Rain Uses Ulearning Online Education Solution Helping Students in South Africa

Why Huawei Cloud?

Huawei Cloud provides an online learning solution called Learning Management System (LMS), in the form of a SaaS offering. Huawei LMS targets educational institutions, vertical industry associations, and corporations. It is used by 800+ universities/colleges, 10+ vertical industry associations, and 1,000+ corporations with 10+ million users around the globe.

A Huawei Cloud team worked closely with Rain during the COVID-19 Pandemic, making sure that the proposed solution would meet the customer's business and technical requirements, and at the same time keeping Rain ahead of competition.

While working with Rain, the Huawei Cloud team managed to win the customer's trust by proving that we were able to deliver the proposed solution with all the promised benefits. Huawei Cloud's local technical teams continue to support Rain 24/7, always responding to any issues within the agreed SLAs, making sure that Rain was able to deploy on Huawei Cloud fast.

Challenges

  • The global pandemic of COVID-19 created unforeseen conditions which forced students across South Africa to stay at home to get out of the way of the disease. Most educational institutions in South Africa did not have mature online/remote learning solutions to deliver online classes at scale. This triggered strong demand for online learning solutions which could not only provide online classrooms, but also support other value-added functions like online student assessment, on-demand content generation and delivery, analytics and reporting. Rain was also in the market providing online learning solutions to educational institutions. They needed an online learning solution featuring all of the following: Cloud-based deployment, Flexible business model, Fast TTM and low OPEX, Analytics and reporting functions, Long-term reliability.

    The global pandemic of COVID-19 created unforeseen conditions which forced students across South Africa to stay at home to get out of the way of the disease. Most educational institutions in South Africa did not have mature online/remote learning solutions to deliver online classes at scale. This triggered strong demand for online learning solutions which could not only provide online classrooms, but also support other value-added functions like online student assessment, on-demand content generation and delivery, analytics and reporting. Rain was also in the market providing online learning solutions to educational institutions. They needed an online learning solution featuring all of the following: Cloud-based deployment, Flexible business model, Fast TTM and low OPEX, Analytics and reporting functions, Long-term reliability.

Pain Points

  • Fast TTM and Low Cost

    The big challenge for Rain was to roll out a Smart Education solution as fast as possible. Rain also wanted to be able to run this solution using an OPEX-based business model with minimum upfront investment.

    The big challenge for Rain was to roll out a Smart Education solution as fast as possible. Rain also wanted to be able to run this solution using an OPEX-based business model with minimum upfront investment.

  • Analytics, Reporting & Assessment

    Rain needed a comprehensive solution that not only could assess both teacher and student performance but could also perform the required analytics and reporting needed to facilitate decision making.

    Rain needed a comprehensive solution that not only could assess both teacher and student performance but could also perform the required analytics and reporting needed to facilitate decision making.

  • Flexible Business Model

    Rain also wanted to explore business models that could help them implement the most viable solution for a low TCO, an OPEX-based business model, and a minimum upfront investment.

    Rain also wanted to explore business models that could help them implement the most viable solution for a low TCO, an OPEX-based business model, and a minimum upfront investment.

Solution

The Huawei-ULearning joint online learning solution is deployed on Huawei Cloud and is provided to customers as a SaaS service. The solution is based on a microservice architecture. It supports open RESTful APIs, a decoupled messaging backbone, and makes use of MySQL, MongoDB, NoSQL, and Redis cache for hierarchical data storage. The solution also supports big data functionality for decision making. The key features include four parts: Online Teaching, Live Class, School Management and Course Authorising.

Customer Benefits

  • Rich interactive functions to engage students.

    Rich interactive functions to engage students.

  • Data-driven improvement in teaching efficiency.

    Data-driven improvement in teaching efficiency.

  • Proven stability and reliability supporting millions of users.

    Proven stability and reliability supporting millions of users.

  • Fast TTM and a low TCO (40% reduction).

    Fast TTM and a low TCO (40% reduction).