A video is not a video

Watching a sitcom on Hulu, a 3-D movie in a theater, a funny home video on youtube and a course video on coursera are all, technically, about consuming video content. And yet, we won’t say that they are the same thing.

“It can be used for other things as well, right?” We are often asked by well-wishers when we explain that our product helps educators capture, manage and deliver classroom videos. What does a video-product focused on education even mean?

As the example above shows, a video is a TV show, a movie, a beautiful slice of life, or a lecture. A video is not just a video. The experience and expectations from the products delivering these different kinds of video content are different.

Watching a TV show starts with the need for entertainment. You are getting bored, or you need a break, or you need your daily fix. A movie in a theater may be about getting bored, but it is highly likely that it is about an outing with family or friends, your appreciation for specific director or actor, or a love of the medium. Coursera video consumption starts at your need to learn more about something specific, proceeds with searching for relevant courses, best teachers, best platform for peer interaction and getting credits, then ends up on the lecture video.

Not only the consumption of different kinds of videos is different, the requirement of content creators are also different. They need different capabilities from the platform used for delivering these videos. And they need this delivery platform to fit with the rest of their operations.

That is why a video product for education. As a business we need a market large enough for being in the business to make sense. As product creators, we need a market narrow enough to be made happy with the capabilities of the product. And as a team, we need something we are passionate about. We think education fits the bill. That’s why CourseHub!

Let me explain with the examples of some of the decisions made in CourseHub keeping in mind the education market.

• Video optimizations: One of the biggest reason an educational institute would want to use an online platform is to increase its reach, most likely to places where physical access to quality teachers is difficult. So, we can not make assumptions about what kind of Internet infrastructure will be available to the learners. At the same time, when a teacher is teaching in the class, blurring of the content on the board, or breaking of his voice won’t be acceptable. That’s why we spent a lot of efforts in making sure that HD-quality classroom videos can be delivered at speeds as low as 100Kbps with CourseHub. For many other applications, this may not be the target market, and hence such efforts may not make business sense. For us, it does!
• Organization of videos: Do you want to have playlists, shows with episodes, or individual movies indexed by themselves? Lectures organized in courses makes sense for education. That is what we did!
• Enabling Capture: A TV show or movie producer has setup to produce, edit and process high-quality videos. It is his job. A home video is fine in whatever quality the camcorder or digital camera captures it. A lecture video needs to be high-quality, but the job of a teacher or even the institute is not to produce videos. It is to teach. That’s why CourseHub includes not only delivery or management of lectures, but also the capture. Further teachers are at their best when they teach in their natural style. So, the capture has been designed to be automated and non-intrusive. It can capture lectures in a regular classroom. Teachers don’t need to sit in front of a webcam, they don’t even have to be aware of the camera. They can teach their class as usual.
• Interactivity: Student-teacher interaction is important for learning. So, CourseHub enables that with no requirement of any special hardware or software at student’s end. It enables sychronous as well as asynchronous interaction.
• Assessments: You wouldn’t usually be quizzed on a TV show at the end of a season, but it is an essential part of completing a course. So, CourseHub has gone beyond videos and created a full-fledged assessment system to help educators and learners have complete educational experience.

The list is practically endless and we are adding to it everyday. Do you have any thoughts on what a video platform of education should have? Let us know!

Transcript: Our Talk on Transformative Practices for Ensuring Quality in Higher Education

Jaya Jha, Head of Product & Marketing at Aurus Network, spoke during World Education Summit 2013 on “Transformative Practices for Ensuring Quality in Higher Education”. Here is the transcript.

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Good afternoon everyone.

When we talk about ensuring quality in education, the issue is inherently tied to the scalability & accessibility of education. If we had to teach only four future engineers, four doctors, four psychologists, four historians and four accountants, we would not be discussing the issue of quality. There would be enough classrooms, enough books & study materials, enough labs & equipments and enough teachers to teach them at the highest level of quality. But we don’t have that luxury. In an increasingly growing and becoming knowledge-based economy, we need to teach not four, or four hundred, or four thousands, but four million or even billions of students. In the ever changing requirements of the fast moving world, we need to even go ahead and re-educate or re-train many people. So, we need increasingly higher number of classrooms, books, study material, labs & equipments and good teachers.

