The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the shutdown of schools and colleges across the world. And adapting to a new normal, education has changed dramatically, with the distinctive rise of e-learning on digital platforms. Online education, a result of the digital world has brought a lot to the learning table at all levels of education, beginning from preschool up to higher-level institutions. The move to remote learning has been enabled by several online tech platforms such as Google Classroom, Zoom Microsoft Teams, and classroom.live all of which play an important role in this transformation.
classroom.live is a complete virtual classroom solution with an interactive whiteboard with seamless collaboration and easy content creation for teachers.The platform is safe for both teachers and students to use and with collaborative live sessions that are conducted in a secured environment. classroom.live has a massive reach with around 150 institutions using it and 1 lac+ students taking sessions per day on it.
classroom.live is an product by Unthinkable Solutions LLP -a 20 years old brand founded to deliver premium software services and products. Unthinkable Solutions has two divisions, one of its teams operates in the space of software services while the other builds products.
Vipul Sobti, Business Head, classroom.live spoke exclusively to Medianews4u on how classroom.live is catering to the needs of students in times of COVID, their plans for the future and much more:
Is E-learning here to replace classroom teaching?
Indeed, offline and online learning complement each other. The future belongs to blended teaching-learning and it will have a high impact on quality delivery and learning outcomes. The benefits of online education were available to the education fraternity for a long time and pandemic accelerated the adoption. By now, educators and learners have adopted and witnessed various benefits of online environments. It’s just the beginning, clubbing it with an offline learning environment shall fetch the right results.
Schools/colleges conscious of quality delivery are getting ready for the blended teaching-learning ecosystem. They do understand the need for updating teaching & delivery strategies. Hence, they have started training their teachers for blended space and are focusing on adopting an education delivery platform like classroom.live. Learners are set to benefit the most with enhanced in-class quality, personalized attention, and proper tools for self-study. Educators have the opportunity to be more creative and lead a rewarding career, the world is open for institutions focusing on quality delivery.
Looking at the brighter side, this is a positive change helps build a better education system and benefiting society at large.
How classroom.live can be the most reliable tool for both students & teachers?
classroom.live is a complete virtual campus, whereas other apps/platforms offer only 1 or 2 features and miss upon most important aspects of online teaching-learning. For example, they do not have automatic attendance, no recorded lectures, partially covered assignment module, missing assessment, and no reporting for school management. Simply put, operating on these platforms doesn’t add any value to teachers, students, or school,it just becomes a check in the box. Parents are unhappy with such online classes and have started raising their concerns.
With other apps, teachers & students have to operate on multiple platforms. They end up wasting precious time and can’t focus on teaching-learning. We witness teachers overloaded, struggling to prepare for an online environment, confused students & unhappy parents. The school management has partial information on their day-to-day online operations. These apps/platforms do not solve these pain points for schools & colleges.
classroom.live’ is designed to reduce teachers’ workload, enhance in-class quality, offer personalized attention to students and help administrators with real-time reports and meaningful insights for effective management. The biggest advantage is a single platform does it all.
Our USPs are;
- Single virtual class for daily sessions. No more hopping between multiple links.
- Automatic attendance. Peace of mind & focus while teaching.
- Recorded lectures & study material for students anytime, anywhere.
- Inbuilt presentation generator for teachers. Helping them prepare impactful presentations easily.
- Integrated assignments and assessments to drive personalized attention.
- Real-time reports and analytics for management.
All of this results in ‘personalized attention for students’ and ‘enhanced learning outcomes’. In a blended environment, class quality & personalized attention shall be key performance parameters of any school/college. These parameters will be the deciding factors for their reputation & future growth. classroom.live partners with schools/colleges in this preparedness to ensure their growth.
In a recent survey, teachers operating on classroom.live are found to be 2 times happier and impactful than others. This will automatically drive better quality and word of mouth for the school/college.
Increased screen time brings in a new wave of worries for parents, how is classroom.live tackling it?
We can drastically reduce screen time by adopting an ‘education delivery platform’.
Today, screen time is the biggest worry for parents and educators. Major reasons for increased screen time is inappropriate technology adoption by education institutions and teacher’ preparedness for an online environment. Teachers & students spend hours hopping between multiple platforms, previous session time is wasted in activities like maintaining in-class discipline and taking attendance, teachers do not have tools to prepare impactful session material, they end up wasting time on compiling manual reports, students are forced to spend screen time searching for assignments/study material, there is no system for recording progress of students and in-spite of all hard work teachers are finding it difficult to offer personalized attention.
With classroom.live, teachers can peacefully focus on preparing and delivering quality lectures, the platform automatically takes care of safety, security, reports, and analytics. Students need not struggle between multiple platforms, they get everything on classroom.live. School management gets accurate and meaningful real-time analytics. All this is a must for delivering quality in an online environment. Most importantly, adopting classroom.live reduces screen time, enhanced learning outcomes, and compliments personalized attention.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how the education system used to work, will the adoption of online learning continue to persist post-pandemic, and how such a shift would impact the education market/system?
Way forward is a blended environment with online complementing offline activities. Times ahead will be filled with creativity & innovations and all of this will improve the overall education ecosystem. Better understanding and application will benefit students, educators, and institutions. Technology has immense potential and a large role to play, it will help educators focus on quality aspects, connecting with their students better, enabling self-learning and much more.
It’s just the beginning and times ahead belong to individuals & institutions focusing on quality delivery.
Any trends that you see emerge post-lockdown?
As I referred previously, post reinstatement of physical classes, the way forward is blended teaching-learning. Education institutions would like to take advantage of the online environment too. We can expect a change of operating procedures resulting in enhanced in-class quality and much needed personalized attention. The space is open for innovations and I see a lot of scope for edTech firms. Collaboration is the way forward.
Future prepositions, tie-ups, and expansion plans?
By now, we have signed our first 100 deals across India and the Middle East. The initial traction is encouraging, teachers are happy and our existing schools have started referring us to their network. This brings a lot of energy and the team is passionately working to deliver the unparalleled user experience.
In the future, we are ready with a long term product roadmap and the next versions of classroom.live shall be targeted to add value in a blended environment. It’s a powerful concept and our deep tech expertise is making it real. Parallelly, we are exploring opportunities in geographies like the UK, US, and EU.
