The second quarter of 2020, April, May, June, has been one of the most challenging times for nearly everyone around the world. It is when it became a reality that the new CoronaVirus may be with us for quite some time. Initially, authorities were hoping that it will be a matter of just a few months, but in the end, the question for many at the moment is whether the world will ever defeat this pandemic or if it is here to stay with us? What will the world look like with a perpetual deadly and highly transmissible disease and how will humans adapt to the new normal?
The questions above are all relevant, but quite frankly no one knows at the moment, in that light for Standard Gateway, the most relevant that applies to us as an organization that is focused on education and technology is rather what can we do and how to better serve our users and customers?
Contrary to what we were expecting, we have seen a mix of trends. On some of our platforms that cater to the education segment, we have seen an increase while we noticed a decrease in others. For instance, on www.nationalexamination.com, a platform that solely caters to students preparing for the national examination, we recorded about a 10% decrease in daily visits. On the other hand on www.edrivingschool.org, we registered an increase of about 40%. While we are on edrivingschool.org, we achieved a major milestone in the quarter we are wrapping up, this is the quarter we had our first customer that paid for a course: the English Standard Version, We have been averaging about couple enrollment per month, from both our Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya courses, quite encouraging to our team.
We are cognizant that as soon as schools reopen people will be more at ease to use online services more than before and tech services in general. In many countries, the ministries of education have taken the initiative of moving content online to entertain students during COVID-19 lockdown and we know this is going to affect the shift to some form of hybrid online-offline content delivery.
Most of our efforts at the moment are geared toward assessing what is needed both in the near term and long term. We have a healthy backlog of solutions, applications, and tools; our only constraint is resources and financing. We are marginally funded, for ongoing operational activities, almost perpetually, but to speed up and execute in parallel is more expensive, to minimize cost, our approach is both conservative and innovative. We have prioritized two major solutions whose development has even already been kicked off.
The two solutions are travel booking on the technology end and online exam administration on the education end. Travel booking will initially focus on travel agencies that have preset routes while online exam administration will initially focus on Standard Gateway’s original prepared assessment exams with the same caliber as past exams, as well as a second component we simplified as online past exams, that will allow students to practice past papers online.
We expect that many startups will quickly attempt to copy the two solutions, and have drafted mitigation plans. Our plans will be aided by the fact that the actualization and operationalization require an organization with a strong engineering and technology experience. Another factor that will play in our favor will be the economics, such projects will rarely be attractive to strong players, given the margins, and the engineering it will require to minimize cost. Those products will be available on our two new platforms Kezastore and KezaServices. KezaStore will house the selling module while KezaServices will house applications
In an effort to fastrack both Keza Travel and Keza Test Administration, we will be bringing more people on the team; starting with one individual who will be solely focusing on Test Administration: Sourcing of materials and initial buzz building to join the team at the beginning of July and later on a second individual who will be focusing on Keza Travel. In addition to the operation staff, we will also be working with our technology and engineering partner to speed up implementation.
Coming back to the question of what will the future look like? For Standard Gateway, we look the future in the lenses of what we will be making possible to our customers and users, the future is making it possible for our customers and users visiting our platform and being able to book a ticket without having to travel to minimize the risk of exposure to COVID-19, being able to access online practice exams and get instant feedback on exam preparedness and many more education and technology tools that we think will in one way or the other make the process convenient and save time for our customers and users. As to how long we are going to be with COVID-19, only time will tell, but either way, we will all just need to adapt to the new normal.
SG Team
N.B: This article was originally published at http://standardgateway.com/blog
Standard Gateway is an online and offline products and services provider focused on education and technology, visit http://standardgateway.com for more information | You can also visit our different products: www.nationalexamination.com | www.edrivingschool.org | www.kezaplex.com
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