This article was compiled from India ” Business Today “< / span> Latest article.

You wear a Google Cardboard-like VR helmet and see a stereo image like a human brain floating slowly in the air. You have a controller in your hand that can be pointed at any part of the brain like a mouse. You find that the entire brain is made up of countless lobes. You click on the brain and all the leaves are separated. You use the “mouse” to slide freely on the image and find out which leaf it touches, and that leaf will automatically appear a string of text to tell you what its function is. You point the “mouse” towards the occipital lobe, and that line tells you that it is responsible for the visual processing. At this time, the system challenges you: can you put these scattered leaves back in place?

You reinstalled all the leaves a little bit according to the text prompts you saw. When the last piece returns, the system will pop up a notification: You have won!

The whole process just now is exactly a game, a VR puzzle game about brain structure.

“This is more interesting than the boring paragraphs in the textbook.” You can’t help muttering. Taking off the helmet, I recalled the experience just now, and it was not exhaustive.

Veative Labs Product Promotion Map

The manufacturer of this VR device, Veative Labs, said that the simulation system they designed is to connect tangible knowledge with abstract cognition, allowing users to change from passive learners to active knowledge. Ingestor.

It is reported that the company’s scientific and mathematical VR equipment has appeared in many classrooms in 25 countries around the world. Its main function is to help students understand complex subject knowledge concepts:

“People can easily see the effectiveness of this device in enhancing learning ability, but one often overlooked but real fact is that this product can also improve the teaching ability of teachers. Expand the knowledge base of teachers and activate their potential. “The company asserts confidently on its website.

Although currently in education, VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) Technology is still mainly used by a few elite private schools, but fortunately the government has already begun action. India ’s latest “Span class =” text-remarks “label =” Remarks “> (Draft National Education Policy 2019) has clearly stated that” Science and technology achievements and application An important strategy for the overall quality of education in India. “

It can be imagined that under this policy background, a series of educational software developed for teachers and year-round students will spring up like bamboo shoots. Among them, serious games and simulation education products that apply AR and VR technology will become the protagonists.

From a deep perspective, the widespread application of these products highlights the subversion and challenge of traditional teaching methods by new technologies. From now to the near future, people will become more and more accustomed to online education: teachers carry out teaching activities at home, and students only need to use a mobile phone to receive learning materials and listen to lectures anywhere. In the past, even in the offline education scene, students’ classroom participation was difficult to track through scientific means; but in artificial intelligence technology and its important branch, natural language processing technology (Natural Language Processing) , even if the educational activities happen online, the students’ understanding ability, analytical ability, and even the concentration of attention and emotional changes during the lecture Can be discovered, tracked and measured in a timely manner.

Face recognition technology can capture students’ classroom participation in real time and supervise the teaching effect of teachers. Business-level AI tools can help students match colleges and universities and choose courses that suit their own characteristics.

“The most amazing technology in this era is artificial intelligence. To be precise, it is machine learning and deep learning in the field of artificial intelligence.” Sebastian Thrun, founder, chairman and CEO of Udacity, said excitedly. The Silicon Valley unicorn’s main business is to provide users with a large number of online public courses.

“AI can train world-class teachers. World-class teachers don’t just speak, they listen more. No matter where the students come from, they can understand them and make them according to their specific circumstances. Timely adjustments, “Thrun added.

Udacity, which was founded in 2011, started as a laboratory set up by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. At that time, the two Stanford faculty members gave a free public course called Introduction to Artificial Intelligence on the Internet.

“Compared with the course content, ‘how can we make students learn better’ is the focus of our concern. We believe that the teaching process is actually an interaction between the teacher and the student on the content of the lesson. When students understand the teacher The content of the lecture is effective in teaching. On the other hand, when students cannot understand what the teacher says, there will be a fault in the teaching and the teaching effect will be discounted. Udacity uses AI technology to analyze the entire teaching process Successfully locked specific teaching faults, thereby improving students’ learning efficiency. In addition, we also use AI technology to help merchants make pricing decisions. Through detailed analysis, AI can find the most appropriate price point for products that meet market needs. This process is a bit similar to the daily work of Amazon’s AI.

Apart from Udacity, Thrun is also the founder of Google X, and Goolge X has spawned Google Glass, a self-driving car and wearable device.

Not just Silicon Valley. In India, thousands of entrepreneurs have entered the education technology industry in recent years.. According to data released by Data Labs, a research organization administered by Inc42 Media, India alone added 4,450 new education startups between 2014 and 2019. Although 1150 of them were forced to shut down, from a general trend perspective The field of education technology has already become a capital outlet. As of now, 194 education technology start-ups have received government funding; the funding pool in this area has also reached $ 2 billion. In terms of business content, a considerable number of startups have focused on improving hardware and software facilities for online training. From the perspective of India’s national conditions, this is indeed a top priority: Due to the limited bandwidth, students in many parts of India have difficulty enjoying the convenience and efficiency brought by online education.

