Last week edtech startup Interactive Cares announced that it has launched its first offline learning center in Dhaka's Dhanmondi area, marking a significant shift for one of Bangladesh's leading skills and career-focused edtech platforms. Since starting in July 2020, Interactive Cares has been helping students gain job-ready skills, receive career guidance, and access job opportunities in a market where regular education often doesn't match what companies need.
With the Learning Center, the company aims to bring the same structured career paths, industry-relevant skills, and placement support into an offline environment. The physical center is designed to provide a more immersive and interactive experience—where innovation, mentorship, and community come together under one roof.
"We're not just opening a learning space, we're building a premium ecosystem where learners will work on real projects, engage in tech meetups, collaborate in hackathons, and connect directly with industry leaders," said Rare Al Samir, Founder and CEO of Interactive Cares.
The center offers comprehensive programming including crash courses, free classes, and advanced offline programs covering Power BI, Web Development, Coding, Tech Talks, AI Agent development, and IELTS Spoken English. Designed with input from industry experts, these programs focus on practical skills that align with real hiring needs. The curriculum is complemented by hands-on projects, real-world exposure, direct mentorship, interactive workshops, expert-led sessions, and career-boosting programs designed for maximum impact.
The Learning Center brings Interactive Cares’ holistic approach to career development to offline. Daily support sessions, structured job preparation, and expert-led mentorship ensure every learner receives a complete, career-focused experience. The facility features a dedicated Tech Zone for hands-on experimentation, a Career Lounge for placement support, and collaborative spaces for peer networking. Special activities like Olympiads and a gamified learning approach keep learners engaged through healthy competition and real-time progress tracking.
The space also plans to regularly host networking opportunities, corporate training programs, alumni meet-ups, placement days, and direct one-on-one counseling for hiring and career guidance, transforming it into a true launchpad for professional success.
"We've always believed in learning that leads to transformation. With this offline initiative, we're creating an environment where learners don't just absorb knowledge, they build skills, projects, and connections that lead to real growth," shared Founder and CEO Rare Al Samir.
COO Jamila Bupasha Khushbu added, "This is about more than education. This is about building an inclusive future where talent from all walks of life can thrive, contribute, and lead innovation."
The move might seem counterintuitive for a company that built its reputation by offering career-oriented learning online. Interactive Cares emerged as an important player in Bangladesh's answer to a critical skills gap crisis: traditional universities weren't preparing graduates for actual job requirements, particularly in technology and various business fields. By focusing on industry-relevant curricula and building partnerships with over 130 companies, the platform proved that quality career education could scale. With the launch of the physical center, the company now takes a bet at breaking its own rules.
The Learning Center serves as more than a classroom facility. It functions as Interactive Cares' physical community hub, an approach which transforms the space from a static learning facility into a dynamic networking ecosystem where current students, alumni, industry professionals, and potential employers can intersect regularly, creating opportunities that extend far beyond traditional educational boundaries.
Online education excels at scale and accessibility. Interactive Cares proved this by building a network of 130+ hiring partners and successfully placing thousands of graduates in jobs—all through digital channels. The company identified a critical gap in Bangladesh's education system: the mismatch between what universities teach and what employers actually need.
But scale comes with trade-offs. Digital platforms struggle with several key challenges. Watching a video or completing an online module is different from hands-on experimentation and real-time problem-solving. Professional networks and peer relationships—critical for career advancement—are harder to build through screens. Employers value demonstrated capability over certificates, which requires environments where learners can work on real projects with real stakes.
Interactive Cares' offline center addresses each of these limitations while preserving the benefits of its digital platform. In fact, the move enhances the advantages of its digital platform. The physical center becomes a premium layer on top of its existing online ecosystem, creating what founder Rare Al Samir calls "a premium ecosystem where learners will work on real projects, engage in tech meetups, collaborate in hackathons, and connect directly with industry leaders."
This hybrid model creates several competitive advantages.
