Info Edge’s education portal Shiksha.com is live and provides information for over 70,000 colleges, courses, scholarships and admission notifications (via).
Features:
- Content – The seed content is pretty good and site does look “information heavy”
- Ask & Answer – Y! styled QnA section which allows one to ask free form queries
- Category based info
- College Groups
- Calendar/Alerts – one can set alerts for any event of choice.
Overall, the site seems to be a good start, but lacks depth when it comes to exploring a college or finding relevant content.
For e.g. the college search does not really mean anything – it simply shows the result from Shiksha’s own categories, i.e. groups/community etc. Though I’d expect them to organize the data around the college (as a context), i.e. show related events, info about college and then additional info (like groups etc), the results aren’t helpful.
Apart from ads, Shiksha will be monetized by charging colleges for additional services like
- Ability to add more details
- Unlimited space for displaying information about college & course
- Keyword based advertising/Branding solutions
- Flagged listings, etc
I am not too impressed with Shiksha and honestly, I think it’s just a half-hearted effort to “get something out“.
There are very niche forums like pagalguy and I am not sure how many of those users would like to hop to Shiksha – an acquisition would have made more sense?
Maybe, Shiksha is trying to do too many things from day one – right from putting relevant college info to building the alum/student community (and giving them more-than-required tools to communicate).
What’s your opinion?
