Education Perfect Provide a Lesson in Class by Offering Free Online Learning

JP Nicou, VP Marketing JAPAC

April 30, 2020

For Education Perfect (EP), a provider of online, curriculum-aligned learning for schools, the arrival of COVID-19 has cast a bright spotlight on its platform.

The interactive EP platform is home to a wide range of resources, carefully designed for all core subjects, across school years and for every aptitude level. During the last 10 years, EP has predominantly supported schools in Australia and New Zealand. Pre-Covid-19, it had over 1,500 schools as customers, with over a million students using the platform. The digital lessons are designed for the classroom, but being online, they are also valuable for students studying at home.


Fast Learners

When the Covid-19 crisis began to grip China and other parts of Asia, EP reacted quickly. The business decided to offer free licences to students in areas impacted by school shutdowns. Then, as the pandemic spread to more countries around the world, it extended this offer globally.

“It changed very rapidly. When we first put out the free licence, Covid-19 was only a problem in Asia,” said Simon Robinson, CFO at EP. “It was really once it became global that we experienced a big uptake.”

EP has since seen a huge spike in subscriptions, with more than 5,000 schools registering in over 100 countries. It is now supporting more than 500,000 students via the free licence.

“There was a weekend when the US announced it was going to close schools, and we got literally thousands of enquiries,” Robinson added.


Homework For Everyone

Not only did EP experience a whole wave of new users, it also saw a big jump in usage from existing customers, due to school closures in New Zealand and Australia. This brought a host of challenges for the business to overcome.

“We’ve had to scale up our infrastructure pretty rapidly to ensure we still delivered the same performance.” Robinson said. “We also added 20 staff to our support team to help out, most of whom we had to onboard remotely.”

Fortunately, having entered into these challenges with a strong customer base, EP has been able to overcome them fairly smoothly, maintaining the same high levels of customer support.

“There’s still important KPIs around customer service and satisfaction,” Robinson said. “We offer all customers a premium level of support, to ensure that when teachers have questions, we are able to provide a quick response.”


A+

EP has received great feedback from teaching staff and students around the world. 

“The EP product is well suited to the challenges of having to teach remotely, because it allows the teacher to set tasks and live monitor progress of students. If kids are struggling, the platform will suggest remediation tasks.” Robinson said.

EP’s platform is proving vital for schools around the world who, up to this point, had little or no contingency plan for closures. 

“If there were people that were reluctant to see the benefit of online learning, this may well change their perspective,” he said. “Just because schools close, doesn’t mean children should have to stop learning.”

Throughout the crisis, EP has continued to adapt and innovate, developing new ways to engage its audience. “As we can’t go into schools, we’ve started doing webinars. In doing so, we can explain topics to a large number of people in an efficient way,” Robinson added. 


Further Education 

Although the free service is set to finish in May, the EP team is doing everything possible to ensure it will remain accessible and affordable.

“We have pricing structures that will hopefully work for everyone. It’s not just a tool for remote working, it’s also highly beneficial to the classroom too, which I think teachers and students will see,” Robinson said.

Robinson attributes EP’s success during this challenging time to the talent and dedication of the EP team.

“If you really embrace the challenge and everyone comes together, you can get a huge amount done in a short space of time,” he said. “Everything we’ve done has been driven by the commitment and culture of the team.”

Discover more about the company and platform by heading to EP for Learning.

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