How We Helped Bring the Human Touch to Kaplan Test Prep

by CoSo

September 27, 2016

Kaplan is one of the world’s largest and most diverse education providers. Throughout its 75-year history, they’ve been a beacon for expanding educational access and a leader in instructional innovation. It’s Kaplan Test Prep program offers preparation for more than 90 standardized tests, including entrance exams for secondary school, college, and graduate school. High school students can prepare for the SATs and go on to college. Doctors and nurses can pass their licensing tests and save lives.

Kaplan wanted to create a virtual environment that could provide 
both faculty and students with a unique human feel not normally associated with the high technology of online learning. But there was a hitch: establishing real competitive differentiation in the rapidly growing online learning industry required a learning and prep environment that could assure both instructors and students that their system would always be up and running, and at the highest possible performance. With tens of thousands of new enrollments every year, the system needed to handle thousands of active student learning sessions simultaneously with room for high growth. Service disruptions just weren’t an option.

After initially working with Adobe Connect on their own, Kaplan approached CoSo for a more robust solution that could provide
a higher level of performance and security. We were soon delivering on Kaplan’s stringent security and always-on reliability requirements with a purpose-built Connect deployment that supported a wide range of desired features without sacrificing absolute reliability.

With CoSo’s hosted version of Adobe Connect in the private cloud, Kaplan could provide students and faculty with even greater flexibility by freeing them even from the desktop to learn and 
train from mobile devices. Whereas most online courses are limited in their ability to duplicate the in-classroom experience, Kaplan was able to surpass it by allowing students to customize their tests and learning experience depending on need and deadline, improve overall understanding of subject matter through a combination of in-class instruction and supplementary materials, and track progress with instant performance reports. Instructors, meanwhile, could custom-tailor and perfect their lessons through live learner participation monitoring, detailed learner reports, and other intuitive live session management tools.

By combining the power of Connect with the stability provided by CoSo, Kaplan continues to re-invent online learning. But this is only part of the story! For more, check out the full case study here.