By Yu Jianbin, People's Daily
At 8:30 a.m., Feb. 10, 900,000 people visited an online education platform of Wuhan, central
China's Hubei province, where gigantic amount of bit streams input from teachers and students'
cameras and microphones are flocking into online classrooms.
The platform responded to every access request methodically, handling data demand in a speedy
but calm manner. No lag was felt by the students, many of whom believed that the seamless
experience was just like having a class in real classrooms.
Such performance was a great relief for Nie Xiaokai, an education product manager of Chinese
tech giant Tencent, who had worked around the clock with his colleagues since Jan. 27 to build the
platform. He and his colleagues gave each other high-fives to celebrate the success.
Similar scenes happened across China on the same day. Over 2 million views were recorded in the
livestreamed classes for students of all 12 grades in Kaifeng, central China's Henan province, and
600,000 teachers in over 300 cities gave lectures to 50 million students through a livestream
platform of DingTalk, e-commerce giant Alibaba's communication app.
Such massive online education practices in China was unprecedented for both the internet and the
education industry. A journalist from Tokyo was astonished after observing an online class
livestreamed on Zuoyebang, a leading online education startup in China. On the class, all the
students, who were located across the country, could respond to the teacher swiftly when the
teacher called the roll.
"There are over a million classes being livestreamed at the peak time every day," said Ross Liang,
Vice President of Tencent and top executive of the tech firm's instant messenger app QQ.
According to Tencent, a total of 20 to 30 million students are having classes on QQ.
"To open an online space for tens of millions of students and teachers was beyond our budget for
technical framework and server capability," Liang disclosed, explaining that huge data flow was
generated when classes were on and disappeared when they were over. Such gigantic peak flow
and capacity expansion were never seen by the world before. To ensure the smooth operation of
online classes, internet bandwidth resources were put into use at all cost, Liang noted.
The capacity expansion was not as easy as turning on a faucet, but a process of high technical
standards. To ensure the operation of the online classes in the daytime, the technicians always had
to race against time to complete server expansion and other tasks in hours before dawn. DingTalk
expanded the capacity of over 100,000 servers on Alibaba's cloud platform, and made a new
record by newly adding 10,000 cloud servers in just 2 hours. All the efforts were made to cope
with the unprecedented data flow and ensure class schedules.
The peak flow on DingTalk was hundreds of times more than that in previous time, and five to ten
times more than all Chinese video and livestreaming services combine.
"The current solution, which is proved to be the most appropriate, was far beyond our plan back
then, " said An Bu, an education product manager of DingTalk, adding that they must prepare
many alternative plans to cope with the sudden and unknown situation.
Thanks to their rich technological experiences, An and his team completed their tasks, and are still
responding swiftly to users' demands
A teacher told An that he would like to make annotations to students' homework submitted online,
and the feature was perfectly realized by An and his team the second day, after at least 50 times of
optimization.
China conducted the largest, widest and the most extensive online education in the world during
the COVID-19 epidemic. As of early April, 1,454 universities across the country had started the
new semester online. A total of 942,000 courses were offered online by 950,000 teachers and
attended over 7 million times. Besides, online education resources had been visited by 1.18 billion
person-times.
The figures could be attributed to online education and technological platforms that offered strong
supports. Multiple Chinese apps such as DingTalk and Tencent Meeting have been recommended
by UN organizations to global students.
