The company aims to promote peer learning by bringing together a vastcommunity of schools and students on the site. To accomplish this, it istying up with schools, colleges and management institutes around the countryand offering them a variety of customised Web-based services.

According to the managing director and co-founder of Learning Universe,Vivek Agarwal, egurucool.com is a path-breaker in the field of education onthe Net. He says, ``It offers highly personalised training for allcompetitive exams. The key objective is to pick up students when they are 14or 15, and getting serious about their future, and stay with them until theyget their first job.''

The services on the site include academic information such as online modulesfor IIT and medical exam preparation, career and personal counselling,counselling for students going abroad, chats and discussions, information onbooks and music, and personal development options. It also provides onlinecomputer courses in Internet and Web technologies.

Agarwal says students will be able to access and evaluate their performancewith the help of question bank sets. Uniquely, each student will have apersonal database to record his individual results and compare them withthose of his peers. ``Harnessing the true potential of this interactivemedium, at egurucool.com, students can e-mail their queries, which will beanswered by a panel of experts. They will also get an opportunity to honetheir skills through their online chat sessions, discussions and debates.Keeping pace with the increasing competition among schools, the portal willhost inter-school quizzes and contests,'' he says. Students' organisationssuch as AIESEC, Rotaract and Interact are also hosted on the site.

As part of an innovative scheme in career counselling, a series ofpersonality and aptitude tests will be conducted on egurucool.com to helpstudents take the right career decisions. Eminent Delhi psychiatrist DrAchal Bhagat has been selected to provide counselling services. Besides, thesite offers a range of information on topics of general interest pertainingto music, sports and books.

Explaining the reason behind setting up the site, Agarwal says, ``Theeducation process has not changed in keeping with the major changes thathave occurred in the environment students live and work in. LearningUniverse wants to provide a learning environment that is in consonance withthe demands of the present day.''

He says this will be achieved by leveraging the rapid developments incomputing and communication technologies, mainly the Internet, which caneliminate the constraints of time and space from the learning and trainingprocess. So here is where egurucool.com steps in.

The site offers comprehensive distance learning programmes for IIT-JEE, GMATand medical entrance exams, provides solved papers of the CBSE and ICSE, andalso has teachers to provide online advice to students and answer e-mailqueries. Short-term computer courses are being offered in collaboration withthe Lakhotia Computer Centre.

Egurucool.com also has tie-ups with institutions in order to providevaluable help to students wanting to study abroad. An important part of thisservice is online chats and e-mail queries, which allow students tocommunicate with the faculty and learners in colleges and universitiesaround the world.

But of course, all this would be of no use if youngsters did not have accessto increased career opportunities, and Learning Universe takes care of this.A list of existing and upcoming career choices, institutes, and other helphas been made available on the portal site, which makes it good for practiceand precept.