Optimize broadcast quality

Like Thrun, Vamsi Krishna is also a teacher. In 2006, he and a friend in Punjab co-founded an offline training company called Lakshya, who is also a lecturer of the company. By 2012, Lakshya had become a well-known test design brand in northern India, but Krishna decided to sell the company because he found it difficult to expand the scale of his main business offline:

“It ’s not easy to expand offline training centers on a large scale. If you want to open a branch school elsewhere, you have to copy the soul of the main school and ensure that you have the same high level of teachers. Both of these tasks are arduous. To expand the scale without losing the educational concept of the training center, and not to reduce the level of teachers, we can only rely on technical means. “

Krishna then co-founded an online course training company, Vedantu, with friends, which provides full-course instruction for students in grades 6-10. In the years when the company was founded, around 2016, Vedantu promoted one-on-one online tutoring; but it didn’t take long for this model to become one-to-two, that is, a teacher More than 200 students were listening while teaching online. In order to establish a brand and expand market share, Vedantu also launched a free model. In the free class online, a teacher can face up to 2,000 students at the same time-Krishna’s goal of large-scale teaching has been achieved, and he did not guess that the means to achieve it really depend on new technology.

“We have upgraded the existing live broadcast technology to a certain extent. As far as the product form is concerned, we are most similar to Zoom and Skype. But unlike them, IOur software applications are designed to meet the needs of teaching. “

Krishna sat in the office of HSR Layout in Bangalore and talked to us about their live streaming technology. The company’s conference room design style was inspired by the movie “Star Wars” and has a bit of a futuristic feel.

In fact, the key to Vedantu’s success is simple: they have optimized streaming live streaming technology, which has significantly improved the user experience of online teaching. Now even in areas with poor network signals, students can see smooth live broadcasts.

Furthermore, in the live broadcast room, many contents can also be presented in real time. For example, the teacher’s voice, the teaching video played by the teacher in the classroom, and even the teacher’s blackboard, all of which can be displayed on the student’s terminal device.

When it comes to blackboard writing, here is a few more words. Strictly speaking, online blackboard writing does not allow students to see the whole process of teachers writing with chalk like offline courses. Its presentation is actually more like a PPT courseware-the text appears instantaneously in the form of a whole sentence. Vendantu uses a control device to monitor the teacher’s blackboard writing. After the instructor finishes writing a complete sentence, the device transmits the written content to the terminal device in the hands of the student. On the student side, the interface of the blackboard is a whiteboard. Whenever the writing on the blackboard is updated, they will see a line of text popping up on the whiteboard.

“If the blackboard interface is too large, the teacher will not be visible on the screen. Therefore, in order not to affect the overall learning experience, we have designed the size of the whiteboard to be smaller. Of course, this size is not too small Let the students not see the above words. In fact, from the perspective of the students’ equipment, the whiteboard is just a static pattern, and it will not move. What is moving is the teacher’s gestures, the pictures in the teaching videos, and the increasing content on the whiteboard. “Krishna introduced.

Another education technology company engaged in streaming media livestream optimization business is Unacademy. The difference between them and Vendantu is that the company’s focus is not on optimizing video fluency but on improving product features.

For teachers who teach online, the biggest contribution of Unacademy, founded in 2015, is that they make content creation easier.

“In fact, many people have the desire to share knowledge, but due to the limited function of the product, for a long time, only a few people can become” online knowledge sharers. “ThisSome people also need to configure the microphone themselves, record the lecture process and PPT content themselves, edit the program repeatedly … When these tasks are completed, and they need to upload content, they will find that the most suitable platform is YouTube. However, as we all know, there are too many types of videos on YouTube, and the creation of new bloggers is difficult to be quickly discovered by target users, so these teachers are actually worried about the distribution of content. “Said Hemesh Singh, founder and CTO of Unacademy.

What Unacademy does is simplify these tedious procedures. Teachers can now use the built-in camera on their phones to directly record course content; PPT handouts can not only be easily uploaded to the app, creators can also modify the content of the handout directly in the app, mark key sentences, and even Enter narration. And before sending to students, all audio and video content will be uploaded and stored in the Amazon cloud server, which can also ensure the security of the file content.

Hemesh Singh, co-founder and CTO of Unacademy

“Unacademy is now used by many competitive test makers and publishers in the market for online teaching because the entire operation process is convenient and fast,” Singh added.

At present, more than 10,000 educators have posted content on the Unacademy platform, and the total number of videos has exceeded 1 million. Just recently, the startup announced that they have completed a $ 110 million funding round with investors including Facebook, Transatlantic Investment Group, Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital, Blume Ventures, and more.

Learn “Hand in Hand”Students and Schools

Leverage Edu ’s LinkedIn account describes his business very clearly:

“This platform is like a market. Here, the machine learning mechanism allows every visiting student to meet professionals, and experts are like counselors: he helps you with career planning, helps When you apply to the right university, he makes you fully prepared before entering the workplace. In a word-he is your mentor, and even your friend. “

At a noisy cafe on Lodhi Road in Delhi, Akshay Chaturvedi, founder and CEO of Leverage Edu, tells us more about the company.

