Suraasa: Building a teaching empire in the cloud to equip the next generation of teachers
About Suraasa
Suraasa is an online platform and resource for teachers all over the world. From mentorship to diploma courses and certification, the platform is focused on the discipline of pedagogy and aims to create the world's largest network of highly qualified and skilled teachers.
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About Searce
As one of the largest Google Cloud partners globally, Searce works with digital native companies and enterprises to re-imagine and futurify their business.
As a pedagogy-focused platform, Suraasa leverages Google Cloud and Vertex AI to educate and support teachers around the world while providing them with a space to learn from one another.
Google Cloud results
- Supported more than 100,000 concurrent users generating 20,000 requests per second without downtime
- Reduces the required evaluation workforce from 15 to just 5 with Vertex AI
- Empowers teachers with digital tools to support teaching and learning
Generates lesson plans from several hours to seconds
The teaching profession is a noble one. Teachers have the power to shape a new generation of leaders, thinkers, and citizens, whom our futures will depend on. Yet, despite the importance of this profession, the world is facing a shortage of teachers. According to the United Nations, the world needs 69 million more teachers by 2030 to achieve universal basic education.
To address this need for more qualified teachers in the market, Suraasa was launched in 2018, with a mission to support and equip teachers with the necessary pedagogical skills. "In more affluent areas, people have more resources to get access to qualified teachers, but when it comes to developing countries and more remote areas, teachers themselves do not have the resources to equip themselves with the necessary pedagogical skills," says Ankit Khanna, Founder of Suraasa.
This is where Suraasa comes in to help. With teachers from around the world, including Dubai, India, the US, and UK, the educational platform now relies on Google Cloud as the backbone of its platform as it continues to build and scale its services.
Moving from a monolithic to a microservices infrastructure
Suraasa is a platform that helps teachers get expert mentorship, guided pedagogy training, and support for employability. It launched its first batch of teacher-training courses in Dubai, hosted by a third-party learning management system (LMS), but soon received applications from teachers around the world. Today, the company has teachers from 40 countries taking its courses.
"One thing I really loved about Google Cloud is that they're very proactive. That was the major reason we chose Google Cloud, apart from the technology. When you implement a new technology within a startup environment, you have to be fast, so you can fail fast and get back up faster. You need a team who can support you with all of that and that's something that clicked with Google Cloud."
—Ankit Khanna, Founder, Suraasa"As the company grew, we wanted to get deeper insights into how the learning could impact the teachers' output in their classrooms, and use that information to improve our courses," explains Ankit. However, this information was difficult to get as none of the LMS platforms offered this information. This spurred Ankit and his team to move to a cloud-based microservices infrastructure and build their own courses, where every video and article shown is linked to internal data points accumulated over the years.
"We started on a different cloud provider but found that they were not quick enough to respond to some of our challenges and questions. In this fast-paced environment, we needed an agile cloud provider to innovate alongside and keep trying new things, which is why we moved to Google Cloud," says Ankit.
With the support of Searce, Suraasa managed to come onboard Google Cloud confidently. "In the first few months, Searce really provided us with a lot of information and support to make sure we were headed in the right direction. After that, we could pretty much run on our own."
"One thing I really loved about Google Cloud is that they're very proactive," says Ankit. "That was the major reason we chose Google Cloud, apart from the technology. When you implement a new technology within a startup environment, you have to be fast, so you can fail fast and get back up faster. You need a team who can support you with all of that and that's something that clicked with Google Cloud."
Building a reliable microservices infrastructure
Suraasa migrated its infrastructure to Google Cloud in 2021 and currently relies on Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud Build, and Google Kubernetes Engine for its day-to-day operations. Beyond its courses, Suraasa receives many user queries daily and provides free resources for teachers. Ankit says the flexibility of Google Cloud has enabled the team to truly maximize its storage capabilities and perform at its best, regardless of traffic.
With a team of 40 employees managing its platform, including solution architects, frontend and backend developers, and data scientists, system automations in the Cloud have significantly improved efficiency in the workplace. "We've been able to automate some of the tasks, so that our employees can spend their time doing more value-added work," says Ankit.
In the same year they migrated to Google Cloud, Suraasa launched an International Teachers' Olympiad with around 100,000 registrations. It needed to scale its platform quickly to accommodate the heavy traffic spikes in its backend and was able to do so with Google Cloud. This event is now one of Suraasa's key events and one of the biggest olympiads of its kind in the world.
Training the next generation of teachers with generative AI
While the Google Cloud infrastructure and its compute resources form the company's backbone, Ankit is particularly excited about Google Cloud's AI capabilities.
"Evaluating learner assignments was a time-consuming task earlier, with the work being done manually. With Vertex AI, we've been able to develop an in-house language learning model (LLM) that can evaluate these assignments with multifold efficiency."
—Ankit Khanna, Founder, Suraasa"I'm most excited about Vertex AI. We just launched our first set of Generative AI tools for teachers so they can generate lesson plans and form their own rubrics to evaluate students. They can also generate automated assigned assessments for their students," says Ankit. By simply keying in a few details in the allocated boxes, the Suraasa platform can generate entire lesson plans, including worksheets for students in just a few seconds, which usually takes several hours for a teacher to create.
Likewise, Suraasa has leveraged Vertex AI for evaluation, improving employee efficiency significantly. "Evaluating learner assignments was a time-consuming task earlier, with the work being done manually. With Vertex AI, we’ve been able to develop an in-house language learning model (LLM) that can evaluate these assignments with multifold efficiency," says Ankit.
Other plans are already underway for the Suraasa team to introduce new generative AI-driven features. Beyond enhancing its platform, Suraasa also uses Vertex AI to support its team internally for sales and marketing.
Building an ecosystem for teachers around the world
With an understanding that not every teacher is able to enroll in courses, Suraasa has decided to make the tools on its platform available to teachers everywhere, without cost. "Ultimately, we want teachers to try these new technologies and tools without the barrier to entry. Typically, a lot of investment is required for teachers to get access to such tools, so we want to make it available publicly so that every teacher has the best resources to create their best work," says Ankit.
"We want teachers to have a community where they can connect with other teachers around the world, share information and resources, and even job opportunities. There's a lot of work to be done, and I believe that we can achieve some great things together with Google Cloud."
—Ankit Khanna, Founder, SuraasaThe company is also working on turning its platform into a space for teachers to connect with one another, and become a hub where schools can hire teachers. "We want teachers to have a community where they can connect with other teachers around the world, share information and resources, and even job opportunities. There's a lot of work to be done, and I believe that we can achieve some great things together with Google Cloud," shares Ankit.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Suraasa
Suraasa is an online platform and resource for teachers all over the world. From mentorship to diploma courses and certification, the platform is focused on the discipline of pedagogy and aims to create the world's largest network of highly qualified and skilled teachers.
About Searce
As one of the largest Google Cloud partners globally, Searce works with digital native companies and enterprises to re-imagine and futurify their business.