Vedantu Celebrates 1Lac hrs of Live Online Learning
Posted: August 27, 2016 Filed under: General, Product Leave a comment
It all starts with a vision
Two years back – with a big vision, a small team in Bangalore had taken it’s first steps. Vision was to democratize learning by connecting a student anywhere in world with a great teacher and make learning a highly personalized experience. We dreamt about a self learning world free from institutional boundaries – a world where a student will be at the center of learning again. Where a teacher will teach according to the need, pace and level of a student. Where learning graduates from being generalized to highly personalized.
Vision without execution is just hallucination!
Live online teaching/learning had not been tried, tested or used when we started. We just took a leap-of-faith! We had no clue if students and teachers will be comfortable learning and teaching in a live online mode. We didn’t know who the teachers will be or will the economics work out!! At Vedantu, the team had the tall task of quickly answering the leap-of-faith assumptions and also create the most effective teaching learning platform. We re-imagined everything and created the right set of technology from scratch for it to work seamlessly for teachers and students sitting in far flung areas of India and abroad. From those first steps, today we have come a long way in proving that Live Online Teaching Learning can change the face of education for the better.
Today, we celebrate 1 Lac hours of learning on Vedantu.
1 Lac is not just a number. It stands testimony to team’s hard work and deep rooted conviction in the vision Vedantu stands for. It stands testimony to power of personalized learning and goes a long way in proving that teaching learning doesn’t require any boundary. 100000 hours – is just the beginning of a huge revolution.
And it’s a no mean feat!
Heartfelt respect to the new age teachers – Teachers by Choice!
We at Vedantu would like to take this as an opportunity to celebrate 100000 hours of effort that Vedantu teachers have put in. We all show our heartfelt respect to you all – these 100000 hours will go a long way in shaping future of young lives. Many of you come from different walks of life and live in different parts of the world. You are corporate professionals, mothers, college students, professional teachers, travelers – above all spirited individuals who love to share. For many of you, it was your first experience of teaching. We are proud that Vedantu as a platform could give you an opportunity to teach students spread all across the world. We are proud that Vedantu could bring out that teacher hidden in all of us.
Now anyone can teach, everyone can learn 🙂
Miles to go Before I sleep …
We strongly believe that we have started something which has the potential to fundamentally evolve the way students learn and teachers teach in future. We believe this is the start of a new category of Personalized LIVE Online Learning and we will leave no stone unturned to make it happen.
Excited about the journey, excited about the possibilities 🙂
Big Shout out to all Vedantu students and parents
We again thank you for your engagement, continued patronage and placing your trust on a new system. You, being the first few are (and always will be) quite special to us as the early adopters of Vedantu, who shaped it up for what it will be in the future!
We would continue to learn and evolve and we really look up to you guys to guide us with your valuable feedback and inputs.
So here’s to us and the future of education!
Content Sharing Reimagined @ Vedantu
Posted: June 22, 2016 Filed under: Parent's Park, Product | Tags: EdTech, homework help, Learning management system, LMS, teacher Training, teaching methods Leave a commentLearning is a lifelong process. For most of us who believe in formal schooling and supplementary education, learning can never be completed without assessment. For enabling great learning, periodic assessment is equally important. If we can pinpoint to the strong and weak areas of a student, customizing a study plan to suit his/her needs becomes much easier. We at Vedantu, strongly believe in solving everyday problems for learners and teachers and thus, we created our own Learning Management System (LMS) recently.
It has been 2 months since we launched our LMS (Learning Management System) and it has been an amazing ride to see the product being used in unique ways by our teachers and students.
Why we built the LMS? In our user research, there were few Key problem areas that we identified with Content Sharing and Tests/Assignments:
- Content Creation – Teachers did not have any easy tool to create personalized content (tests, assignments, notes) and share with the student on Vedantu
- Content Sharing – Teachers could not share tailored content as per the requirements of the student and the topics taught, which resulted in students not receiving enough tests, assignments to practice on time.
- Content Consumption Interface – Test/Assignment sharing, attempt and evaluation interfaces were not intuitive and had very few options that led to offline sharing and submissions with no tracking.
- No Tracking and Reports – Students and teachers did not have the progress tracking and reports at one place.
