7:00 p.m., April 2–ZEGOCLOUD organized a live broadcast event on online education, where Xiaowei Zeng, ZEGOCLOUD’s senior education solution architect, shared how to maximize efficiency of online education at minimum cost as the speaker. In conjunction with ZEGOCLOUD’s deep audio/video application in education, he started his speech by setting forth the latest developments of online education.Online education has been one of the fastest-growing industries regarding the user base this year and the speech in this respect apparently provoked great public interest during the event. Therefore, the event’s transcript are presented as follows for your reference：Good evening everybody! My name is Xiaowei Zeng, a ZEGOCLOUD architect. Today I’d like to share with you How to Maximize Efficiency of Online Education at Minimum Cost.
I. Broad market prospect of online education
The tide of “home-based distance education” is prevailing. In the context, offline teaching and training activities are halted while online education is booming. Public data shows that till March 5, a total of 4038 Internet-based education startups were founded in the Year 2020, accounting for approximately 2/3 of total startups founded in the prior year; and 13 online education platforms, including TAL and Zuoyebang, are now worth nearly CNY 80 billion higher than they were earlier in 2020, upon a cumulative increase in the market value.Regardless of spatial and temporal restrictions, online education provides a variety of teaching methods and educational resources in first-tier cities and are hence favorable for second- and third-tier cities with a larger student base and a broader market. Previously, online education wasseen as a supplement to offline teaching and training. But as the wave of online education sweeps the nation, more users that felt strange about online education before get accustomed to it. Besides, online education embodies values of inclusiveness and promotion of fairness in all respects and offers a new opportunity for traditional schools and education institutes to establish a partnership with online education platforms.
II. Four key indicators of online education platforms
To launch a training program offline, we need rent a classroom and recruit trainers. Then to set up a quality online education platform, the following four key indicators may be prioritized.Cost performance: To build online education platforms, we need primarily spend on customer acquisition, faculty compensation, audio/video stream resources, etc. It is found that we can save customers 50% of the stream cost per month on average by building their own PaaS platforms rather than renting SaaS platforms after years of serving many online education platforms. In addition, customers can use their discretion to select networks for distributing and storing resources on their own platforms.Safety: For each online education platform, its core resources include the list of students, courseware, audio/video calls and recordings among others. Based on their own reliable platforms, customers can make more flexible deployment of business modules and guarantee data security by anti-piracy, encrypted transmission, anti-leech, multi-channel real-time warning, etc.Retention: User retention in online education mainly depends on the renewal intention of users, specifically parents in this case. Whetherparents are willing to renew contracts with online education platforms is determined by two factors: teaching effects and teaching experience. Definitely, frequent collapse, stuttering, discontinuity of sound transmission among other audio/video quality problems shall heavily affect user retention. In long-term operation, customers can enhance brand awareness by building their own platforms, leading to lower customer acquisition cost and better user stickiness.Innovation: China’s online education is booming. Large-class programs, one-to-one small-class programs, and multi-participant interactive small-class programs among other niches have been taken up by top platforms but customers who are newcomers can blaze a new and broader trail through scenario innovation. For that end, PaaS platform is available for user-defined function settings. AI Classroom, for instance, was in vogue last year and one of our customers working on AI-based online education realized a user explosion by 50 times.
III. Online classroom building by four lines of ZEGOCLOUD’s Express SDK codes
Speaking of building one’s own platform, concerns about difficulty and duration may arise. Concerning such pain spots, ZEGOCLOUD unveils Express SDK for quick access. Merely entering 4 lines of codes, we can set up an online teaching scenario in real means.3nzA0ILsyC.pngWith 60% of interfaces off, Express SDK is arranged with sufficient highlypackaged interfaces and is hence compact and user-friendly. Moreover, a full range of development files are offered for 30-min self-help access demanding no audio/video development basis.
