The TEL Window of Opportunity
Have you seen any of these websites?
www.amazon.com
www.google.com
www.ebay.com
www.secondlife.com
If you have not, you should, NOW!
Each of these websites offers a unique and complete experience to their users entrapping them for life.
Amazon.com revolutionized the book selling industry by taking it online completely. Its ingenuity lies in the way it has captured the entire process of book buying in its web design. It’s understanding of “Consumer Choice” is impressive. It keeps track of your browsing patterns and generates a list of books which might interest you. It has a wish list section where you can store books for possible future purchase. It has a network of blogs giving discussions on books, subjects and authors. It takes you through sample pages of books to let you get more information to help decide purchase. It offers you three convenient ways of shipping depending upon your urgency of requirement and affordability. It helps you track the delivery of your chosen books from the place of pick up through the airports of transit to your nearest airport.
The way the delivery is recorded at your doorstep and its instant reflection on the website as “delivered” strikes you impressively. Its promise of prompt delivery and its commitment to honour it leaves a lasting impression on you.

Let’s look at Google.com. There’s no doubt that it is probably the most popular website in the world as a widely used search engine. It is equally well know for its innovative applications, one of them being Gmail, which for the first time offered unlimited mail storage space. Google is also well known as a prolific innovator. It has almost perfected the art and science of continuous innovation which is highly user driven. The concept of Google Labs and release of Google graduates is a tested process of churning out continuous innovations. Its huge range of innovative applications such as Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Apps, Google Earth, Google Photos, Google calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Trends enhance the experience of the user and takes him beyond just search or mail capabilities. The constant interaction of Google with its users, capturing, understanding and analyzing their usage patterns and creating and shipping its products instantaneously keeps it abreast and far ahead of its competitors. The speed of innovation and the functionality of its products or “graduates” as they are called embody the core personality of Google as an organization. There is no end to its imagination and experimentation and its passion to keep innovating at a fast pace. It has also learnt to localize at equally fast pace, example being seen in its vernacular versions and applications such as “Google Quotes” of our national and regional leaders. This tremendous pace of innovation at Google is attributed to its organizational form and encouraging culture which is driven by small teams of 3-4 engineers, each spending about 20% of their time officially pursuing their “pet projects” powered by their passion.

The next example worth citing is of ebay, the revolutionary and successful auction site. E-Bay has perfected the art of simplifying the complex process of bidding and buying. The volume and value of transactions and the range of articles traded on e-bay is mind boggling. E-Bay has set up an excellent process of educating the new users on how the system works, hand holds them through the process and offers a wide range of transaction modes.

Secondlife.com is another fascinating website which is literally a parallel virtual world, replete with different tribes to which you can choose to belong. It gives you a first name and surname, it has several hot spots where you can hang around, it has its own currency called Linden Dollars. You can choose your avatar, change the way you look and dress. It has its own market place where you can conduct transactions. You can You can even buy virtual land on Secondlife. In fact, Secondlife is being used in training of the Canadian Defense Forces since February 2008.

The one powerful underlying feature of these websites discussed above is that they are unique and offer their users a binding experience. They are the “Category Killers” in their own industries. They have transformed the way things are done traditionally and have set the rules of the game for others to follow.
TEL for Manipal Education and SMU DE could belong to this class., if we have such a vision. TEL could become an “Amazon” of education industry (I believe Education is an industry). It could change the way people look at Distance Education. To harness such a transformative power, we cannot follow others in the industry or look for similar models. We need to develop our own unique model which provides a real world context to our business processes and web design.
The window of opportunity for us to shape TEL in such a form exists now. But it is quite narrow and short and could be taken up by anyone else in the turn of events. At the rate at which Google is churning out innovative products, or at the rate of which Secondlife is providing varied pursuits to its users, any of these organizations may integrate a Learning Management System into its fold and our window may be lost.
Hence there is a great urgency to proceed fast but surely towards our vision. We have set a target of 20000 logins to TEL by March, 2009, but we should ask why not 20, 00,000 in five years. You think this is not possible, try talking to Sergei Brin or Jeff Bezos!