"Home Learning" Becomes the Learning Era of Online Education Platforms in Indonesia

The government's decision to close all schools and universities in Indonesia is forcing us to adopt a solution educational technology (Edtech) as an alternative option for teaching and learning activities (KBM) which have been usually carried out routinely offline.

Unfortunately, the urgency to take advantage of edtech actually occurs in an unpleasant situation. For stakeholder related, of course this is a heavy "homework" considering that there is no ideal concept to measure the effectiveness of KBM online.

Moreover, imagining the weakness of internet access in Indonesia is one of the markers that KBM in Indonesia is not yet fully ready to transition to online.

For Kristin Lynn Sainani, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University who has applied the study online since 2013, this transition won't go smoothly if the main goal is just to finish the class quickly.

Then, how do edtech startups in Indonesia respond to this KBM transition with technology solutions?

Significant spike in traffic and users

One month post-enactment home learning, edtech platforms in the country experienced a drastic surge in service traffic and the number of users. This makes sense considering that in the current situation, the edtech platform is one of the only solutions to accommodate student learning.

Collected data DailySocial noted that the Kelase platform experienced a significant increase in traffic in less than a week with peak up to ten times, and the number of users rose to 33 percent. While Quipper recorded a traffic increase of up to 30 times during the last week after implementation home learning on March 16th. A total of 128 thousand assignments were given by 10.000 active teachers in 10.000 schools, and more than 121 active students have answered questions from 69 million questions on the Quipper platform.

Other published data Telkomsel recorded increase in traffic broadband by 16 percent. This increase is dominated by an increase in platform users e-learning as spacebig, an application that is part of the Sainspedia Package, the site e-learning Campus, and Google Classroom, which skyrocketed to 5404 percent.

Operator Tri Indonesia also revealed the application e-learning became one of the most demanded digital services in the past week. Compared to previous weeks, Zenius service traffic on the Tri network increased by 73 percent, followed by Ruangguru (78%), Quipper (196%), and Edmodo (841%).

The data above indicates the height traction and enthusiasm of the Indonesian people towards learning online. Then the platform provider needs to ensure the availability of sufficient capacity to ensure service stability and learning comfort.

The founder and Director of Kelase, Winastwan Gora, revealed that his party is trying to optimize its service capacity. In fact, it has the support of providers cloud from Amazon Web Service (AWS) to optimize architecture and increase capacity server.

"AWS provides additional credit for server until the end of the year due to the COVID-19 situation," he explained to DailySocial.

Meanwhile, Zenius CEO Rohan Monga said that at this time he would remain focused on providing convenience for independent learning at home. He revealed that he had prepared a special team whose role was to maintain service stability during this pandemic.

"Our IT team is always working hard throughout the day to ensure that this increase in traffic does not burden the performance of our platform," Monga told DailySocial.

Pandemic triggers new feature development

At the beginning of the implementation home learning, a number of edtech platforms are competing to come up with new initiatives, ranging from collaborating with cellular operators, providing free service packages, to developing new features to strengthen the quality of their services.

Basically, the development of this new feature is solely driven because of the urgency of implementing it home learning. With spirit agile, the edtech platforms strive to help students, teachers and parents adjust quickly.

Ruangguru started this initiative through its collaboration with Telkomsel to free the service for 30 days with a quota of 30GB. Kelase also makes similar programs, both free online classes at blajar.klike.id and a free pro version for three months for institutions that need it.

Next, the Zenius platform collaborates with several operators to present a free data package to access as many as 80.000 learning content. "In fact, Zenius services can now be accessed using an application Gojek," Rohan added.

From the information gathered, the Zenius, Kelase, and Quipper platforms developed new features that were worked on in anticipation of the continuation home learning in the next few months.

Zenius platform launches Live Class feature, three days after implementation home learning. This feature allows students to participate in live learning sessions through the Zenius application, website, and YouTube account with certain topics provided by Zenius tutors. Students can also interact by asking questions via live chat. 

In addition to Live Class, Zenius also provides a daily study plan feature (Daily Study Plan) as a guide for teachers and parents to guide students who carry out independent study at home.

In line with Zenius, the Kelase platform also launched a new feature in the Beta version to accommodate two-way communication. For example, participants not only heard and saw the presenter but also made presentations and asked questions with audio video. The Kelase Live Lecture feature is promised to roll out in full in the next few days.

"We are still continuing to improve accompanied by the team solution architects AWS to anticipate high traffic spikes with the presence of this new feature," said the man who is familiarly called Gora.

To provide ease of use, Quipper developed a voice transcription indexer feature that can make it easier for students to search by keywords, topics, or specific material that appears or is mentioned in the video.

Quipper's Business Development Manager Ruth Ayu Hapsari explained that this feature is also able to detect keywords based on the words spoken by the teacher in the video and history student learning on a Quipper account.

"We also provide Masterclass services that can help students to discuss directly with teachers related to subjects, homework, including consulting on study plans," he said.

Online learning transition challenges

In fact, the government's decision to carry out home learning like an impromptu task that needs to be rushed overnight. Of course this decision will pose a successive challenge for parents, students, and teachers. The reason is, so far the Indonesian education system has not seen learning online as an equivalent option to face-to-face learning.

The transition will be even more difficult when digital literacy in Indonesia is still low. Not necessarily the parents, students, and teachers understand very well how to use it. However, on the positive side, this condition will force them to learn to use other digital applications and services.

In addition, internet access in Indonesia is not evenly distributed, especially in remote areas. Internet quota is still an expensive item for many people. So, don't expect that teaching and learning activities can run seamless pattern.

For Kelase and Quipper, the limitations of the internet are one of the big challenges to smooth this transition. According to him, the limited quota prevents student users from being able to take part in the services they need bandwidth big, like a lecture session live.

Another challenge that is no less important is that most teachers who use Kelase and Quipper still have difficulties in designing Learning Management System (LMS). This makes a number of features in online classes not able to be used properly.

These challenges can ultimately become important lessons that encourage startups to develop solutions. To answer the difficulty of internet quota, Kelase developed a Live Lecture service which is considered economical bandwidth.

It also provides a brief guide and conducts special mentoring sessions for teachers and parents on a regular basis online to optimize the use of Kelase during implementation home learning. Because of this too, we are pursuing timeline for the development of other new features, namely Dual Presenter in Class Live Lectures," said Gora.

In line with the above, Ruth revealed that her party continues to provide education and training to help teachers in a number of regions in Indonesia adapt to using online learning applications.

Not only through feature development and education, it also collaborates with telecommunications operators to provide free internet quota. This collaboration was carried out to answer parents' complaints about the increasing need for internet access than usual.

"Of course we also hope that the government will maximize the facilities and infrastructure for network connections in the 3T (underdeveloped, frontier, and outermost) areas, especially for the education sector," said Ruth.

If you look at the conditions above, it seems that it will take a long time for the education ecosystem in Indonesia to adapt. As mentioned before, this pandemic situation will become test cases and proving ground edtech startup, are online education services ready to become the primary platform in Indonesia.