Experts give a thumbs up to Shiksha Experts Meet!

Garima Upadhyay Rawat

Spread over a few hours, Shiksha Experts Meet- Mumbai saw quality action from Mumbaikars on bettering user experience on Shiksha Café. Held this month, the meet saw participation from seasoned experts like Amar Kakaria, Khushwant Jain and Arun Dev.

The meet provided the experts a platform to discuss and debate on the current format of Shiksha Café and offer suggestions towards improving café search, bettering the quality of questions, pop-ups to experts intimating them of some action, mobile application etc were some of the key ideas that were recommended by the panel of experts.

Unlike the expert meet held in Delhi that focussed more on exploring ways to make the current interface even better, the Mumbai meet was more inclined towards ‘seeking ways to improve the quality of answers’. Mayur Deshmukh, an expert with Shiksha Café, suggested, “Provisions to facilitate live chats between experts and students, there should be SMS alert notifications which can alert the expert if any query has been addressed to him/her." He also proposed an idea where "students can download a list of best answers in each category to guide him/her better. Also, webinars and seminars by Shiksha experts will be good ways to engage experts and students both.”

In their joint presentation, expert Ravindra and Shrey, proposed, “Having un-tag option, and paying more attention to the quality of questions by making them to-the-point, informative and written in a user-friendly manner will make it easier for students. Copy paste should be avoided totally and there should be checks and balances in place to ensure that the student is getting updated information always.”

Professor Garain, attending the meet for the second time this year said, “I think these meets are a good platform to voice our ideas. Shiksha café can look at the possibilities of appointing campus ambassadors in various colleges who can tip them off about the latest and important happenings in their respective campuses.”

Prof Arun Mishra stressed more on making the site "more user-friendly by working on navigation and having dedicated tabs for students of all categories like undergraduate, postgraduate, diploma etc". He also laid emphasis on giving "research-intensive and brief answers".

The meet concluded with some experts being felicitated for their continuous support. The experts present on the occasion include: Ankur Jindal, Rahul Chauhan, Chandrashekhar, Dipti Bhatte Thakkar, Kanika Mathur, Rajvi Desai among others.

Delhi Expert Meet

It rained ideas all over when education experts came together at the Shiksha Experts’ Meet 2012.  Held over the weekend, the meet saw participation from as many as 25 experts including Arvind Joshi, Dr Piyush Juneja, Karan Chandna, Aashish Srivastava and so on. The experts interacted with the shiksha.com team on how to make the engagement on Shiksha Café more interesting and enriching for the student community.

The event was spread over a few hours, where experts discussed and debated on the current format of Shiksha Café and offered suggestions on making the interface better. Improving café search, bettering the quality of questions, pop-ups to experts intimating them of some action, mobile application etc were some of the key ideas that were recommended by the panel of experts.

Said Sushil Gupta, an expert at Shiksha Café, “The event offered a great platform to meet the Shiksha team and have a healthy exchange of ideas pertaining to the student community. We could offer suggestions on the problems we face with the interface and recommend some new ideas to the Shiksha team on how to make Shiksha café far more engaging for the students.”

Sophia Chacko, a consultant at Adar Consultancy and a shiksha expert opined, “It was good to interact with fellow experts since some of them had interesting insights to share about education in general and Shiksha Café specifically. The group activities were a good way of engaging us with each other as well as the product.”

For RJ Hritz, an RJ and an expert at Shiksha Café, “The event was not just about all work but making new friends too! “I have made some friends at the event and it is good that all of us share a passion for counseling and answering student queries. The event was interesting and the presence of such a variety of experts made it very worthwhile.”

“I would like the Shiksha team to also have some sessions where we go beyond discussions and get some hands-on training on how to effectively counsel students. It will be great if we can get some input on how to draft better, cohesive and brief answers that provide solutions directly. I would also appreciate if the team can also make these expert meets more focused,” advised Gupta.

A word of caution was offered by Chacko when she said that, “It is good that new features are being added on to the site. But, I hope that these will not clutter the space and will make the user-interface only better than before.”

Prakash Sangam, executive vice president, Shiksha and Ad Sales, New Media welcomed the experts on the occasion and enlightened the audience on the recent trends in education. “The Expert meet this time was as enriching an experience as the previous two editions. It was very encouraging to see the level of engagement that experts have with Shiksha Café. This is evident from their high-level of familiarity with all the recent updates/upgrades of the Shiksha Café platform, and awareness about the other product/features on Shiksha.com. It was equally heartening to note that work is in progress on many improvements that were suggested. This reflects a high degree of cohesion between the experts and the Shiksha management.”

The event concluded with a felicitation ceremony where Kumar Ravi Singh, Gautam Joshi, Shahid Khan, and Neeraj Gupta among other experts were recognized for their enthusiastic engagement with the student community on the website. 

Other participants at the Meet included:Manmeet, Shaban, Aru, Munawar Khan, Nitin Santoliya, Pawan Garg, Vivek Anand, Dinesh Saini, Himal Ghimiray, Deepak Rajpal, Amit Goyal, Sham Kumar, Sheetal Kumar, Nidhi Juneja, Manoj Kumar, Deepali Bedi, Ritika Bhagat, Kavita Goswami,