Now, it isn’t difficult to see which of these is the most difficult to scale. The rest of them can be scaled by putting in more money. And a growing economy will figure out a way of making more money. But what cannot be guaranteed to scale is the human resource. Because being a good teacher is not just about qualifications, which itself cannot be taken as granted. Teaching not even just a science, which itself is highly non-trivial. In addition to all of these, there is a lot of art involved in it. I am sure most of us remember that one teacher who had made a most unexpected course the most exciting one for us and whose learnings we cannot forget in our lifetime. And yet we know that there aren’t enough good teachers for everyone.

The elite schools & universities in the world boast of high teacher to student ratios. But even our most privileged institutes like IITs & IIMs are struggling to hire enough faculty members to fill even their sanctioned quota, forget about trying to increase it. Other institutions are likely to be struggling even more. In an ideal world, we’d want many more teachers, many more good & great teachers. But in the real world, we are stuck with much fewer of those than we need for ensuring quality education for all.

Given this, as a student, how do you access the best teachers? As an educator, how to you reach out to more & more students with your best teachers? No prizes for guessing. Technology comes to our assistance. The term in fashion these days is blended learning. Despite being fashionable, it is not a meaningless term. And its meaning is pretty simple. Using a mix of face-to-face time with teachers and computer-mediated learning technologies to get the best of both worlds and enhance learning outcomes for large number of students.

So, how is that done? In a variety of ways and let me explain by some examples.

Consider distance learning, which has been the answer to educational requirements of people who do not have access to mainstream education due to financial or logistic constraints. Problem? No face-time with a qualified teacher. Students are dependent on mostly printed text for learning.

But what Academy of Commerce (AOC), which has some of the best and well-known commerce teachers in India, is doing today is that it is delivering live classes over Internet to almost a hundred of its centres across the country helping students with their CA studies. Students can use audio-video and text chat to clarify doubts and interact with the teacher. The single star-teacher, who could have taught only 40-50 students at one location, is now using technology to teach thousands of students across a hundred centres. And there is no reason for it not to go up several times the current number of students and centres. This is happening using Aurus Network’s product CourseHub, by the way.

Let’s take another example. IIT students, whom many of us would like to think of as super humans, are fairly tortured souls in reality. The pace of teaching is fast. In a recent survey among the computer science students at IIT Kanpur, 64% said that they don’t understand everything taught in the class most of the time. Now with so many students, it is unlikely that they’d be able to get face time with professors outside the class. Even if the professors stretch themselves, many students are not that forthcoming. Not to say that professors need time for their other classes, their research and their lives!

In the last semester, we deployed what is called a lecture capture solution in one of the classrooms. Again, powered by our product CourseHub, this is an automated system to record lectures, upload them on secure servers and make them accessible to registered students for watching at any time of their choosing. Now, they can catch up on missed classes, review the lectures that taught difficult concepts and even audit the courses they are not enrolled in. 84% of the surveyed students agreed that it helped them in understanding the subject matter better. Almost everyone wanted the system to continue in the coming semesters for every course.

Not only has it made the lectures more useful for students and is making maximum use of that one hour of valuable faculty time, it has also created very useful intellectual property for the institute. These HD-quality lectures, which are deliverable at very low bandwidths, can be used to offer distance education or can be delivered to other colleges and institutes who may not have enough teachers.

I will finish by discussing one more interesting concept called flipped classrooms. In a typical classroom setting, most of the teacher’s time goes in lecturing. For most courses, especially the introductory ones, teachers might be delivering pretty much the same lecture semester after semester, year after year. Still the valuable face to face time goes in that process. The projects, discussions, group activities are relegated to the time outside the class, when the teacher can not make a contribution. In the flipped classroom, the activities will be reversed. Students will watch the lectures outside the class to understand the basics and the class time will be used for clarifying the doubts, teacher-mentored peer discussions, and group activities, which are vital parts of the learning process. The role of a teacher, then, shifts from being a lecturer to a mentor and coach. And his time is utilized in activities that add maximum value.

The problem of accessible, scalable quality education is huge, but the possibilities presented by the technology are also endless. We’d welcome you to our stall to discuss more on these.

