SOURCE / COMPANIES
DingTalk, Lark enable students learn from home while schools are closed
Published: Mar 15, 2020 08:23 PM

Visitors stand in front of the Dingtalk booth on Tuesday to view an introduction to the app's functions at an exhibition in Beijing. Photo: CFP



As the deadly coronavirus continues to spread globally, more students have to turn to online courses when they are required to stay away from schools, which will provide opportunity for Chinese tech firms as the latter have successfully helped local students attend remote classes.

Governments in 49 countries have announced closure of schools, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in an attempt to rein in the coronavirus-caused pandemic.

In a list of UNESCO recommendations for distance learning solutions, Chinese-developed app DingTalk, the Alibaba-owned chat, videoconferencing and task management tool — and ByteDance's remote-work app Lark were named.

In China, DingTalk is being used by a staggering number of 120 million students now, while 3.5 million teachers have become anchors in front of streaming cameras.

Apart from distance classes, the platform has to handle traffic from over 10 million enterprises, which have seen surging remote work demand during the outbreak.

And, DingTalk, a subsidiary company of Alibaba Group, added more than 100,000 cloud servers to ease traffic pressure, DingTalk said in a statement sent to the Global Times.

"Chinese internet firms have shown high efficiency and quick responses during the virus outbreak, which has shown signs of being put under control in China," said Beijing-based independent analyst Liu Dingding.

As a forerunner in applying telecommuting amid the special period, it is expected that Chinese firms can make forays into overseas markets where such learning demand is on the rise, according to Liu.

According to UNESCO monitors, 29 countries have shut down their schools, affecting 391.5 million students. In Italy, the world's worst-hit country after China, with over 20,000 confirmed cases of virus infection, all schools have been shut down and classes suspended. 

The Italian government has created a web page to give teachers access to videoconference tools and long-distance tutoring plans, according to a New York Times report.

Some Chinese netizens have suggested on social media network Weibo that DingTalk should launch an Italian version as soon as possible. The company has developed overseas versions in English and Japanese. Teachers in Japan have started using DingTalk as Tokyo shut schools till the end of March.

The company did not provide specific user data when reached by the Global Times on Sunday.

Lark, developed by TikTok's owner ByteDance in 2019 in Singapore, also on UNESCO's recommendation list, has not taken much of a market share overseas yet.

As an online collaborative platform that combines calendars, documents and chats, Lark has entered Singapore, Japan, India and Europe, a PR representative told the Global Times. For its domestic version Feishu, the market share remains small.

"The coronavirus has triggered explosive growth in telecommuting and live-streaming classes in China, but the players' ability to go global still faces challenges especially for the to-business model (instead of to-customer model)," said Liu.