Seethaprasad M- Founder & CEO of TriByte Technologies Pvt Ltd connected with The Global Hues to talk about their unique learning system.

TriByte is a Bangalore headquartered technology company providing an Interactive and Personalized eLearning Platform through its Learning Management System (LMS) targeted at Educational Institutes, Corporates and EdTech companies. The company has successfully completed its 10th anniversary. TriByte and its products are deployed across 25 countries, available in multiple languages (English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Arabic, Spanish, Bahasa, etc), and has over 2 million users on the platform who experience the learning on Windows, Android, IOS and Linux.

Transforming the outlook of education

TriByte’s mission is to enhance engagement and outcomes by making learning fun and interesting through interactive learning, gamification, peer learning as well as AI-based adaptive & personalized learning, while providing the same learning user experience, online-offline, across devices, and on all types of learning material. TriByte partners with Educational Institutes, Corporates, and EdTech companies to create cost-effective, highly scalable, and personalized engaging solutions allowing them to expand across geographies.

Journey towards establishment

After the initial trials, TriByte quickly realized few parameters necessary to be successful. They include:

Think offline learning first and make the learning experience seamless, whether connected to the internet or not connected.
Be a partner to the customers and help them scale using technology.
Configure the Technology Architecture to serve the needs of very large-scale assessments across the flaky internet.
Offer a White-labelled solution with the capability of creating custom workflows for larger clients.
Offer Personalised and Adaptive learning capabilities to serve diverse students and maximize learning outcomes.

Over the past 10 years, TriByte’s LMS technology has transitioned across the 3 stages.

Stage 1: Focus on Content delivery & Assessments:
- Enabling providers to upload the best content, using the latest technology is merely the starting point of EdTech interventions, providing access to high-quality content, at affordable prices on a large scale.
Stage 2: Creating an engaged learner:
- Students, irrespective of age group and course content, need to be motivated to learn. Thus, engaging the learner by way of gamification, leader-board, badges, and other engagement models, makes learning more engaging and delivers better outcomes.
Stage 3: Personalized & Adaptive Learning (making the cutting-edge)
- A key differentiator is when technology is used for personalized learning. This requires the technology to provide adaptive learning i.e., individual learning paths for each student, based upon the past performance, learning goals, and predictive performance. This is done using advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML) tools.

Differentiating Factors

TriByte has a significant contribution in providing clients a customized SAAS service. The provisioning of a unique workflow for each client has addressed the challenges of maximizing student engagement through Personalized Adaptive Learning, Gamification & Peer learning. The company’s solution ensures that the lack of high-speed internet bandwidth is never a constraint for students in accessing cutting-edge learning materials due to the adaptive streaming capabilities. It is a full-feature Made-in-India LMS. The Company supports all standards like SCORM, LTI 1.3 to provide the engaging experience envisaged. TriByte has been the backbone service provider to some of India’s largest Test Prep (NEET/ IIT-JEE) brands.

The Clientele

TriByte provided LMS to clients operating in the domains of Test Preparation, Formal Education (Schools/ Colleges/ Universities), Upskilling / Certification Training Companies, Social Enterprise/ NGO’s, and Enterprises. Some of their notable clients are Aakash Education, Vidyamandir Classes, Azim Premji University, Wizklub, Wadhwani Foundation, NIIT Foundation, IMS Proschool, ICT Academy of Tamil Nadu, Jaypee Publishers, etc. They are the technology partner, taking care of client’s tech needs and enabling them to scale. “We are proud to say that few of our customers who begin as a start-up are the market leaders now,” said Seethaprasad.

Ensuring best workforce to teach students

The TriByte LMS supports program delivery using multiple pedagogies, viz:

Blended Classroom with Online assessment and remedial learning
Self-paced learning with Live doubt clearance
Flip-based with Pre-Class, In-Class, and Post-Class.
Gamified Learning
Adaptive Personalized Learning

Thus, the teacher can adopt the best alternative to ensure the desired learning outcomes.

Impact of Covid-19

“What took decades of discussions, has taken a month to implement. The pandemic has stimulated unprecedented innovation within the education sector,” said Seethaprasad. There is a newfound appreciation for the role of teachers and educators. The pandemic has also brought out the need for better training for the teachers using new methods of education delivery. Schools are best served by ‘face-to-face’ learning. The role of a teacher cannot be undermined. Also, the wide disparity (economic and social) presents challenges of continued dependence on technology as the sole delivery mechanism.

However, Seethaprasad believes that the schools will experiment & innovate the use of technology to greater personalization and scale now. The need to remain ‘Always Connected’ and ‘Mobile First’ approach will be dominant in the blended learning approach adopted by schools.

Company and Team Ethos

TriByte is a young close-knit company focussed on addressing the challenges of technology-enabled learning and teaching. The company follows a flat organization hierarchy where each one is free to contribute and participate. “We encourage the team members to pursue their passion and continuously enhance their technological horizon,” said Seethaprasad. We also conduct a lot of activities like Coding Camps, Knowledge sessions, Customer Interactions, etc, which helps them to appreciate and understand the impact being created. “In line with the tagline of TriByte ‘making learning fun & engaging’, we regularly have theme-based team outings,” explained Seethaprasad

Biggest challenge

Adequate Digital Infrastructure: Digital Infrastructure like broadband, electricity, and availability of required devices/hardware. It will take time and energy from all the stakeholders to get the required infrastructure. TriByte platform has been designed keeping these challenges in mind where offline is considered as a primary requirement providing users the same experience.

Resistance to change in Pedagogy: The pandemic has forced all the institutes to move digital for continuity of business. Post lockdown there is a high possibility of institutes going back because of mindset or resistance to change, as well as the established advantages of classroom learning. However, in classrooms, a homogeneous solution is adapted across heterogeneous students who have different learning and absorption rate. To address this, TriByte provides personalized adaptive learning that can help the student to get better learning outcomes and can be used in a blended model to get the best of both systems.

Free and paid services dilemma: Education Institutes are always flooded with free products which do not provide the complete ecosystem to ensure effective learning. Thus, EdTech companies need to be creative in pricing strategies to align with the market needs.

Views on success

TriByte has a mission of Improving the learning outcome by making learning more engaging and personalized. In this journey, there will be multiple milestones, and reaching each milestone is a success. “In this journey, we remain focussed on our mission redefining success at each stage,” said Seethaprasad.

Awards and Milestones

IT Solutions Provider of the Year – 2020 by EdTech Review.
Executed over 75,000 concurrent exams without any technological glitch.
Enabled over 40,000 live sessions every month since the lockdown in 2020.
Rave reviews from clients for the company’s unique feature suite, catering to current & even aspirational requirements.

Visions and Future Prospects

“We continue to evolve and update our services with the best-in-class tech solutions and are making deeper engagements within India,” said Seethaprasad. TriByte is exploring partnerships for greater reach in India & is poised for a significant presence in Asia & Africa.

Words of advice

Ed-tech as a business provides enough room for many players who can have unique solutions to solving a specific problem.
To be successful, one needs to be clear about the target customer, have clarity on the selling process and anticipate acquisition costs.
Investing in the right technology early on will help you to scale at the opportune time.
Creative pricing strategies, that do not hurt the business, and at the same time help in acquiring customers, are another key aspect, especially as large companies tend to offer solutions for free or at very low prices to gain a user base.

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