Heard about ICAI's virtual classes for CA students

The Board of Studies of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India to enhance the studies of students of correspondence course of Chartered Accountantancy has decided to conduct live virtual classes for CA students of both Intermediate and Final.

These classes can be accessed from anywhere being it a PC, Laptop or Mobile.

The course will be covered by renowed faculties like Sanjay Aggarwal, Vinod Gupta, Parag Gupta, Girish Ahuja, Bhanwar Borana, Aseem Trivedi, Aditya Jain, etc. for Final and Girish Ahuja, Puroshottam Agarwal, Kapileshwar Bhalla, etc. for Intermediate.

Highlights The highlights of the programme are convenient timings for students and very attractive fees structure.

Timings are such that, a student will need to attend a lecture of 2 hours in the morning and of 2 hours in the evening, at 7AM to 9AM and 6PM to 8PM, respectively. Such timings will not disturb students' articleship and also give ample time for themselves in comparison to those taking satellite classes outside.

For Intermediate, the charge of the classes is ₹ 8,000/- per group and ₹ 15,000/- for both groups. While for Final students, the charge of the classes is ₹ 11,000/- per group and ₹ 20,000/- for both groups.

Other Aspects

Though the programme looks very appealing, but it has some limitations. Since, there are multiple faculties for the same subject, different faculties will cover their allotted topics to cover the course of a subject. Not one faculty will complete the teaching of whole subject. It will definitely avoid boredom and provide teaching with expertise but it will lack coordination and synergy among different topics of the same subject.

As per the information available, classes can only be viewed during in-LIVE/Relay timings, so those students who are dreaming of taking the classes anytime as per their comfort, their dream might not come true.

As per the initial schedule uploaded on icai.org, it can be seen that all the 8 subjects of the course in either case of Intermediate or Final will be parallely taught, so in Final, two lectures each of FR and DTIT and one lecture each of remaining subjects per week will be given. While in Intermediate, two lectures of CMA and Taxation and one lecture of remaining subjects per week will be given. Carrying on all subjects at the same may become cumbersome especially for Final students. It will also lead to too much time gap between two consecutive classes of the same subject.

Students can partly overcome this limitation by taking single group classes at a time who have enough time for their attempts to be due.

There is no information available about the further/new batches of virtual classes, time to be taken to complete the course and updation of the classes in accordance to the latest curriculum applicable.