Thank you.

Technology-enabled Breakthroughs in Learning and Teaching Methodologies: A Glossary

Blended Learning

Blended learning refers to an education programme where students get their education through a mixture of traditional learning in classrooms and instruction mediated by technology. It combines face to face classroom methods with computer mediated activities. The goal of blended learning is to get the best of both to worlds – the face-to-face time with teachers as well as the advantages online or technology-enabled solutions can provide.

There are no strict standards about how much “blending” is to happen. Blended Learning could mean supplementing the traditional teaching with digital aids and content. It could go another step, where you fundamentally change the activities that happen in the class and the ones that happen outside. At the other extreme it might eliminate all pre-scheduled class meetings and replace it with a learning centre. The students would have the access to learning centre anytime and would be assisted by instructors and tutors whenever they wish to learn.

Flipped Classrooms

Flipped classrooms is a form of blended learning, where the activities traditionally done inside and outside the classroom are switched. In a typical implementation of flipped classroom, the students would watch the recorded lectures before coming to the class. The lectures would introduce the concepts to them. The class time would then be used for discussions, problem solving, group activities – things that were traditionally delegated for the time outside the class.

The advantages of flipped classrooms are

1. It can allow the students to learn in a way that suits them the most. Different kinds of content can be made available for learning outside the class. Those who prefer lectures can view the recorded lectures, those who prefer to read from textbooks can use them.  Yet another set can use specialized multimedia content created to explain the concepts. The class time can be used to address their doubts, peer discussion and group activities.
2. It makes the best use of a teacher’s time. Many a times teachers give similar lecture on introductory topics semester after semester, year after year. This repetition is not the best use of face-to-face time available between teachers and students. The repetitive lecturing can be moved out of the class in a flipped classroom and the valuable teaching time can be used for coaching and mentoring, rather than lecturing.

Lecture Capture

Lecture Capture is an umbrella term describing any technology that lets a teacher or an educational institute record the happenings in a classroom. It can be a simple audio-recording using a mobile device or a sophisticated HD-quality recording of audio, video as well as digital aids being used. Management and delivery of the recorded content are the other two major aspects of lecture capture. In its simplest form one could manually record the videos, upload on a popular and free video hosting site and use that as the delivery medium. Although the idea of recording a lecture sounds simple, implementing a scalable, accessible and cost-effective lecture capture system is non-trivial. Lectures are important intellectual property and organizations would want sophisticated control over their usage. Also, they would be rendered meaningless, if content organization or hosting does not allow for easy searching and access of relevant videos to the students.

The advantages of Lecture Capture are

1. It lets students catch up on the missed classes.
2. It allows students to review the concepts they found difficult to grasp in the class.
3. It allows teachers to review the lectures and enhance their delivery based on the feedback.
4. It creates content that can be used for blended learning and flipped classrooms.
5. It creates content that can be used for offering media-rich distance education programmes.

Self-paced Learning for IITK Students

The world (or at least the Indians) would like to think that IITians are super-humans and can not possibly be bogged down by anything. But let’s accept it. It is already not easy being a student in India. The pressure to succeed and be on the top is just immense. And if you are a student at one of the top institutes, you are surrounded by and judged against extremely competent peers. It is no surprise that the pressure on such students just shoots up. A helping hand to cope with academic pressure won’t be a bad thing.

Among other things, the pace of teaching is rather fast at places like IITs. There is no time to warm up, to slow down and take a break, or to adjust the time spent on different topics. I still remember our first day of classes at IIT Kanpur. It was the very first lecture. Professor walked into the class. “Good Morning. Welcome to IIT Kanpur.” That was all the settling time you get. And off he goes teaching PHY101 (Introduction to Physics) with those wide-eyed, 17-year olds staring at him in disbelief and amazement. One complete topic was finished in the fifty-five minute lecture! The rest of the days were no different.

It is no wonder, then, that students of Computer Science and Engineering department at IIT Kanpur have taken to CourseHub deployed by Aurus Network in the department. The solution is being used for Lecture Capture. Students can view the recorded lectures any time. It helps them review the concepts taught in the class and helps them catch up with something they missed or found particularly difficult to grasp. It also lets them audit the courses they are interested, but not enrolled in.

