True to the spirit of digitization, SWAYAM breaks down the socio-economic silos that deny millions of students in India access to quality education. With SWAYAM, India’s largest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program, more than ten thousand courses across various disciplines are now available free of cost — and Persistent proudly played a role in preparing the platform for ongoing growth, allowing millions around the world to begin or continue their learning journeys.
Built on the principles of lifelong learning, SWAYAM has garnered over 37 million course enrollments, with over 2 million certifications to date. And just with other digital learning initiatives, the platform puts students at the center – allowing them the freedom to choose the subjects they want to study at the time that suits them and at their own pace. Additionally, the Government of India encourages the transfer of course credits completed via SWAYAM; several leading universities today accept credit transfers, further legitimizing the learning gained through the platform.
Cloud at Work to Enable Learning
What makes SWAYAM work? How does a platform support multi-format course material for more than 10,000 courses, be always available to students, even in the remotest parts of the country, and offer learning opportunities free of cost to millions who access it? Cloud is the answer.
Launched in 2017, SWAYAM is a Government of India initiative designed to offer underprivileged students denied mainstream education an opportunity to access the most advanced educational courses worldwide. These courses are digitally taught by leading professors from Indian universities and institutions.
By the end of 2018, SWAYAM boasted more than a thousand courses and more than 3.9 million enrolled students. The platform’s continued growth and scale could not have been possible without rearchitecting the platform to meet anticipated surges. The challenge was to match this enrollment growth with cost expectations and align with SWAYAM’s ultimate goal – providing free, accessible, and high-quality learning opportunities to millions of students in India or abroad.
Powering Through with Persistent’s Cloud Expertise
Persistent worked with the NPTEL team, which included professors from IIT Madras, and the LMS team with the existing NPTEL Online Certification portal to make SWAYAM a viable, sustainable platform. We worked with the IIT Madras professors to understand the platform’s course load and the number of users expected to access it. We mapped these considerations to unique factors, such as a responsive, interactive interface, low latency, high performance, and unprecedented scalability. Underlining these considerations was the cost factor; SWAYAM had to be available free of cost to its end users, and hence, the team had very tight budget constraints to work with.
We optimized cloud resources with auto-scaled, serverless instances and concurrent connections. In addition, we implemented a failover mechanism and increased the virtual private cloud connector throughput to ensure high availability. Our team has also expertly configured the Redis multi-level caching and utilized a CDN (content distribution network) to improve response time significantly. We also optimized cloud operations with continuous monitoring without 24/7 resource availability, ensuring the overhead costs remain in check as the platform scales up to more users. This was critical since SWAYAM’s vision was to give an opportunity to those who have either dropped out of formal education or cannot pursue higher education from brick-and-mortar universities due to financial constraints. To ensure the platform builds on the demands of its end users, we leveraged Google Analytics for traffic analysis, pulling insights such as the most enrolled courses or student demographics to analyze the impact.
The rearchitected platform can scale up as needed and support surges, which has escalated by a factor of 10 since Persistent took on the project in 2018. Even at this scale, SWAYAM continues to be free of cost, easily accessible from anywhere, anytime, and capable of supporting another ten-fold surge in traffic and course material. The platform remains India’s answer to how technology-enhanced learning can sustainably scale and address the needs of millions of learners who are out of mainstream education.
Our experience working with IIT Madras on SWAYAM is just one of many examples of our successful cloud deployments worldwide. Ranked a challenger in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services, Persistent helps global enterprises navigate cloud complexities to right-size their cloud environments and respond to changing business dynamics.
To learn more about our collaboration with IIT MADRAS, watch this video. To get started on your cloud transformation journey, contact us here.