Tests and assessments play an important role in the entire learning cycle for a school student. Assessments inspire teachers to ask these important questions:
- Are we teaching what we think we are teaching?
- Are students learning what they are supposed to be learning?
- Is there a better way to teach the subject, thereby encouraging better learning?
Hence, we came up with the following solutions to address the problems and concerns:
- Completely new LMS for teachers – Teachers can now create their own personalized tests/assignments/notes to suit the learning needs of their students. Teachers can unleash their creativity and create interesting tests and assignments for students.
- All Types of Tests/Notes – Students shall now get objective, subjective and mixed tests along with Assignments and study material from their teachers for practice
- Easy interface for the attempt – Students can now easily attempt tests/assignments from desktop or mobile. Students can type answers, take a photo of the written answers, add attachments, record audio or video answers. This helps students in reinforcing the concepts they have learned and also help them in gauging their learning.
- Track Progress – Students can now attempt and track all their tests/assignments/notes from a single page. Now they can view the report of each test and assignment attempted, anytime!
Now that we have our awesome teachers using our LMS for more than 2 months, we have some great practical stories to share…
“LMS was something I always wanted as I was not really happy with the kind of ready-made tests we had before. I wanted to create my own tests. Initially, it took a little time to understand the process but now I am very comfortable.
Tests and assignments are integral part of teaching – learning process. With subjective test, I am able to check the student’s’ ability to comprehend whereas objective tests are the best way to test learning outcome in a quick, time-saving manner. Auto evaluation of objectives is such a boon that combination of objective and subjective test helps me to handle assessment of a number of students at once.” – Sweta Rai
“I have used LMS enough to be able to use it in a very effective manner. I am very comfortable with it now.
During a class, I set the expectation to complete a test by the coming weekend. Weekends being a little light, are the best time that they can attempt the test with full enthusiasm. Even though I set the expectation to finish a test by the coming weekend, I set expiry date to at least 2 weeks. Due to unforeseen circumstances (school load, sick, travel, guests etc), a student might not be able to get time to finish test on time. I don’t want them to complete it just for the sake of it. If they can’t finish it by the weekend, they can finish it later.
Student reaction is positive. Many students and parents remind me if I fail to provide a test on time. Attempt ratio is very high. Its not 100% because there are students who are taking class for casual learning right now and want to take serious classes later (eg. one student based in Toronto paid for OTF, never attends it, gets the video and watches later. He has plans for serious Physics studies starting in a month).
In case of OTF, it also helps me gauge myself. If a few students in a batch have performed poor, then I have to improve them. But, if most of them have performed poor, then I need to improve myself. I did a poor job in explaining the concept to the class.LMS helps me gauge the level to which a student has understood a concept.I can then plan to either revise the concept with student or move on to the next one.
I do see a few shortcomings and have suggested a few enhancements. If they are implemented, my productivity would increase. But the current product, as it stands now, is a good tool in itself.” – Bhavdeep Sethi
“LMS is very comfortable for me as I can prepare my own question paper and assignments for my students depending on their individual capability. I am having freedom to choose questions for designing a question paper which consists of all type of questions varying from easy to difficult. I am including reasoning type questions, concept based questions and HOTS questions.
Students are very eager to take test as they want to evaluate themselves. Most of the students attempt shared tests and assignments within 12 hrs, this shows their willingness in taking test.
Evaluation is very easy, in case of MCQ, True/False, Match their is an auto evaluation option, and also I can add a comment for wrong and correct answers, because of this student will get to know their mistake once they finish their test.
I share a test with my students after every topic completion. From their test results, I get to know how clear are they with the concept and what topics they are facing difficulties with. I discuss the difficult topics in my next session and clear students’ doubts. This makes the student and teacher self satisfied. Student will be very confident in taking test at their schools.” – Santoshi Gururajan
“Prior to this tool, it was difficult to send tests, assignments, notes and similar tasks through mails or phone. It was equally difficult to keep the track of them.This process has become relatively convenient and easier now. This tool is very simple and easy to use. Though there is one time effort to create tests and assignments but once we create them, we can use the same with many students that s reduces my workload by leaps and bounds. Students are also very enthusiastic and zealous to learn via this tool. Though the attempt ratio is little less, but I must say it is increasing day by day.