Here are couple representative comments from the students

“Really HELPFUL. I could watch some very important lectures that i missed, it helped me to get those points which are somehow lost here/there in class and finally it helped me to recover in the class.” – Chirag Gupta, B.Tech Student

“CourseHub is really useful. In addition to viewing my regular classes, I am also able to audit other interesting courses, without being required to attend the actual classes. I am able to learn many new things due to this.” – Vipin, M.Tech Student

The most important advantage of Lecture Capturing is that it allows students to learn at their own pace without asking for any disruptions in the teaching methodology. In this TED Video, Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, talks about a very interesting observation from their data. There are topics on which a particular student gets stuck and takes a lot of time. In the traditional teaching environment that might just lead to the student be classified as the “slow kid”, if he gets stuck on something early on. But when self-paced learning is enabled, as it happens with Khan Academy’s recorded videos, once the student does get past that difficult topic, he might race ahead on other ones. One size doesn’t fit all. How do we custom-tailor education for everyone? Lecture Capture does provide a very potent tool!

Have you seen lecture capturing in use in any of the educational institutes you attended? What was your experience?

“We do not hesitate to say that this is one of the best Indian Startups in the sphere of Education.” – TheTechPanda

TheTechPanda recently covered Aurus Network. Quoting from the article:

What do we think about AurusNet?

Nothing enough can be said about the Bizspark winner but these are the kind of companies that will change the world. We do not hesitate to say that this is one of the best Indian Startups in the sphere of Education. This is a classic case of how technology can change the world. Here’s wishing AurusNet all the best.

Read the full article here.

Among India’s Coolest Startups (Business Today)

We won the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge!

About the Challenge

Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge is an effort to find entrepreneurs with innovative business ideas that can significantly impact their markets. The search is for fresh ideas and vibrant leaders who can help shape the future of Cloud computing and Mobile application. This is a platform, for those start-ups or individuals who leverage the power of these latest technologies to build applications that impact the future of business. (Find out more…)

And the winner is…

Aurus Network in the “Cloud” Category!!

Media Mentions

• Microsoft Awards Entrepreneurial “Sparks” for a Second Year (The Telegraph)
• Virtual classroom solution, location-based mobile service get Microsoft awards (News Track India)
• Who are the Finalists of Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge 2012? (YourStory.in)
• And more…

Product Coverage in Pluggd.in and YourStory.in

Aurusnet Brings Cloud based HD Video Conferencing Solution To Educational Institutions (Pluggd.in)

Currently, educational institutes have no cost effective way of offering their classes live to remote students. Existing solutions either provide poor quality video or require intensive infrastructure (like Internet leased lines, VSAT etc.). Aurus Network enables HD quality videos… (read more)

Aurus Network: Bringing high definition video communication to the classroom (YourStory.in)

Just as technology is bridging the gap in every field, same is the case with education. Aurus Network with itsVirtual Classroom Solution, pioneered the use of internet based, live 2-way HD classes… (read more)

Case Study: Academy of Commerce (AOC)

10 Months of Successfully Offering Virtual Classes

Executive Summary

Academy of Commerce (AOC), New Delhi, having large number of owned and franchise centres all across India, wanted to broaden the reach of its best commerce faculty to students all across the country. AOC needed a reliable, secure and cost-effective solution to intra-connect all its centres and offer live classes to them (also known as Satellite Classes). After thorough research in the market, Aurus’ CourseHub Solution was selected and installed in 3 studios in New Delhi. These studios are now used to offer live and video-on-demand classes to more than 50 centres across the country. Students appreciate the quality of videos and almost face-to-face kind of classroom experience, while AOC management is happy to have saved tons of money which would have gone into launching satellite classes had they opted for conventional systems like VSAT.

Challenge

Academy of Commerce endeavours to be a CA training institute of the future as innovative, dynamic and agile as the world for which it prepares its students. Thanks to a strong brand name in India and years of producing successful chartered accountants, students from all across the country want to study from the top commerce faculty that AOC possesses. Realizing this vast business potential, AOC started exploring the option of offering its classes live to students in various remote cities, through what is now known as “Satellite Classes”.

