Back to Case studyHow Zoom empowered an international education charity to continue its classes for underprivileged students
ShareHighlights
- Zoom: Intuitive remote learning solution accessible on any device
- Multiple security layers for live communication, data sharing, and cloud storage
- Improved teaching efficacy with features such as screen sharing, call notes, session recording, and polling
- Actionable insights from reports and analytics to enhance teaching/training sessions further
- Optimised external communication to garner government support and CSR funds
Introduction
The organisation is a global education service charity. It partners with the government and like-minded institutions to improve the primary education quality for students from India’s lowest-income communities and unconnected villages.
With each implemented program, the organisation wants to ensure that the entire education system and its coordinators focus on actual learning needs and help children overcome learning challenges.
The team is currently working in alliance with several institutions to support the Gujarat Government in transforming education services across the state. By blending international best practices with its own experience, it aims to bring structural reforms with stronger foundational literacy and better mathematical skills in children.
When the private schools and colleges across India switched to online classes during COVID-19 lockdowns, the organisation also wanted to ensure the continuity of education for its students. As most of the children and the teachers in training were not digital natives, the team wanted a system that would be easy to use. Compared to other alternatives, they found Zoom offered by Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) a more user-friendly app for virtual teaching.
Business Challenges
Teaching students in remote villages and under-resourced schools is already difficult, and the problem became more challenging when COVID-19 disrupted India’s education sector.
While children studying in private urban schools usually have access to computers and speedy internet at home, the ones taught by this charity group lacked such privileges.
The customer tested a few free video conferencing apps to continue offering its services and train teachers at organising classes for students in areas without internet connectivity. However, these setups could not serve effectively.
- Students using their parents’ mobiles had limited data allowance and on-device storage, preventing them from saving the reference files shared by teachers.
- Besides accommodating the considerable student strength in each class, the customer’s team had to organise frequent webinars. Free apps could allow only a small number of attendees in such sessions.
- There was no assurance on the security of communication, and the audio-video quality was not up to mark.
The customer needed a more reliable service with scalable infrastructure to structure remote education for students in dispersed locations. The app was also expected to support the organisation’s workforce that was trying to facilitate examinations and liaise with government agencies for general improvement in education services.
TTBS Solution
TTBS offered Zoom to help the customer overcome the limitations posed by other video conferencing apps and meet their specific requirements. Users could access it directly as per their convenience from a browser or through an application downloaded on their device.
Zoom helped deliver the curriculum in virtual classes effectively and made it easier to organise teacher training. It came with several features to make digital education and communication better:
- Since the service could also be accessed via browsers, users were not compelled to download it on their devices.
- Zoom enabled attendees in a classroom/meeting to store and access their reference material in its cloud repository, eliminating the hassles of stuffing their device’s local storage with data.
- With Zoom, the organisation could run sessions with HD-quality audiovideo for hundreds of participants. The communication was secured with 256-bit TLS encryption, while shared data had AES-256 encryption.
Zoom gave the customer an effective platform to deliver academic lessons. It also helped their teams coordinate closely with partner organisations to continue deploying the services planned for long-term improvements in school education.
TTBS ensures the promised uptime of 99% under the end-to-end SLA provided to the customer.
With a host of features for teaching and learning, Zoom helped the customer recreate the feel of being in a classroom. It also enabled students to get accustomed to digital technologies that are getting globally imbibed in the academic and business worlds.
