Agora and New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. Provide Access to Remote Classrooms Amidst Coronavirus Outbreak
Over seven days, one million students were successfully transitioned to stable, interruption-free online classrooms
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Agora, the leading voice, video and live interactive streaming platform, teamed up with New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc.(NYSE: EDU), one of the largest providers of private educational services in the world and a leader in the Chinese market, to launch the “New Oriental Cloud Classroom,” a remote, interactive classroom experience to aid in the displacement of students and teachers during the coronavirus outbreak. Bringing more than one million students into virtual classrooms in just seven days’ time, this joint project is the latest enterprise application of Agora’s real-time engagement platform.
“Without the efforts of the New Oriental Live Broadcasting team and Agora, the quick launch of the platform would have not been possible,” said Yu Minhong, Chairman of the New Oriental Education Technology Group. “Over seven days, the teams collaborated closely to ensure that we could deliver a solution to help support the more than one million students and teachers during this national crisis.”
The cloud-based classrooms provide a much needed alternative to traditional physical classrooms, and they touted powerful, interactive features:
- A student is able to address the classroom individually using voice or video capabilities.
- Teachers can “take a student aside” and have a private, one-on-one session.
- Students can break away from the larger classroom and work in smaller groups powered by video conferencing.
“In the face of the coronavirus epidemic, schools, companies and educational institutions realized there is a clear need for a stable online learning environment for students and teachers,” said Tony Zhao, CEO of Agora. “We knew we had the technical expertise, technology and experience, and we felt confident we could meet the critical scalability needs very quickly, based on our past work with enterprise-level users. This project was extremely important to us because it is essential to maintain continuity for both students and schools impacted by the Coronavirus outbreak.”
Aside from the pressure to provide continuity of education, the two companies needed to build a solution with an understanding that users would be challenged with highly congested networks. Any such solution would have to be resilient and highly scalable across the globe. With many institutions turning to online classrooms, and extremely high-traffic data usage during the Chinese Spring Festival holiday, the project needed a platform that could handle the congestion and still perform without fail. Agora’s Software-Defined Real-time Network (SD-RTN™), the company’s dedicated network designed for low-latency and high-scale, was capable of handling the sudden spike in demand and, more critically, doubling the scale of users nearly overnight.
In recent days, cities like San Francisco have declared a state of emergency due to the fast-growing threat of coronavirus in the U.S. Many business, healthcare, educational, and governmental organizations are looking for reliable telecommute, telemedicine, and teleschooling solutions capable of handling rapid, enterprise-scale deployment.
Solutions like Agora’s real-time engagement platform have proven to perform time and again.
To learn more about Agora.’s powerful real-time communications technology, visit https://www.agora.io/en/.
About Agora
Agora helps apps increase user engagement and retention with a developer platform for live, interactive audio, video, and messaging features at planetary scale. With a dedicated network and device-optimized SDKs, Agora is the only real-time engagement platform designed to cross borders and reach users on low-bandwidth networks and on lower-powered devices.
About New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc
New Oriental is the largest provider of private educational services in China based on the number of program offerings, total student enrollments and geographic presence. New Oriental offers a wide range of educational programs, services and products consisting primarily of language training and test preparation, primary and secondary school education, online education, content development and distribution, overseas study consulting services, pre-school education and study tour. New Oriental’s ADSs, each of which represents one common share, currently trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “EDU.”
