While nations’ COVID-19 infection rates vary, there are presently more over 1.2 billion children in 186 countries affected by school cancellations due to the epidemic. Children up to the age of 11 are returning to nurseries and schools in Denmark after they were closed on March 12, but kids in South Korea are responding to roll calls from their teachers online.
With this dramatic move away from the classroom in many parts of the world, some are wondering if online learning will be accepted post-pandemic, and how such a transition would affect the global education business.
Many online learning platforms, in response to tremendous demand, are providing free access to their services, including BYJU’S, a Bangalore-based educational technology and online tutoring organisation formed in 2011, which is currently the world’s most valuable edtech company. According to Mrinal Mohit, the company’s Chief Operating Officer, BYJU has experienced a 200 percent rise in the number of new students utilising its product after introducing free live lessons on its Think and Learn app.
Meanwhile, Tencent Classroom has been widely utilised since mid-February, when the Chinese government ordered a quarter-billion full-time students to continue their studies using online platforms. This culminated in the greatest “online movement” in educational history, with roughly 730,000 students, or 81 percent of K-12 pupils, taking lessons through the Tencent K-12 Online School in Wuhan.
Other businesses are expanding their capacities in order to create a one-stop shop for instructors and students. For example, Lark, a Singapore-based collaboration suite that was initially developed by ByteDance as an internal tool to meet its own exponential growth, began offering teachers and students unlimited video conferencing time, auto-translation capabilities, real-time co-editing of project work by using a photo editor online, and smart calendar scheduling, among other features.
Lark expanded its global server architecture and technological capabilities to provide dependable communication both instantly and during a crisis. “To enable large-scale remote work, the platform tapped Alibaba Cloud last month to build more than 100,000 additional cloud servers in only two hours – setting a new record for speedy capacity expansion,” according to DingTalk CEO Chen Hang. Many colleges have already taken effective advances in this direction. Zhejiang University, for example, utilised “DingTalk ZJU” to obtain over 5,000 courses online in just two weeks.
Imperial College London began offering a course on the science of coronaviruses, which is now the most popular Coursera class for 2020. Many individuals have previously praised the advantages: “It has changed the way I teach,” says Dr. Amjad, a lecturer at The University of Jordan who has been using Lark to educate his pupils. It enables me to reach out to my students more efficiently and effectively, particularly during this pandemic, via chat groups, video meetings, voting, and document sharing.
