Dipak Biswal, Assistant Vice-President, IT, Meritnation
Technology adoption in the education sector is on the rise. The deployment of information and communication technology (ICT) across schools and colleges is moving beyond traditional set-ups to a broader system for disseminating information and interacting with students, faculty and staff members. The cloud is emerging as a key technology solution that promises to change the way students learn. IT heads of key educational institutions talk about the emerging ICT trends in the sector, the level of technology adoption and key challenges…
How have the technology requirements of the education sector changed over time?
Internet penetration in the country has increased dramatically in the past few years. This has changed the way an individual interacts with technology. The field of education is no exception. From offline education software, students are now moving towards online software hosted on the cloud. The mobile industry has also grown manyfold in recent years, as a result of which tech giants are now focusing on a “mobile first approach” for users. Smartphones provide access to digital content anytime, anywhere. At Meritnation too, we have witnessed high levels of engagement from users on mobile phones as opposed to what we used to see from users on desktops. Further, the increase in internet speeds/bandwidth has allowed education technology companies to offer more engaging multimedia content seamlessly over the internet.
What is the telecom and IT blueprint of your organisation? What are the ongoing and future initiatives?
We have data centres at multiple locations. Some of these centres act as a back-up to provide a seamless experience to our students, in the event of a failure of one of our data centres. We have also developed smart alert systems that notify our team during any technological emergency. This enables our team to quickly switch the website away from the server that is creating issues. Also, all user data is encrypted, thereby ensuring the security and privacy of user data.
What are your views and plans on the deployment of new technologies such as the cloud, internet of things (IoT) and big data analytics in the education sector?
I strongly believe that these technologies will take digital learning to the next level. We were the first company in the Indian education space to establish a full cloud-based platform to serve digital learning content way back in 2009. Big data will help companies to precisely identify students’ conceptual gaps and provide remedial solutions. While artificial intelligence (AI) will provide self-help to students, the role of a teacher cannot be overlooked. There are a lot of students who do not get access to good teachers due to geographical limitations. Meritnation aims to actualise the concept of “classroom without boundaries” by providing live classes over the internet, thereby negating the limitations posed by physical distances. Yet another powerful technology that is still in its early stages is virtual reality (VR). We learn best from our experiences, yet most of the current form of learning is not experiential. Once VR as a technology evolves and becomes accessible to the masses, the possibilities of the learning landscape will become limitless.
What are the challenges faced while managing the existing IT/telecom infrastructure and deploying new technologies?
We have been working on our own platform to provide live classes and have successfully connected students across India and the Gulf with the best teachers. This was not an easy task to achieve, given the variation in internet speeds in different cities across India. Creating a platform that provides live video streaming over lower bandwidth was a challenge for us. We needed to manage the video quality while maintaining it in real time. We have integrated WebRTC, the latest technology for live video streaming provided by Google, for our live streaming platform. We made a lot of iterations in the code to optimise and support multiple browsers as well as low bandwidths. We now have a fairly stable platform, which helps us deliver hundreds of hours of live classes every week.
What are the key technology trends that will shape the education sector going forward?
With the increase in bandwidth and internet speeds, rich multimedia (including 360° videos) will take the space of a regular video in self-learning modules. Processing power is also going to increase in the coming years. This will help in better handling of larger chunks of data to provide valuable insights and reports to students. Also, live classes coupled with VR are going to replace traditional classrooms, wherein a student sitting anywhere in the world can get the experience of being present in a class without being physically present there. These technologies will change the way our students currently study and learn.
“Live classes coupled with virtual reality are going to replace traditional classrooms.” Dipak Biswal