It is reported that 750,000 people visit the site every month. Most of these visitors want to try the “exact matching” function of the platform: through AI tools, users who want to apply for foreign universities can find schools that match their various abilities and personality traits. Students who are worried about choosing a major will also find relevant professional courses that are suitable for them and can stimulate their potential.

But isn’t this feature too mysterious? How exactly did Leverage do it?

The answer is simple: data. Leverage’s intelligent matching algorithm is implemented with the support of massive data.

“When doing machine learning training, we entered different types of schools and data that people have selected in the past ten years.” Chaturvedi said.

Leverage Edu founder and CEO, Akshay Chaturvedi

In addition, this algorithm also takes into account the background information of scholars. This data includes school experience, graduation exam scores, work experience, and possibly evenInclude employer information. Each data indicator has a different weight.

“Of course we also have a lot of data from universities. For example, compared to some applicants who work for large enterprises, many universities today pay more and more attention to those who have had work experience in startups. People. So our database must also track and respond to this trend. “Chaturvedi added,” At present, our matching accuracy has reached 80 ~ 85%. Of course this is still not enough, considering that the algorithm can never reach With 100% accuracy, we decided to include artificial factors: expert consultants hired by the company can help users through offline consultation, and do our best to help scholars find the school that suits him or her best. “

Leverage can also predict future career choices of users through AI.

“This is one of our many studios. In this project, the algorithm is mainly driven by relevant data from clinical psychology. It analyzes your career choices by testing your feedback in different situations “Said Chaturvedi.

Specifically, this machine will present a number of mini case studies to the candidate. The candidate will use the information to answer the question, and the machine will evaluate the answer to determine the career suitable for the candidate’s development. For example, according to the company, such tests can tell whether a person is more suitable for marketing or financial work.

Not only that, these machines also see a range of other details. For example, whether users who find mentors for career development advice online have obtained satisfactory answers in the conversation, whether they have maintained an attentive and polite attitude in the communication process, and whether there are emotions in the conversation.

When the technology is applied to online teaching, it can also evaluate the comprehensive ability of students in all aspects. For example, when a child is thinking intently, the machine can know whether he is thinking about the material he is reading or remembering what he has heard.

Analyze learning effects

Now, almost all experts who study future employment issues will tell you: Machines will leave high-level cognitive materials for humans by completing most of the repetitive work; then from a human perspective, the most important future Skill is critical thinking.

AugLi is a technology company located in Gurgaon. They have built an appTesting platform for critical thinking. The basic mechanism and design purpose is to first measure the distinction between the reading age and the physiological age of students, and then push them to read content that is truly suitable for their cognitive ability according to the actual situation of the students.

The reading materials of the test are mostly based on current affairs and politics, but there are also biographies of major figures, such as well-known Indian boxer Mary Kom. After the students have finished reading the article, the platform will ask them to make a brief introduction of the content, which can be audio or text.

“We believe that it is important to find the important content of the article and the ability to quickly absorb and repeat it.” said Augja founder and CEO Anjali Tiwary. “We can see that you understand the content of the article. Degree. “

The “we” in Tiwari’s mouth is not human. According to him, the machine algorithm can see the reader’s understanding of the content of the article, and this is likely to be a branch of artificial intelligence technology, natural language processing technology (NLP) .

The specific process is as follows: Take audio repetition as an example, the platform will first transcribe the student’s audio content into text, and then the machine algorithm will compare the similarities and differences between the original text and the transcribed text.

“The first thing that is recognized is the noun, then the phrase. If the student uses a word that has never appeared in the original text, the machine will mark it, and start searching for related information and analyzing the ideas behind the different words. The difference between the two. “AugLi co-founder Kamal Kashyap further added,” Since the system has embedded tens of thousands of relevant text materials, it can ‘understand’ the relationship between different concepts. ” / blockquote>

Coincidentally, Vendantu is also using big data and natural language processing technology to analyze the learning status of students and find ways to improve learning efficiency. For example, face recognition technology can be used to evaluate students ‘learning participation and teachers’ teaching effects: Are students staring at the screen or looking elsewhere? Are they smiling or frowning? Do some children blink too often? Why is that student’s eyes so wide? What is the time difference between the teacher’s question and the student’s answer?

In today’s online teaching, even the tone of speech is analyzed.

“Each lesson we capture more than 70 changesthe amount. We use the amount of data that other companies cannot reach to analyze children’s understanding. “Vedantu co-founder Vamsi Krishna is full of confidence in his own technical capabilities.” With the support of this data, we can create customized learning content for each student. Real-time learning analysis technology is our strongest patent. “

The National Education Policy 2019 Draft sets goals for primary and secondary schools at all levels in the country: software must be developed to help teachers evaluate children’s teaching fitness; after the periodic evaluation, students must be provided with appropriate feedback .

“The new mechanism will minimize the importance of rote memorization and replace it with a focus on critical and creative thinking, as well as a focus on students’ ability to communicate and collaborate. These are the requirements for 21st century talent Training programmes. “The ambitious draft policy states.