On January 20, Agora officially released the first aPaaS product Smart Classroom in the education industry on its official website, helping educational institutions and developers to launch their own brand, full-function online interactive teaching platform in 15 minutes, saving 90% of the development time. At present, Sonnet opens a limited-time discount for new customers of Smart Classroom. From now to February 28, 2021, recharge 1000 yuan and get 5 million minutes of usage (equivalent to 100,000 classes), which will be valid for 3 months from the recharge date.
Sonnet has been committed to reducing the burden and threshold for developers through low-code, making the development of real-time interactive scenes more universal and convenient. As a sound network launched the education industry products, the first low code clever classroom will need hundreds of API interface to originally complex logic of the “online interactive classroom” modular encapsulation and simplified to only need to fill out a few simple parameters can be done online, education institutions and developers do not need to understand the underlying complex logic of audio and video. “Low code is the trend of the future,” said Qian Fen, product manager of Sonnet Smart Classroom. “The mission of Smart Classroom is to enable more educational institutions that lack development experience to easily and quickly launch interactive teaching platforms.”
Figure: Fill in and modify parameters, you can quickly online
Before this, sonnet’s smart Classroom Beta version has helped a number of education information enterprises and OMO institutions to quickly online interactive classes. At the beginning of 2020, during the epidemic period, The well-known Educational technology brand Of Shanghai, Xiaoblackboard, launched an integrated “Classroom in the air” within 10 days based on the Beta version of Sound Net Smart Classroom, which became the designated interactive learning platform for primary and secondary school students in Shanghai. Statistics show that an average of 500 schools, 5,000 teachers and 200,000 students are learning interaction in Xiao Blackboard live classes every day during the epidemic, with an average of 10,000 live classes every day. At its peak, 120,000 people attended classes at any one time.
Overseas, Ibn Khaldoun, a well-known Saudi education enterprise, launched an exclusive online interactive class based on Smart Class without applying for technical support, and the number of minutes used exceeded one million on the first day of its launch. Ibn Khaldoun, CEO, said: “Soundnet Smart Classroom not only significantly reduces the development time of online classrooms, but also enables us to have our own brand and UI, which helps us to achieve rapid business growth.”
“Online interactive classroom” as the standard, how to construct the organization?
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated the online transformation of the education industry. According to the latest report released by iResearch, the overall online rate of the education industry increased by 5 percentage points to 13%-15% from 2016 to 2019, while the overall online rate will reach 23%-25% in 2020 thanks to the epidemic. Online interactive classrooms, whether originally online or offline, have become standard tools for educational institutions to drive retention and business growth.
Currently, there are two solutions for educational institutions to build online interactive classes: directly purchase third-party online teaching live broadcasting platform (also known as SaaS platform), or develop by themselves through the underlying real-time audio and video technology service provider (also known as PaaS platform). However, as more and more organizations move online, the existing two solutions can no longer fully meet the needs of those organizations with little development experience but who want to launch online classes quickly and flexibly. Therefore, sound network based on the service experience for thousands of education customers such as New Oriental, Good future, VIPKID, and Master 1 to 1, launched smart classroom to fill this part of the market gap.
Smart classroom to fill the market gap
Private brands and personalized business functions are inherent in educational institutions. This need will grow stronger as educational institutions grow and is critical to their long-term business growth and retention of students.
Direct use of third-party teaching live broadcasting platform (SaaS) will limit the exposure of Logo, UI, domain name and other brand information of educational institutions, and even passively reveal the platform’s brand sometimes, which is very unfavorable for institutions to build their own brands in the stage of business expansion. At the same time, although third-party platforms can be used directly, their functions are mainly standardized and cannot meet the more flexible and personalized classroom needs of educational institutions, such as student grouping, interactive teaching AIDS and other functions, which are difficult to integrate with business needs.
Teachers and students, on the other hand, the class information, data and other business data will be passive to retain live on the third party platform, for institutions, these are very valuable asset, such as reserves, the tripartite platform will be leaked to other institutions, and even the risk of competitors, is also likely to follow-up platform itself into teaching culture, facing serious data security hidden danger.
Compared with third-party online teaching platforms, Smart Classroom has the following advantages: independent brands, flexible and extensible functions, independent control of business data, stability and reliability, XLA experience quality assurance, etc.
