The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the world to revisit the idea of digital learning, especially where remote learning is the only way to continue the education of the learners. With the pandemic, we are now realising that the schools and teachers perform a very critical role in a child’s overall development besides education. The lack of network bandwidth and unavailability of enough devices, proper digital curriculum, and offline testing have brought the equity issues in the societies to the center stage. The sudden spike of adoption of the digital platforms provided by the edtech companies and digital curriculum providers has highlighted new challenges specifically around scalability and integration.
There is an opportunity for engineering solutions providers to step up and provide some practical solutions that work. Currently, the market is also ready to adopt and accept the newer solutions to overcome the new challenges. Pre-COVID, there was a lot of frustration about the poor digital adoption of technology by schools, students, and teachers, but today the focus has shifted to the operational challenges that come in the way of digital adoptions.
Bringing Learning to Life
Founded in 1989, Magic began with a simple idea of leveraging digital technology to bring learning to life. Over the years, Magic has reimagined content to utilize different digital technologies and create an immersive learning experience that makes learning accessible and affordable to everyone. Magic has served over 60 global education publishing and edtech companies and has a long-standing relationship with leading publishers like Pearson, HMH, and McGraw-Hill Education. Magic blends technology and content to deliver dynamic, leading-edge digital learning products.
Magic helps publishers and edtech companies to build and deliver digital learning products. The company is unique as it blends its education expertise with technology and content engineering expertise to build, produce, and deliver digital learning products. The services are delivered using a global talent pool, so it can scale the team very quickly and also work 24×6 schedule to leverage the most of global time zones—delivering on-time solutions especially in the back-to-school (BTS) season.
MagicBox: A Cloud-Based Digital Learning Platform
The global talent pool allows the company to provide cost savings to the clients as it invests in building new technology platforms for edtech. Furthermore, for those who do not want to invest in building in-house platforms, MagicBox is a white-labeled platform that delivers learning content for remote/distance learning to schools and teachers on behalf of publishers and edtech clients in a very cost-effective SAAS model.
MagicBoxTM is an industry-leading, cloud-based digital learning platform that is used by over 3.6MM students globally. Magic is known in the industry as a go-to company for the accessibility and mobility needs of the education business. Magic’s platform and content teams partner with clients to build the latest industry solutions for digital assessments to deliver successful learning outcomes. Magic sees itself as a leader in providing technology, content services, and digital platforms that make learning accessible, affordable, and measurable.
Inspiring Learners Globally
CEO of Magic EdTech, Acky Kamdar began his career in HCL (India) in 1985 and remained fascinated by the power of technology and its ability to help the world positively. He came to Magic EdTech via the investment Solmark made in 2014. He is the general partner at Solmark—a Private Equity firm based out of DC, USA. He sees huge headroom for growth in the adoption of technology in the education sector, and this meant that Magic would give him a huge opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives.
As a problem solver, Acky wants to take out the drudgery from the teacher’s lives and make it easy for the school administrators to run the schools. Moreover, he also focuses on helping the students to learn without any burden. He inspires himself by questioning how can he help students with different abilities to get equal access to learning—can he empower a verbally challenged student to communicate while engaging in learning? As a responsible leader, he also feels that he owes to his team members, investors, and the community to serve their interests.
Motivating to Communicate
Motivating to CommunicateDuring the lockdown, the team members of Magic continued to work remotely. However, each of the team members working in the USA and India faced distinct challenges. The engineering team in India needed special equipment and computers to work remotely and some of the workstations and projects needed special security testing. And the timing of the shutdown was unfortunate, as the Magic team was getting additional work from its clients for the Back-to-school season. To overcome these challenges, the leadership team at Magic EdTech motivated the team and took extra steps to continue to communicate and allowed lots of feedback loops with various teams.
With the increased digital adoption of learning, the fragmentation in the IT infrastructure in the edtech/schools is becoming a cause for concern. Magic is investing in partnering with its publishing/edtech clients and industry platform players to deliver technology solutions that will make integration easier. Magic EdTech has several initiatives to help its clients to deal with the post COVID world. Schools, teachers, and students will need technology applications and the underlying infrastructure that is seamlessly integrated to deliver better learning efficacy and yet does not compromise on data privacy and security. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter’s Score (NPS) survey results in an improvement in the Magic’s performance every year. As digital adoption grows, the clients are expecting quicker turnarounds on project deliveries as well as support and Magic EdTech is well prepared to cater to these demands.
Read full issue: The 10 Innovative E-learning Solution Providers in 2020