Moreover, interesting fact is that students are asking me to share the homework without fail. This tool is really helping me a lot to set the goals for my students. They can see their grades and they can improve their grades by keeping track of their marks.” – Manisha Bhala
New Academic Year Brings New Goals & Means to Achieve Them
Posted: April 11, 2016 Filed under: Product, Student's Den | Tags: 1-to-1 tuitions, CBSE Tuitions, ICSE Tuitions, Monthly tuitions, Online Tuitions, online tutors, School Life, subscribe to a tutor, Tuitions 3 CommentsThe new academic year brings new hopes and a lot of new stationary (isn’t that the most exciting part of being promoted to the new class). Along with it, there comes a daunting task of searching for the best tutor who can help you achieve your learning goals for the new academic year. At Vedantu, we want to flip this daunting experience to an awesome one. We have some of the India’s best tutors on our platform who can help you be a better student and a better human being with their experience in teaching and mentoring young kids.
We like improvements and growing with the growing needs of our students and thus with the new academic year, we have made some changes to our website that would help students schedule the learning subscriptions more systematically and hassle free. Booking a subscription, whether a monthly subscription or subscribing to a teacher for specific academic needs, will be a simple 5-step process –
How to subscribe: A step-by-step guide
Step-By-Step Guide to Subscribe
1 – Click on ‘monthly tuitions’ tab under offerings or ‘view teachers’ to browse teacher list
2 – Choose the teacher you want to subscribe with
3 – Hit the ‘subscribe/book teacher’ button to see the teacher’s calendar
4 – Select the start date and duration (in months) for the subscription
5 – Choose from the available slot and fix the schedule on a weekly basis
6 – Pay and book the subscription, check your scheduled sessions under ‘My Subscriptions’ section and start taking sessions with the teacher of your choice at the time scheduled by you.
We have also made an explainer video that would help you understand the whole process of subscription seamlessly, have a look –
We are sure you are excited for the new academic year and resolved already to perform better than before. You can count on Vedantu to help you reach your academic goals quicker than ever with its handpicked teachers. Don’t wait anymore now, go ahead and book your subscription with the teacher of your choice and start with your personalized learning sessions.
Taking Sessions on Mobile Made Amazing!
Posted: January 22, 2016 Filed under: Product | Tags: Android App, App Upgrade, examination, LIVE Learning App, LIVE Sessions on Mobile, Mobile Learning, study hacks, Study on Android Leave a comment
A completely new mobile session experience
Pinch to zoom in and out
Draw & move shapes on whiteboard
Learn On the Go – Take LIVE Sessions on Mobile!
Posted: November 30, 2015 Filed under: Product | Tags: LIVE Sessions on Mobile, Mobile Learning, Study on Android Leave a comment
We have all seen how the Internet changed the way we teach and learn. It came as a boon for the students and enabled them to learn things with a little help and explore the unreachable. What do you think the impact will be when your personal teacher can teach you right on our Android device? When you’ll be able to take a LIVE personalized online tuition session from your mobile device even when you are away from your PC and enjoying a sleepover at a friend’s house. Wouldn’t it be revolutionary?
That’s exactly what ‘Mobile Team’ at Vedantu was working on all this while. We have created a first of its kind, two-way, real-time audio and data communication system for your Android devices. This would allow students & teachers to receive and deliver learning sessions seamlessly over a mobile device respectively. This is a step towards making the entire teaching-learning experience even more personalized and pleasant.
The new feature is well integrated into our already-live Vedantu App and comes with some add-on
Along with giving you freedom to take LIVE sessions anytime and anywhere (yes, we are talking literally here :)), the improved app will also offer –
- In-app reminder notifications before the start of each session on mobile
- Best mobile experience on all screen sizes (be it tablets, phablets or mobile)
- Seamless performance, even on low-end devices
- Smoother interactions over audio communication and whiteboard
We are sure, it can’t get any convenient & simpler than this; all you have to do is follow these 3 simple steps –
1 – Download the Vedantu App from Google Play Store
You can download Vedantu app from Play Store. If you have it downloaded to your Android already, all you have to do is – update the app to use all the new functionalities.
