It takes ten years to grow trees, but a hundred to grow people. The primary goal of education is to cultivate people, and the primary goal of technology is to make science and technology better. Tencent cloud Serverless and China’s education industry hand in hand, uphold the original aspiration to technology-enabled education, to create a competitive Serverless solution for China’s education industry.

“With the rapid development of mobile network and online mode, audio and video communication has become a demand for education and training industry. 51 Talk is committed to improving the user experience with technological innovation, enabling rapid audio-video interaction in online education scenarios.”

– Jin Yuan Long, head of audio and video technology at 51Talk

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51Talk is a leading brand in China’s online English education industry. It was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2016, making it the first Chinese online English education company to go public in the US. As one of the earliest Online education institutions to practice OMO mode (online-merge-offline) in China, it supports the whole teaching link on the basis of the supporting software system developed by itself, by deeply studying the teaching and research management experience accumulated in the industry and the real scene teaching data.

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(Data Flowchart of 51Talk Online Classroom)

OMO mode refers to a business model that integrates online and offline, uses technological development to connect online and offline, and greatly improves market efficiency. Currently, there are three ways for educational institutions to implement OMO model: self-research, outsourcing services, and purchase of SaaS services. But each of these three approaches has its own problems:

1. High cost: OMO mode has high technical requirements for AI, big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things and other fields, and self-research ability requires the establishment of a professional technical team and high cost input;

2. Difficult matching: Outsourcing manufacturers are not familiar with the original architecture, so it is difficult to match properly in terms of requirement realization and development authority;

3. Low flexibility: Although it seems simple to purchase SaaS services, there are problems such as poor flexibility, isolated data and inability to meet customized requirements;

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01. Take small steps. Don’t let the education industry get stuck in the code

The OMO model in the online education industry involves complex processes and new technologies, which puts forward higher requirements and challenges to operating costs, technical capabilities and profitability. The key to the revenue of the online education industry is the user conversion rate, continuation rate and conversion rate. Essentially, the basis for improving the conversion rate is the teaching experience and learning results. This requires the education industry to use the minimum cost, quickly test user feedback, and constantly verify the market response. 51 Talk, based on its understanding of user behavior, needs to quickly iterate on new features on the business side: support for playback, bookkeeping, downloading and forwarding of highlights from students in the classroom, to capture highlights of students’ growth and progress. Let professional people do professional things, let the education industry just focus on business logic.

Long Jinyuan said: considering the dual requirements of online efficiency and operating cost, we need a solution that can quickly build services and automatically expand flexibly, so as to speed up the time of project online and reduce the complexity of development, maintenance and expansion.

Serverless allows customers to focus on their own business without maintaining the underlying infrastructure unrelated to the business, shorten the R&D cycle, and truly realize the “small iteration, trial and error fast run” agile development. In the architecture of Serverless, users operate on service-oriented components, such as storage services, authorization services, etc., which shortens the development cycle, reduces the difficulty of development, and avoids the delays caused by infrastructure.

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Let developers focus on business logic

02. “Panoramic recording” real-time audio and video TRTC + cloud function SCF solution

  1. The cloud function SCF is used to record the live broadcast content in real time, and the generated TS file is stored in the specified location.
  2. After triggering the highlights, read the first few fragments of the trigger point, call the function resource pool, and quickly generate the highlights.

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(Flowchart of panoramic recording)

  • Cloud function SCF is triggered with one key, real-time elastic start, and the server executes panoramic image recording of the browser;
  • Browser multi-channel decoding, all the way coding, reduce computing power consumption;
  • Browser to achieve multi-channel live streaming, signaling, whiteboard and other synchronous integration, simple and intuitive;
  • Adjusting the layout flexibly during the recording process, switching the perspectives of anchor and audience;
  • Real-time audio and video TRTC and cloud function SCF Intranet push and pull stream, greatly improve real-time, reduce network traffic cost;

Reduce cost and increase efficiency, the best embodiment of technological progress

Online education technology is not simple to online classes of business system, for example, requires iOS development, software development, PC development, Web development background, etc., even set up the most simple education system, usually need at least 10 people about research and development team, not to mention the late operations, servers, and time cost. At the same time, the online education industry has obvious peaks and troughs of user traffic, and will also face unexpected surge of traffic. The servers in IDC may not be able to meet the computing needs, and the hardware procurement cycle of self-built services is long, so it is urgent to find a feasible solution with the minimum cost.

