Smarter Classrooms: How EF Improves Student Learning Outcomes with Tencent RTC

As the digitalization of education continues to deepen, EF has leveraged Tencent RTC’s online education solutions to widely apply online interactive classroom technology to its own business, significantly improving student learning outcomes.

EF（Education First）

Education First (EF) is an international education company that specializes in language training, educational travel, academic degree programs, and cultural exchange. With a mission of providing life-changing education for global citizens, EF currently operates over 600 English language schools over 50 countries and regions.

Challenges & Goals

EF’s business spans more than 50 countries and regions worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. This means that, on the path of digital transformation and building “smart classrooms,” EF must overcome even more challenges.

● Global Operations: To serve users worldwide, EF must be able to provide stable, consistent, and high-quality online classroom experiences across the globe. This places extremely high demands on infrastructure and network technology.

● Development of Teaching Tools: Compared to offline teaching, online education requires the development of various teaching tools such as whiteboards, screen sharing, and courseware to create an online learning environment that closely resembles a real classroom. This poses a significant challenge to the platform’s development capabilities.

● Expansion of AI Capabilities: As AI technology matures, more and more educational platforms are integrating AI capabilities into their businesses. For leading education institutions like EF, AI has become an essential area of exploration for business development.

● Content Security: Educational institutions serve a unique audience, which means they have stronger requirements for content review and security. Ensuring classroom safety and compliance is also a challenge that EF must address. 

Why Tencent RTC?

As the world’s largest private education institution, EF has chosen Tencent RTC as the technological foundation for its online interactive classrooms, mainly for the following reasons:

● Globally Leading Audio and Video Capabilities: Tencent has accumulated over 20 years of expertise in the audio and video field, with more than 3,200 acceleration nodes covering over 200 international regions. This enables EF to provide ultra-low latency of less than 300ms for its global users and supports stable live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers, significantly enhancing EF’s global business efficiency.

● Extensive Industry Application Experience: Tencent Cloud serves more than 90% of China’s leading educational institutions and over 18,000 education clients, giving it deep understanding and experience in the education market, especially in China’s domestic education sector. Its strong technical capabilities and rich industry experience make Tencent Cloud the ideal choice for EF.

● Comprehensive Interactive Classroom Solutions: Tencent RTC offers a complete interactive classroom solution, easily supporting a wide range of educational scenarios such as one-on-one classes, small group classes, large group classes, large-scale online training with tens of thousands of participants, and dual-teacher classrooms. The solution also provides EF with a variety of teaching tools, including interactive whiteboards, courseware, screen sharing, and recording playback, creating an online learning environment that closely resembles a real classroom.

● Strong AI Capability Reserves: Tencent RTC has a deep reserve of AI capabilities, enabling the platform to provide real-time audio and video interactions powered by AI, creating intelligent experiences. Currently, the AI capabilities provided by Tencent RTC have already been implemented in numerous teaching scenarios.

Highlighted Benefits

The highlight of the services Tencent RTC provided is the Smart Classroom solution. This is a solution that encompasses Tencent’s years of experience in AI, speech processing, image recognition and video processing technologies. With this solution, EF upgraded several of its schools in China and improved student learning outcomes.

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