2- Go to ‘My Sessions’ section
You can choose the ‘My sessions’ section from the main menu to see the active and upcoming sessions. While the upcoming sessions will show the scheduled date for the session, a scheduled active session will have a ‘Join Now’ option.
3 – Join the Session & Learn
A Glimpse of Whiteboard in Use
You can start a scheduled session with your personal teacher at vedantu with just a click on ‘Join Now’ button. You can communicate via audio and use the whiteboard both for sharing your doubts and understanding the concept your teacher will be teaching. The best part is, you can now upload pictures directly on the whiteboard while in the LIVE session.
Here is a Video that makes understanding the process super easy.
We encourage all of you to take the sessions on your Android devices and share the feedback, we’ll be all ears for suggestions.
Learn Anytime Anywhere with InstaLearn
Posted: November 23, 2015 Filed under: Product | Tags: assignment help, Doubt-clearing Sessions, help kids, InstaLearn, Instant learning online, instant teacher connect 1 Comment
Do doubts stop you from being ahead of others? Not anymore!
We understand ‘doubts’ make anyone go bonkers. Especially for students, doubts are deterrent and if not curbed at the right moment, it can affect the academic performance to quite an extent. We are here with ‘InstaLearn’ feature that will allow students clear their doubts from teachers of their choice in as quickly as 10 sec*.
Now, squash the doubts as they occur with the InstaLearn feature at Vedantu. The process is super-easy. All you have to do is take a couple of steps to clear your doubts.
Quick 3-Steps to Clear Your Doubts
1- Choose ‘Clear Doubts Now‘ option on Vedantu home page
As soon as you come across a doubt, the simplest way to clear it is to log on to Vedantu.com and select the ‘Clear Doubt Now’ section on home page.
2- Share your doubts
As soon as you hit the ‘Clear Doubts Now’ you are taken to InstaLearn page that asks you to select your class and subject and submit your doubts to be shared with teachers. The best part is, you can upload pictures, share links or your type in your doubts.
3- Book an instant session
Once your doubt is successfully submitted, you can see a list of teachers who can help you clear your doubt. You can choose the best teacher to clear your doubts based on your preferences. After you have decided on the teacher, you can straight away head to book your instant session. Once you make the payment, your session starts in mere 10 secs.
Take the Live Session & Clear Your doubts
Voila, you are now connected with the teacher of your choice over an instant doubt clearing session in three simple steps. Go ahead and clear your doubts.
The best part is, there is no minimum time duration for the session. You can end the session as soon as you are cleared of your doubts.
Isn’t it simple! All you have to do is collate your doubts and get them cleared instantly from the teacher of your choice. We are pretty sure this will help you overcome academic anxiety and be successful in your journey to learn.
24×7 Content Library is Open!
Posted: June 25, 2015 Filed under: Product, Student's Den | Tags: assignment help, content, Library, New feature, reference material, Student reference Material, tests Leave a commentAlways wanted to have a library, but couldn’t really build one. We have built it for you! Now you have your very own academic Content Library. You can have a look at all the content with just a tap of button. Sort content, check documents, view videos, and attempt tests and assignments – All at one place! Where to Look for Content Library
You’ll see the ‘Content Library’ tab beside ‘My Calendar’ on logging in to your Vedantu account. You can click on the tab and open the entire library with a click. Choosing the Relevant Content
You can choose and zero down on the content of your choice- filter the content based on exam you want to take up – CBSE, ICSCE or any other competitive examination. Select the grade and choose the subject – Once you have selected all the parameters correctly, you’ll see only the relevant content. Choosing the Content Type & Topic
You can further filter the content based on types of content you wish to see – you can check documents, view videos, and attempt tests and assignments. In case, you want to take up a test, you can further narrow down the search based on the topic you want to take the test for. You’ll be able to see all the tests for a selected topic – just open the test and you are ready to take up the test! Attempting the Test
Once you click open the test, it opens up in a new tab. Fill in your details, and attempt the test. You can choose the correct option for objective questions from the right side of your test screen. Also, you can upload the pictures of the answer sheets for the subjective questions. Once done, end the test by clicking on the end button and voila! You can also see the solution to test paper after submitting the test. View the List of Tests Attempted
You can also view the entire list of tests you have attempted – just go to the ‘My Teacher’ section and click on the ‘Test Attempts.’ The list opens up and also shows you the results for each test you have taken. We have also created a video for easy understanding, here it is for you to have a look! Hope this post helps you understand all the features for Content Library well. Do post your comments and suggestions!