On the Serverless solution, even if the local traffic is all cut to the cloud, it can also be all carried, supporting elastic scaling. The cloud function greatly saves the cost of operation and maintenance and server overhead, and the cost can be reduced by 70% with the billing model of 1ms granularity (the specific benefits can be estimated based on business scenarios and use cases).

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(Cloud function billing model by usage)

Li Yongtao, Architect of Tencent Cloud Serverless, has served many well-known education customers in the industry. Based on his rich experience in the field of video cloud for many years, he said, “Serverless is the use paradigm of the next generation of computing resources, which truly realizes the on-demand use of IT resources. Combination of tencent cloud the global Internet data center, in the face of education industry and the regional distribution of delay is sensitive to strong and high range concurrent scene features, provides the corresponding solution – high concurrency scenarios resources quickly, when trough for resource recycling quickly, meet the demand of users at the same time reduce the use of resources costs.”

04. Tencent cloud Serverless education solutions are upgraded comprehensively

1. Focus on audio, video and multimedia processing

1V1 class, small class, interactive large class and double teacher class are the four basic scenarios of online education. The demand for technology is to meet the requirements of high quality audio and video processing and high concurrency stability.

Serverless audio and video transcoding, push stream, live broadcast and picture processing solutions, support flexible, custom transcoding way, quickly build RTC, RTM, interactive whiteboard, real-time recording and other product portfolios of customized task processing capacity, to make up for the current separate cloud service functional blind spots; Adoption of distributed architecture, can withstand the test in the case of massive and high concurrency, 99.99% high availability, to meet the needs of thousands of large class scenes.

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(Cloud function audio and video transcoding application scenarios)

  • Efficient integration

Through the cloud function SCF linkage FAAS + BAAS service, video uploading, video processing, picture processing, storage scene, data processing are organically integrated into one.

  • Long running

Using the long running mechanism of cloud function, it supports the running time of 12h-24h, which can cover the transcoding scenarios of large files that consume a long time.

  • Smooth migration

Support user-defined configuration of FFMPEG command parameters, and deployment of self-built FFMPEG, flexible transcoding.

  • The cost is low

All component interactions are conducted on the internal network, without additional traffic charges, and the granularity of 1 millisecond is charged according to the usage, which has a significant cost advantage.

2. AI interaction and content monitoring and audit

The rapid development of AI interactive classroom in the online education industry can provide personalized teaching programs and gamified interactive experience according to the learning progress of students, which has become the focus of attention of users, online education institutions and capital.

Tencent cloud Serverless combines AI and audio and video technology to provide intelligent video arrangement and processing solutions, including hidden digital watermarking, AI intelligent review of content related to prostitution and politics, assist video content analysis and production, real-time personalized recommendation, etc.

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(Flow chart of intelligent recommendation)

3. ETL processing of data

In the teaching process, the big data generated by student portraits, learning situation analysis and classroom quality analysis need to be precipitated and analyzed to help students, parents and teachers grasp the teaching effect in a scientific and quantitative way and adjust the classroom content and teaching progress in time.

Tencent cloud Serverless ETL solution can easily carry out the calculation of large volume data, such as the simultaneous execution of multiple mapper functions on the source data and the summary of the execution results through the reducer function.

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(Cloud function data processing application scenarios)

Tencent cloud Serverless technology advantages will continue to expand to the “preparation, teaching, practice, test, evaluation, management” of the teaching process.

05. Application for use of “Panorama Recording”

In the article “Confluence of real-time rendering and recording using Serverless cloud functions and Headless Chrome”, we talked about the pain points of recording requirements in the online education scene, and introduced a new solution: Headless Chrome panoramic recording solution.

At present, more enterprises are gradually using it online. If you also want to participate in the test use of this program, click here to complete the internal test form filling, and we will contact you within 1-3 working days. Thank you for your attention and support.

06. Serverless series solutions for audio and video real-time interaction

  1. Cloud function and Headless Chrome for real-time rendering recording confluence;
  2. Use Serverless cloud functions to input online media streams for TRTC;
  3. Use Serverless cloud function to achieve TRTC single/mixed stream recording;

One More Thing

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