The center's dedicated Tech Zone allows for hands-on experimentation that's impossible to replicate online. When learning Power BI or web development, there's no substitute for working through real data problems or debugging code in real-time with peers and mentors.
Physical proximity accelerates relationship formation. The center's Career Lounge and collaborative spaces create serendipitous encounters that lead to job referrals, startup partnerships, and mentorship relationships—the kind of valuable connections that rarely emerge from Slack channels or video calls.
In a market flooded with online courses and certificates, the physical center serves as a quality signal to both learners and employers. The investment in real estate and facilities demonstrates commitment and creates a filtering mechanism for serious learners.
Interactive Cares' timing reflects a deeper understanding of Bangladesh's unique market dynamics—and the structural limitations facing pure-play edtech companies in the market. While digital adoption has grown rapidly, the reality is that edtech penetration has a ceiling in Bangladesh due to several persistent challenges: the digital divide between urban and rural areas, expensive and poor-quality mobile data, and crucially, the strong cultural preference for in-person coaching and tutoring.
For typical Bangladeshi students and parents, the conventional path to academic success has long involved supplementing school classes with private coaching centers. While many consider online learning useful, they rarely see it as a replacement for offline education. Many parents even view smartphone-based learning as potentially harmful to their children's attention spans and behavior.
This creates what we might call the "edtech credibility gap"—digital-only education simply doesn't feel "real" to many prospective customers. Interactive Cares' physical center directly addresses this perception challenge by making its educational offering tangible and socially validated
Interactive Cares' learning center strategically re-bundle the scalability advantages of online education with the credibility and experiential benefits of physical presence. This reflects a deeper truth about emerging markets: solutions must be purpose-built for local contexts. Digital-native approaches that may work in markets with high trust in online experiences may fall short in contexts where physical presence still carries disproportionate credibility.
Interactive Cares' physical center enhances its digital platform rather than competing with it. The center generates content (tech talks, expert sessions) that can be distributed online. It creates case studies and success stories that improve online conversion. Most importantly, the offline center can be a significant driver of business for the company. Through events and engagements it can help the company attract new users for its digital services. Similarly, the added credibility of an offline channel means more people will be confident in taking its services.
COO Jamila Bupasha Khushbu's comment about "building an inclusive future where talent from all walks of life can thrive" points to the company's longer-term vision: using the physical center as a flagship that elevates the entire brand while maintaining online accessibility for the broader market.
However, this strategy carries several execution risks. Operating as a digital player, Interactive Cares has built its business model around a fundamentally different cost structure than traditional coaching centers. Physical centers require substantial capital investment, ongoing operational overhead, and different pricing dynamics that could conflict with customer expectations established through its online platform.
The success of this initiative will largely depend on whether these centers can meaningfully improve Interactive Cares' return on investment—not just through direct revenue, but by driving higher conversion rates, premium pricing, and stronger employer partnerships across its entire ecosystem.
If successful, it could create a network of learning centers in major cities while maintaining its online platform for broader reach. This would create a powerful moat: competitors would need to match both their digital capabilities and their physical infrastructure.
Interactive Cares' move reflects a broader trend in edtech: the recognition that the future isn't purely digital or purely physical, but hybrid. Companies like Lambda School (now Bloom Institute of Technology) in the US have struggled with pure online models for intensive technical training. Meanwhile, traditional bootcamps that ignored digital distribution have failed to scale. In Bangladesh, edtech companies as well as many digital platforms are increasingly expanding offline.
The winning formula appears to be platforms that use physical presence strategically to create premium experiences, build community, and validate learning while maintaining digital distribution for scale and accessibility.
Interactive Cares has the advantage of starting with a successful digital platform and adding physical components, rather than trying to digitize an analog experience. This inside-out approach to hybrid education may well become the dominant model for career-focused learning.
The company's success with this center will be worth watching—not just for what it means for Bangladesh's tech talent pipeline, but for what it reveals about the future of online career and skills education more broadly.