PaaS solutions, while satisfying these same advantages and even better in terms of customization, have a higher threshold for teams with less development experience
Fast online in 15 minutes, flexible and scalable, safe and reliable data
Smart Classroom covers the whole course of online education, including K12, language training, vocational education and quality education. The supported class types are also very rich, including 1-to-1 interactive teaching, 1-to-N online small class, interactive live large class and so on. In addition to the basic real-time audio and video interaction, Smart Classroom also supports real-time interactive messages, recording and playback, interactive whiteboard, screen sharing, classroom management, pre-class equipment detection, in-class network monitoring and other functions.
Picture: Online small class based on sound net smart classroom
Low code platform, fast online in 15 minutes
Based on smart classroom, educational institutions and developers do not need to deeply understand the complex application logic of audio and video development, through “low code” fast access, greatly reduce the threshold of development, the fastest 15 minutes to complete application development, even new people can quickly get started, saving 90% development time on average. Educational institutions no longer need to form a huge development team, but can also have their own interactive teaching platform, which can improve the development efficiency by more than 10 times.
Modular function design, flexible and extensible
Smart Classroom has rich functions such as classroom interaction, classroom management, role management, authority management, user management, etc. It supports flexible expansion of business functions through modular function design. At the same time, the whole process of online teaching can be completed, and the user business management system can be seamlessly connected through the standard interface.
Independent control of business data, data security and reliability
After the smart Classroom is launched, the business data of educational institutions can be stored locally or designated third-party servers, and the data retention and migration can be controlled 100% independently. It also provides functions such as resource isolation, content encryption, transmission encryption, and identity authentication. Multiple security protection measures ensure the security of educational institutions’ business data.
Sonnet Smart Classroom complies with the requirements of laws and regulations of the countries and regions covered by the business, follows the principles of minimal and transparent data collection and processing, and fully meets the norms of information security, data security and personal privacy protection. Sonnet has passed ISO27001, ISO27017, ISO27018, SOC2 Type1 certification, and obtained third-party GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA compliance testing/auditing.
Interactive experience industry leading, to ensure that online classes do not collapse
The quality of real-time interactive experience of online classroom directly affects the class experience of C-end users and the conversion rate, cancellation rate and renewal rate of educational institutions. The most important thing to have a good experience is: no lag, no crashes, and low latency.
When the epidemic broke out in early 2020, the sudden influx of traffic made SaaS platforms providing online interactive teaching, and even many manufacturers including giants, “caught by surprise”. Serious delay, lag or failure to enter frequently occurred. “Online course collapse” was also listed in the hot search. However, sonnet has been able to withstand the pressure, and has maintained a record of no total network accidents for seven years since its establishment. This depends on the stable and reliable real-time interactive cloud service capability of Sonnet.
Smart Classroom relies on sD-RTN ™, a software-defined real-time network developed by Agora, to identify network anomalies in real time and accurately based on deep learning algorithm, and to achieve user “zero awareness” failover mechanism to escort high availability of services. Also for southeast Asia, the Middle East, North America and other foreign teachers’ countries and domestic small and medium-sized cities, exclusive network optimization, end-to-end high quality transmission rate is higher than 99%.
In terms of low delay, sound network provides optimal access for teachers and students from all over the world through distributed node deployment. At the same time, the global end-to-end network delay is less than 400ms and the median delay is 76ms through whole-network multipath transmission and dynamic intelligent routing acceleration, ensuring low delay of classroom interaction.
For high concurrency, the SD-RTN™ is designed with a highly resilient network architecture that can easily handle loads up to 10 times higher. When the traffic surge, it can be adjusted in real time to meet the situation of tens of millions of concurrent platform and single classroom.
In July 2020, Sonnet defined and launched XLA, the first experience quality standard in real-time interactive industry, based on nearly one trillion minutes of user experience data and massive subjective experience evaluation of users. If any index fails to reach the standard, Snet can pay up to 100% of the compensation. This commitment also demonstrates snet’s technical strength and service quality in the field of real-time interaction. At present, no other service provider in the market can offer similar commitment guarantee for real-time audio and video services.
Recently, the epidemic has rebounded in many places, and schools and educational institutions are once again facing the suspension of offline classes. After nearly a year, teachers, students and parents have accepted online teaching and formed the habit of using it. Sonnet has served thousands of educational clients, such as New Oriental, Good Future, VIPKID and Master 1 vs 1. The launch of smart Classroom is undoubtedly another good news for educational institutions with online transformation needs in this special period.
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