Tapp – Our Teacher’s App is Live!
Posted: June 23, 2015 Filed under: Product, Teacher's Desk | Tags: Android App, App Release, Instant Connection, interaction Leave a comment
The world is going mobile, then why should our teachers stay behind??? We realized the need of the hour and came up with this all new Android app for our teachers – Tapp! The app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store on your Android device and it runs to perfection!
With this new app, your life as a teacher, is made more sorted and you can connect with your students in no time. The app empowers you with right tools to see the entire list of your students, interact and share files with them.
You can login to your teacher account on Vedantu from the app.
See the entire list of students you have taught at one place, you can see who all are online and chat instantly with them. Else, you can also send messages for the offline students.
The app will allow you to chat instantly, share informative links and solve student queries in a jiffy.
You will also be able to set your status as Online/Offline via this app and from the Vedantu website as well. Now being online to chat or changing your status to receive offline messages from students is made easier.
Our RDX (Research, Develop and Explore) team is constantly working on the app’s beta version to make it more feature enriched and useful for you all awesome teachers.
Download the app and experience the instant connectivity!
Shoot us an email at – atom@vedantu.com for any concerns, ideas and suggestions.
Introducing Choice of Teachers!
Posted: June 7, 2015 Filed under: Product 2 CommentsIt’s been around 6 months and we at Vedantu have seen overwhelming response from Students, Parents and Teachers. It has been a thrilling ride so far and we are ever so pumped about the tremendous potential of disruption in education that lies ahead. It has been our constant endeavour to personalize and democratize learning and today marks a major milestone in this journey.
After days of conceptualising and ideation, weeks of rigorous building and rebuilding, intense testing and prototyping, today, we are rolling out what we believe is by far our biggest step in truly democratizing knowledge.
We are giving more power to both our students and teachers in this feature release. Power of choice to Students – they will now be able to browse awesome teachers on Vedantu, communicate with them to find the best match with their specific learning requirements. Teachers are our superheroes – we are empowering them with tools to manage their students and teaching better! Teachers can now directly communicate with their students on Vedantu, and can schedule and manage their sessions.
Teacher listing and search:
We at Vedantu have a broader vision to democratize knowledge. And choice is the backbone of any democracy. From today, students will have choice of awesome teaches in front of them. Our evolving algorithms will try to list down teachers in a logical order by analysing their student reviews, rating, number of sessions and availability. Students will be able to communicate with teachers, schedule sessions with them and hence identify the best fit for their specific learning requirements. We believe that this step of Vedantu will be pivotal in making learning ‘student driven’ for the very first time in human history!!
Automated Session Scheduling:
A true democracy works best when its people feel empowered and independent. Today, we are empowering our users with exhaustive tools to schedule and manage learning sessions between them. Students, Teachers will now be able to send session requests to each other, can modify and freeze schedules. System is built intelligent enough to identify conflicts with existing schedules. And not just this, all upcoming sessions can now be tracked on an intuitive calendar.
Communication:
We understand that for effective teaching and better understanding, continuous communication between student teacher is very important. We have built in Live Chat and Offline Messaging feature! We believe that it will really help both teachers and students understand their requirements better and hence will lead to better learning for students. A dedicated App is in the making to truly break boundaries of communication between our users.
Curriculum and Test Results Tracking:
We know that teaching learning happens best when it is planned prior in detail. To enable our teachers to plan and track better, we are introducing Curriculum Creation and Tracking Tools. Also, teachers will be able to track students performance on Tests shared with Students.
Internally, we called this feature set buildup as – Project Morpheus. Here is an insiders peek into how we had fun building up these awesome features for our users 🙂
This is just the starting, we are innovating at a feverish pace at our end to make Teaching and Learning an awesome experience for you all. We would love to hear more from you. Feel free to share your feedback with us at atom@vedantu.com, we would love to incorporate your thoughts and ideas.
