e4m-Limelight Networks: 'Quality & seamless technology are crucial for virtual classrooms'

The e4m virtual roundtable discussion, which took place yesterday, shed light on enhancing user experiences in online education through quality Digital Content Delivery. The virtual event was hosted in partnership with Limelight Networks.

On the panel were prominent thought leaders from the ed-tech and e-learning field like Prajjwal Sinha Co-Founder Amigoz; Poonam Singh Jamwal, Director Extramarks Education India Pvt. Ltd.; Karanvir Singh Founder & Managing Director Pariksha; Kush Beejal Founder & CEO NeoStencil; Udit Sawhney, CEO, myPAT.in; Anuj Kumar, CTO, Adda247; Arjun Mohan, Chief Executive Officer - India, upGrad; Gaurav Goel, Founder & CEO, Toprankers; Pulkit Jain, Co Founder & Product Head, Vedantu; Mohammed Hisamuddin, Founder, entri.app; Gomathi Damodharan, Director, Aha Guru; Balaji Sampath, Founder, Aha Guru; Gaurav Toshniwal, CTO, Doubtnut; Rhea Mehta, Product-Manager, Lido; Ahmer Nadim, Managing Director & Co-Founder, Education; Ashwin Rao, Sales Director -India, Limelight Networks; Charles Krauss, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Limelight Networks.

 E-learning has played a key role during the global pandemic, ensuring that education is not interrupted. Starting off the virtual roundtable discussion, Krauss shared that Limelight surveys consumers about their habits watching video multiple times a year. This spring, they decided to make a change and focused on the pandemic and on the new habits.

 Sharing his takeaways from the survey, he remarked: “There is a broad definition of online learning it isn't just schools and universities but it has extended to many different activities people use. Learning involves such things as work out classes to people learning to play a musical instrument or pursuing hobbies and so forth."

 Krauss said that the data garnered on India highlights that the country is always an outlier. He pointed out that the people in India tend to use videos more than any other country.

 "93% of people are already learning all sorts of things like language classes to online fitness. An e-learning platform Toppr based in Mumbai currently has 2.5 million users. The challenges they have is rapid growth and more than 2000 courses in their library. They want to improve their user experience and deliver videos as fast as possible. The solution they used is Limelights Content Delivery Service, which is a basic CDN service to deliver content from any source to any place in the world. The results that they have is now they are able to upload 8000 videos without any buffering," Krauss said.

Talking more on the key takeaways from the e-learning experience during COVID, Beejal said, “Both ends of the education periphery that is the content providers and content consumers both of them are now looking to go online. This is a fast-changing environment where everybody is looking to consume.”

There has been a debate on recorded videos or live sessions Sawhney says that live sessions with live tutors have clearly been the winner. “We need to understand how students consume information. We need to have goal setting classes and then personalize it”, he commented.

 Sharing her learnings in COVID-19 times, Jamwal stated, “The single factor that made the process seamless was the quality learning content that our students were already consuming. They just seamlessly accessed the same content online through the apps and teaching platforms. The new learning that all of us have to realize is that learning content is going to be the core of everything and will also bring value to the teacher and child.”

Talking about his learning, Singh remarked, “We cater to a different market. Pariksha is primarily meant for Bharat. We are vernacular in nature and serve 2.5 million users across 11 states in 6 languages. What we have experienced is that In India, the educational institutions are run by the traditional mindsets. The teachers and students were worst in adapting technology. But because of COVID, everything is shut and now they were forced to adopt technologies.  We have seen people hooking onto the platform now and the educational institutions are also realizing that a much better experience can be delivered in one-fourth of the price.”

Sharing his viewpoint, Kumar expressed, “For tech, everyone saw the surge and the number of people coming online looking for education content. The adoption of tech is extremely important. Digital players need to be ready for it.”

 Mohan believes that now it’s only been about what the consumer is doing. He adds, “The consumer’s current needs, fears, aspirations need to be looked at, and accordingly one needs to promote the product. In the case of my market, I’m clear that I need to keep people engaged. When people are doing well, they want to do learn more and when not doing well, they need to upskill.”

 Goel shared, “This pandemic has helped in a pre-purchase journey. I think if this kind of traffic is coming in it is about what can we do in the pre-purchase journey.”

For Sampath, the key learning from the pandemic is the post-purchase journey, which they have been focusing a lot on. “We desire not to go on with the free things rather focus on the sales part directly”, he shared.

 Jain says that what we used to do since 2014 is becoming a norm now. “This pandemic has short-circuited a lot of things. We need to have a predictable learning experience with scale”, he commented.

 Damodharan has been very clear: "If it feels like for, a particular section of people, it is not going to work, then we clearly inform them. "

 Sinha said that reaching out to different sectors and people has become easier because of online education.

 Mehta spoke about the roadblocks they have facing: “The challenge for us is providing offline content in a virtual classroom environment. In tier 2 and 3 cities, this gets difficult. Enforcing quality and tech check in the virtual classroom, we prioritize audio over video.”

 Nadim feels that there is a lot of agreement and consensus on the positivity this situation has brought on us. “While we talk about students and the ecosystem, digital has been something we've been moving towards. Schools will have to adopt, coaching centres will have to take a different approach, but we need to take care of things that need focus immediately”, he remarked.

 Rao says that in India, the big challenge is the COVID impact on infrastructure. He further explained, “OTTs are sacrificing on the video quality. Audio hasn't changed but video quality has gone down. Limelight's trying to ensure that all students logging into our customer platform are getting a good network. Whichever area they may be living in, we're giving good access. It’s critical to think of a security strategy while you have infrastructure being planned out. Both need to run parallel.”

 Most of the panellists have suggested that a  blend of offline and online should exist. "When you think about product creation, you need to have the right set of strategies. For example, technical architecture, user interface, network drop related issues are all areas we need to focus on," stated Kumar.

 Krauss advised that we need to keep innovating on protocols and come up with new ideas. He commented, “Zoom did really well in less than 4 months. In December, they had 10 million users. Today they have 300million.”

 Rao concluded saying: “There's a lot of technology out there. There are experts out there to solve those problems with you; so have faith in them. In India, we're focusing big time on tier 2 and 3 cities. Our mandate is to give good customer experience to users across all regions in the country.”