Text meets video as HP India attempts to reinvent the education paradigm. By Prashant L Rao
HP’s VideoBook technology sources relevant videos from YouTube based on key phrases in a textbook. About five videos offering diverse, sometimes even contrary, opinions on a subject are shortlisted for every textbook. The video links are sourced and stored so that only the streaming video has to be piped in real time to the student or teacher.
As of now, HP has been piloting this solution at various schools and colleges including three in Bangalore, one in Gujarat, two in Delhi and one in Bhubaneshwar.
“We are taking this technology to market after two years of development at HP Labs. To begin with, we will address the education segment followed by the enterprise,” commented Bishwanath Bhattacharya, VP & GM, India Technology Services, Enterprise Group, HP India.
Lakshmi Narayan Rao, National Manager – Cloud Consulting Services, HP India, said, “Studies have revealed that both comprehension and retention are better with visual learning.”
The solution is being offered both as a Cloud service and through the traditional on premise model. To begin with, HP is targeting the metros along with smaller cities where Net connectivity to schools is a given. 4 Mbps bandwidth suffices for a student user population of 600. The addressable market for such solutions is about 20% of the 1.3 mn private schools in the country or about 2,60,000 schools. This is as per a Wharton report.
The education offering is just the kick off and there’s a variant aimed at corporates, automotive majors in particular, for training and learning management etc.
“In the automotive industry, manufacturers have to rapidly get products to market, within months, nowadays. When it comes to service and support, master mechanics or trainers have to travel to each and every location and spend a day training the mechanics in those centers. With this solution, these companies can do away with that and ensure a high level of comfort with servicing new vehicles as well as enhance customer satisfaction,” commented Rao.
As of now, the solution is available in English. Vernacular support is on the roadmap.
Dr. Sudhir Dixit, Director, HP Labs India, said, “The algorithm that we use is language neutral.”
Since textbooks from most school boards are not available in digital form, the physical copies are OCR’d into the system. To overcome the lack of accuracy in OCR, the original digital text is shown to the student/teacher with the recognized text being used only for locating key phrases and sourcing video content. Yet again, in order to ensure the relevance of this content, HP Labs has adopted multiple techniques. The choice of videos can be overridden by the administrator (the teacher in this case); there’s crowd sourcing in the form of users (students) voting on whether or not they like a particular video; a reporting module tells the teachers as to which videos have been accessed more often and by whom, for how long etc; content filtering is left to YouTube and since the videos are only sourced from the Education category on that site, crowd sourcing takes care of ensuring that no inappropriate content gets through.
Bhattacharya concluded, “Our aim is not simply to make money though this will lead to demand for our other products such as servers, storage, PCs etc. It’s more about the number of students who stand to benefit from this technology.”
Dixit outlined the technology roadmap for VideoBook saying, “We will eventually support video Q&A sessions, social networking hooks, have a virtual teacher and allow the students to create their own video content.”
Clearly, HP’s serious about bringing some of its Labs tech to market. Having said that, this is a market where others have already made their moves be it Dell with its Connected Classroom or Intel/Lenovo/Connoisseur with the Classmate PC and its associated content. Nevertheless, the video/content-centric nature of this solution and its agnostic vision in terms of running on pretty much any end-user device be it a PC/laptop or tablet makes it unique.