IV. ZEGOCLOUD’s provision of many online education solutions and teaching plug-insBased on Express SDK
We can put into practice online teaching scenarios. In addition, to meet a variety of needs of customers, ZEGOCLOUD rolls out large-class teaching, small-class teaching, two-teacher class, AI classroom and many other scenario solutions and such teaching plug-ins as interactive whiteboard, screen sharing and server.Various scenario solutionsAI classroom: It is an intelligent education scenario solution integrating program recording, NLP and pronunciation correction among other AI algorithms. Different videos are excerpted from a mass database of footage recorded beforehand and pushed in response to what students answer in the teaching process. AI classroom has the strength of no restriction on class hours. Programs on the platform can be recorded and recycled, indicating a lower cost.Ultra-small-class teaching: Combining low cost and interaction strengths of large-class teaching and small-class teaching respectively, an ultra-small class can accommodate hundreds of and even thousands of students. The class is arranged with an excellent teacher to teach through stream publishing. Students fall into interactive teams, 4 or 5 members per team. Each team is arranged with a tutor who keeps order and answers questions while students are interacting/learning. This way, outstandingteacher resources are efficiently utilized and teachers and tutors are precisely assigned with respective tasks.Two-teacher-class: It is a prevalent type of class in offline teaching and training. Through software and hardware integration, it is implemented online to realize efficient utilization of online/offline resources. Together with our partners, ZEGOCLOUD unveils a software-hardware integrated two-teacher-class solution. Covering a variety of online/offline scenarios, we have managed to implement 5G+4K interactive live broadcast.Furthermore, ZEGOCLOUD also supports already developed solutions in the industry, large-class teaching, 1v1 small-class teaching and interactive small-class teaching, to name a few. Based on such indicators as completion rate/switch rate/ticket rate which customers are concerned with, we keep promoting the quality of solutions. Our customers include such top education platforms as TAL, Zhangmen 1V1 and Haifeng Education.Aided teaching plug-insIndependently developed interactive whiteboard: ZEGOCLOUD develops interactive whiteboard on its own, which supports real-time whiteboard and audio/video streaming synchronization in a weak network environment and hence assures students’ learning experience and class recording effect in all respects.Server recording: We provide more stable and robust server recording service to record teachers’ class instruction for reference of students in review.AI beauty filter: ZEGOCLOUD’s SDK can connect to beauty filter providers through an open interface. Supporting various functions including background segmentation, expression recognition, posture recognition, virtual image, etc., it is available for one-click change of a teacher’s background, recognition of a student’s expression in class, virtual teacher image building, etc.
V. Lean operation through end-to-end quality tracing
ZEGOCLOUD’s measures for promoting audio/video quality fall into three keywords: “end, network and traceability”. Through prism-based end-to-end quality tracing, we help customers enhance audio/video quality and realize lean operation.End: The “end” referred to is mainly concerned with SDK’s stability and compatibility to devices. First of all, ZEGOCLOUD needs pledge to provide high-quality SDK. Thus, every edition of SDK delivered undergoes a thorough automated test, professional audio/video test and performance test. Compatibility to devices comes second. We now cover and are compatible to more than 15000 types of devices online, including all kinds of mobile phones, learning tablets, teaching projectors, and smartwatches among other embedded devices.Network: Our network-related measures include weak network prevention, node coverage and disaster recovery design. ZEGOCLOUD is one of the few carriers capable of maintaining 15-frame smooth audio/video calls under 70% extreme packet loss and maintaining smooth audio calls under 80% extreme packet loss in China. We link more than 500 core nodes around the world, which can do sniffing and alarm for each other. Apart from intelligent routing, we design discovery recovery by multi-availability zone (multi-AZ) and intelligent monitoring.Traceability: Traceability refers to real-time fault locating and problem tracing that follows, which is mainly implemented through automatic troubleshooting and prism system. In automatic troubleshooting, we put into practice intensive learning and troubleshooting by connecting to and intelligently classifying tickets in conjunction with sorted out historical problems; and the prism system supports query by console or API connection and tracing the quality of every class from three dimensions (room, person and streaming) to enable platforms to control quality of all links in the entire process.OMO model has been well accepted in the online education industry. While retaining strengths in offline services, experience and emotional links, we introduce online interaction and add access of streaming to improve user stickiness and retention. In the future, ZEGOCLOUD will continue tosupply creative education solutions and quality audio/video technical services to promote robust growth of the online education industry on a sustainable basis.That’s the end of my speech. Thank you for attention!
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