“Utilizing his/her time and money effectively is of utmost importance when a student is preparing for competitive exams. A lot of it gets wasted when students move to other cities, just to attend the classes by top faculties,” said Mr. K. M. Gupta, Director of Academy of Commerce. “We wanted to offer our classes to students in the cities where they are, without the need to relocate. This had obvious financial benefits for us as well!”

But AOC was facing a hard time in deciding on a solution. The most popular way of offering live classes at such a large scale at that time was by using VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) technology. However, VSAT technology was cumbersome to use, required specialized studios and suffered from serious technical problems like audio and video getting out-of-sync, irregular reception due to rain etc. Most importantly, it required very heavy investments which raised serious questions on the project profitability.

Academy of Commerce needed a cost-effective, yet scalable solution. “Although other institutes were using VSAT to offer satellite classes, we wanted to offer our students a much superior and reliable experience, while keeping our offerings affordable”, said Mr. K. M. Gupta.

CourseHub

CourseHub by Aurus Network met all the requirements Academy of Commerce had. CourseHub’s advanced live video streaming technology was able to deliver HD quality videos at just 200 Kbps of internet speed. In-built archiving of live videos and instant availability of back-up/repeat lectures using video-on-demand proved very useful for students who could not attend live lectures due to conflict in schedules or other problems. Finally it turned out as the most cost-effective solution, with very low upfront investment required. “The solution works right out of the box. It’s solid, straightforward and well supported,” said Mr. Gupta.

Today, AOC runs 3 studios using CourseHub. These studios are equipped with a variety of digital teaching sources, including ceiling mounted automatic HD cameras, wireless and boom microphones, presentation computers, tablets etc. CourseHub seamlessly captures all that is presented and written on the boards, and concurrently streams it live to more than 50 centres. Students at various centres interact with the faculty live using the solution’s inbuilt two way audio/video and text chat. The end-to-end latency of communication is less than 2 seconds, allowing natural and effective conversations between students and teachers.

Once skeptical about internet based live classes, Mr. Sudhir Sachdeva, who heads business development at the Academy of Commerce, is now excited to see the results. “I was concerned that due to the low broadband penetration in India, we might not be able to deliver our classes to all the remote centres. However, CourseHub’s advanced video compression and streaming technology works at just 200 Kbps, which is today available in even tier 3 cities. We have our centres running the live classes successfully in many cities, including Faridabad, Gurgaon, Agra, Alwar, Bhatinda, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Sonipat, Rohtak etc.”

Mr. Sachdeva is also impressed with CourseHub’s strong security features. “My nightmare was that our lectures might get downloaded by illegitimate users and be posted online somewhere. This would have led to huge losses for us. With CourseHub’s strong encryption algorithms and multiple layers of access check, we were able to customize the view so that only registered centres are able to view the lectures,” said Mr. Sachdeva.

About Academy of Commerce

Academy of Commerce (http://www.aoc-india.co.in) has been a pioneer in CA education. After 28 years of excellence it is now considered to be a premier institute for all levels of training. A career in CA is a blend of both theoretical education and practical expertise. The institute has benefited more than 65,000 students, producing top rank holders of India every year. AOC believes in delivering knowledge solutions with respect to a career driven approach of learning. The academy focuses on shaping students to become world-class CA professionals enabling them to choose from a range of career options that are available. AOC prescribes performance based sessions divided in modules which are regularly upgraded to suit the standards of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI). They can either adopt public practice or join a public or private organization. AOC gives them the advantage to specialize in different areas with concrete expertise. AOC trains students to have a strong base of fundamentals. AOC understands the need of consistent result-oriented education and thus provides complete and assured standards of excellence.

About Aurus Network

Aurus Network (http://aurusnet.com) was founded in 2010 with the vision to make quality education accessible to masses at affordable prices. Today, Aurus Network is revolutionizing the way distance/online education is delivered. Through its flagship product CourseHub, Aurus has pioneered the use of internet-based, live 2-way HD classes which connected the best teachers with students across the country and eliminated the need for costly hardware-based video conferencing or VSAT (satellite based) equipments and networks. In-built features such as web based lecture video editing, social networking, online testing, performance tracking, search and analytics make CourseHub an ideal automated solution for large scale, university-wide lecture capture and publishing.