"Our branded tutorial centres are a great way to deliver high quality tutoring to school students by combining the effective use of technology, in-house rich multi-media curriculum content with team of highly certified teachers - all this at an extremely competitive price point," says Shantanu Prakash, managing director, Educomp Solutions [Get Quote], a firm specialising in online education.

Its wholly owned subsidiary, ThreeBrix e-services recently launched their first branded tutorial centre, LearningHours in the capital. So what one has is a state-of-art tuition centres with digital white board, which can store and transmit whatever is written on it to students, a rich multi-media set up along with online content. Other technology savvy initiatives include a biometric finger printing for attendance.

"Our focus has been to impart technology-centric learning with a combination of well qualified teachers. Moreover, we have limited the class strength to just 15 students per batch to ensure everyone gets equal attention," says Riju Gupta, director, LearningHour.

Gupta along with his two friends, pass outs from IIM, started ThreeBrix e-services which was taken over by Educomp solution few months ago.

"We felt that there is a serious need for more than just neighbourhood tuition centres. While there does exists branded tutorial centres for competitive exams, ours is the first initiative in school tutorials," Gupta adds.

Though primarily, the focus is right now on Class IX and upwards, Gupta adds that one cannot rule out their foray into tutorials for lower classes and also competitive exams.

LearningHour has plans to set up 50 centres across North and West India by March 2009. While the fees would range from number of hours that the student opts for, the average fees for a full year would be anywhere between Rs 6000-8000 per subject.

While the branded tutorial initiative is being welcomed by large section of the parents, few teachers point out that tuition classes make students less attentive in classes.

"The students always know that they have to go back and re-do the chapters done in schools at their tuition centres. So they think why pay double attention. While, I do agree that at times, extra classes might be needed for students above class IX, school teachers are more than sufficient to take care of the extra classes," says Nimi Philip, a teacher with a private school in the capital.

Parents on the other hand say that tutions are a must. "My child is in class XII and still goes for his Maths tuitions. Most of the time, schools are not able to give complete attention to all students and hence some need to go to a third party. It is nice that to hear that proper tuition centres are coming up. Hope the teachers are as good as they claim they are," says Chary Baja, a housewife in Onida.

"Our selection procedure for teachers is very stringent. Our strength lies in our technology-based teaching techniques and our expert teachers," adds Gupta. He adds that since they were into online courses for students prior to the launch of LearningHour, their expertise and talent cannot be matched.