Happy Learning!
Year of Rebirth 2014
Posted: January 9, 2015 Filed under: Product 1 CommentYou might be familiar with the legend about Phoenix. It burns itself and from the ashes a new life is born.
Sometimes complete destruction is necessary for an evolution to happen. We found it experientially rather the hard way out. Destruction is never easy, but sometimes imperative.
2014 has been that year of destruction and resurrection for Vedantu. We were almost on the verge of putting our shutters down. Toiling and persisting very hard with our enterprise model for almost 1.5 years things were not getting displaced, we had given ourselves time till March to see it through. Though things seemed very positive at the start of the year (it is always positive with Entrepreneurs as we are the most delusional of all). A lot of clients seemed interested in trying our product, but nothing materialized.
By March end we had exhausted enough resources, time and energies, it was a time to take a call.
We decided to follow the Phoenix legend. Instead of continuing and slowly perish we took drastic steps. We decided to close down everything and pivoted to an entirely new model. It was a very tough phase. We had to restore investor confidence who had invested their money and trust in us. Had to motivate the team which at that point was very low on morale due to lack of traction. We also had to let go of key team members to restructure the company and to make it lean, which again didn’t help the team morale. It took a huge toll mentally and financially to halt everything and to steer the ship in another way which had a momentum in a particular direction. At that moment we had no visibility as to how things will pan out and whether we will survive this or not. We clearly remember our heated discussion where we all converged on one thing – ” If this new vision and direction is what seems to hyper excite us and feels right inside, then it doesn’t matter if we perish trying to do the right thing” That was it.
So with new vigour, hope and direction we set out to create the new Vedantu. 13th of April was the day we took this decision and it shall be the foundation day of Vedantu.
As they say if you are on a right path everything conspires to make way for you. Things suddenly started moving and stuff started happening. We were able to close unexpected rounds of funding which gave us a runway. We will eternally be thankful to our Angels who have shown their trust in us and told us to be fearless and do what is right. We are super proud of our team which decided to trust us and our vision and decided stay on board.
This time we incorporated all the learnings from our previous (mis)ad-ventures and started very lean and applied all Lean Start-up concepts (God bless that book). We launched our initial very basic product as a closed Alpha and started testing out with a small set of users. Our biggest apprehension was – will people be able to study effectively online? We put on a board our fundamental Hypothesis which we wanted to test and went about answering them.
18th of July we had our first session on Vedantu. We were all glued to our screen and praying everything goes well :D. Well, one thing led to another and very soon we were having lot of happy students who absolutely loved the personalized experience and convenience they were getting on Vedantu. We started to see increased usage. So with the first question getting ticked off (Students find studying Online effective), the immediate next question was – will students find live 1-to-1 online learning mode good enough to pay for it? As my fellow edupreneurs would testify, getting someone to pay for Online education in India is a task in itself. We persisted and we got our first paid user on 24th Aug, Aishwarya (hey girl, you will be very special to us, All the best:-)
Things picked up from here, once our initial set of hypotheses were tested it was time to launch the product to a wider audience and so we started our second phase, to do a public beta launch. Many iterations and missed deadlines later (:D) we launched Vedantu to public on 26th Oct 2014. And, boy it was insane after that.
We started getting lots and lots of session requests, we also started experimenting with many marketing channels. Overall we started on a solid growth trajectory. From some 80 odd users in October end to around 2500 users by the year end. From some 200 hours at the time of public launch in October end to 1000 hours by December end – it was an awesome journey.
Let me take a moment to thank all my team members to have trusted and stayed on for this journey, to all our mentors and investors for placing your unwavering trust in us and especially to all our early users to trust us with the precious time of your children and believing in us. We will ever be thankful to you for without you Vedantu would cease to exit.
We are hyper confident about the change we aim to achieve. Vedantu believes learning should be personalized and centered around a student and we are here to make it happen. We strongly believe that we have started something which has the potential to fundamentally evolve the way students learn and teachers teach in future. We believe this is the start of a new category of Personalized LIVE 1-to-1 Online Tutoring and we will leave no stone unturned to make it happen.
Excited about the journey, excited about possibilities 🙂
Vedantu 