Software company Zoho on Wednesday launched a new mobile app, Zoho Classes, that enables educational and training institutes to serve their students online.
Zoho Classes is completely free for all government schools in India and for all other schools it is free for up to 100 students. For every additional student, beyond 100, It will charge ₹ 250 per student, per year, the company said.
Zoho said it has launched one app for both teachers and students, which will ensure all things shared between them can be centrally-monitored by the school and students can join only via direct invite from the school.
It also claimed that the app is secure and personal details are never visible or shared. The offering is as a part of supporting the Government of India’s BharatPadheOnline Programme, it said.
This platform replaces the need for educators to deploy multiple, disintegrated apps including video content delivery, classroom communication apps, assignment management tools, as well as video-lessons and project-creation applications, and instead build the class on one platform, Zoho said.
Using Zoho Classes, teachers and institutions can upload courses, broadcast live classes, share assignments under set deadlines, and collect responses on one interface, it added.
Zoho Classes, as with all Zoho products, runs on the company's own data centres that adhere to the highest global security standards, it said.
Vidya Mandir Estancia, a CBSE school in Chennai, successfully moved their school activities online after the nation-wide lockdown was announced, using Zoho Classes.
“We on-boarded and trained around 70 teachers and 850 students in just a week, and were able to commence the new academic year from April 2020, without any hiccups. We are happy to have not missed out on precious teaching time,” Maheshwari Natarajan, Founder Principal, Vidya Mandir Estancia said in a statement.
“We intend to use it even after the lockdown is lifted for interventional teaching, special classes, extra material, and continuation of classes when a teacher/student is absent,” she added.
Zoho said it is in talks with other schools to introduce the product.
