Lockdown doesn’t lock us down, SoME’s activities continue

“United we stand, divided,” a cheeky play by Stephen Colbert - arguably one of America’s greatest Late Night Show hosts - on an adage humorously yet accurately captures the essence of our new normal. Today, ironically, only when we are separated by physical barriers and practice social distancing that we are truly united and safe. This strange – almost apocalyptic – way of life has left a colossal impact on our work behaviours. Locked in our homes – as if scolded for some prank by the Universe – the way we approach our work has, almost overnight, changed. The marauding novel Coronavirus has shut down businesses across the globe, with experts claiming that the virus’ impact on the global economy could exceed two trillion dollars.  

To counter the apparent economic and human losses associated with COVID-19, companies are relying on the ubiquity of the Internet and have embraced the much contested work from home mantra. We, at SoME followed suit. 

Here’s how my team – spread over six cities and three continents – is coping with the restrictions brought about by quarantines and lockdowns to ensure our activities are not hampered.  

Embracing teaching from home

On March 25, when the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the lockdown, we quickly shut shop! Even though most of our work was already taking place online, some logistics manifested into offline activities. My team and I got together – online, of course – to discuss strategies on shifting offline events and activities online.  

Probably for the first time since we became operational, my colleagues and I got the jolt of the start-up life. Just a week before the lockdown announcements, we had offered a bright young person the role of Community Manager. She worked tirelessly to plan a road trip for us to conduct SoME’s annual summer camps in four cities. The lockdown rained hard on our parade, and all our hard work looked snaking down the drain. Anxiety and desperation seemed palpable, but my teammates refused to cower in the face of adversity. A couple of days later, she successfully shifted all our offline community events online. Her job profile has changed three more times since she joined.

Today, my team is working from home from six different cities, but we are stronger than ever! None of us feels our productivity has lessened. This pandemic has shattered many myths of work etiquette, especially the most contentious one – does productivity decrease if you are not chained to a physical space for specific hours? Frankly, the answer is no. My team and I, if anything, are working harder than ever. Without the additional pressure of getting ready for work or wasting hours manoeuvering heavy traffic, we have more time to concentrate on work. My colleagues are continually coming up with new ideas, holding meetings at a time comfortable for all of us, and work lucidly without restrictions, thereby being more effective.   A big shout to all of them @Sudha Rajesh, Reuben John, Aniruddh Bhaskaran, Ramya Srinivasan, Abbas Shaikh, Avantika Gautam, Simran Godhwani, MurariSharan Gupta, Gayatri Nair, Kian Godhwani, Sreechandana Lella, Col. Mandanna and Anuja Mudur. Thanks for being there for SoME.

Here is a snapshot of us working from four cities – Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and Goa. We also have two other colleagues joining us from Sydney and NewYork who joined us recently and did not want to make funny faces because of the laws in their country :).

Taking activities online

So how did we manage to facilitate the smooth functioning of SoME despite heavy constraints? We acted swiftly. Moving all offline activities targeting students from various parts of the world online was a massive undertaking, and time was of the essence. Even though we were taken aback by the lockdown announcement, we didn’t pause to lick our wounds; instead, we started brainstorming immediately, charting the next course of action. 

Most importantly, we maintained transparency, constantly communicating with parents and students about the changes in our plans. After moving our activities online, we immediately contacted all the parents who’d signed their teens up for our summer camps and explained the situation to them. We assured them that the camps were still on, only that now they will be held online. They were both happy and relieved and were just as excited as before. We didn’t neglect our other activities. With ample support from the participants of our Executive Program batch, we hosted their graduation ceremony online!  Here is one of the snapshots of our online programs.

Currently, we are also doing webinars every week, which are attended by participants from both India and abroad. These webinars attempt to bust the myths surrounding 21st-century academia and corporate culture, thereby helping partakers make informed choices.  Within 45 days – since going entirely online – we have done more than a dozen webinars, including customised ones for corporates and institutions, and engaged with over 1500 teens, parents and working professionals around the world. Recordings of our webinars are available on our blog and our YouTube channel.

In one webinar, I asked the participants to type the names of the cities they were joining us from; I counted 20 different cities, and then could not keep up with the speed with which they were responding. SoME is truly becoming a global classroom! 

Going international

To err is human, to adapt quickly to an ever-evolving strange new world is absolutely divine! This pandemic has forced us to adopt new practices and also made us more ambitious, reaching out to a larger, more international audience. On April 5, we were joined by our first international student from Khobar, Saudi Arabia. Soon, two more students from Bangkok, Thailand and London, UK, joined in. We are now getting used to having classrooms where Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, and Arabic, among other languages, can be heard being spoken in the background. We discuss not just classwork but different cultural norms and practices, which have left us wiser.  

The outpouring of support and appreciation from our students and their parents have humbled us, motivating us to keep doing our best.  

We also initiated programs in partnership with other similar organisations. One such initiative, a summer camp, was launched late April in collaboration with IGenPlus, founded by Soumya and Sahil Aggarwal, and we are working with them to create more such programmes in August.  Here is a photo from that program along with the IGenPlus team, participants and their parents.

Getting Angel funding

We also have some excellent news to share! SoME recently closed an angel funding round led by Uday Singh, former Group CEO of SIS Group Enterprise. Uday is the Visualiser and Co-founder of Better Place, a blue-collar workforce management platform, and an angel investor and mentor to several other start-ups in Bengaluru. These funds will help SoME’s operational expansion and in the recruitment of more professionals, thereby improving the institute’s services.  Read more about it here https://www.vccircle.com/ed-tech-startup-some-raises-angel-funding

Jugaad in launching our tech platform

Necessity is the mother of invention, or ‘jugaad’ if you will. SoME’s programmes are now available online! We faced numerous difficulties with launching our tech platform, but thanks to the hard work of my team, we managed to overcome the seemingly insurmountable challenges. 

The audio/visual team we had identified to shoot and edit our video lectures had temporarily shut shop under the lockdown. So I decided to use my mobile camera and started making videos from the comfort of my living room. My 16-year-old son became the videographer and editor. But tragedy struck again when the leg of my tripod broke. An important lesson learnt; never buy things on sale! My brilliant son carved a base out of cardboard to stabilise the cell-phone, and it worked just fine. 

Then we faced another issue. Living rooms cannot effortlessly translate into sound-proof studios. Despite warning everyone in the house not to make any noise while we were shooting, ambient sounds, including cooker’s whistles, kept interrupting my video lectures. So we found a ‘jugaad’ and used a second cell phone to record the voice and then merged the files using a software. Not exactly a great way to hear crystal clear voice, but acceptable for a video lecture. 

My son spent two weeks learning editing tricks from YouTube tutorials and managed to create smooth teaching videos that could put a reasonable agency to shame. I am a proud father, for sure! 

His critical thinking and dexterity in the face of adversity only prove SoME’s philosophy – today’s teens and youngsters are wiser than their years and don’t need to be taught lessons they can learn themselves.  

We then had to deal with another issue. I had only one chair to do my work, which was taken by my son to sit and edit videos. The family occupied all other chairs for their Zoom sessions and virtual meetings. I had to settle for a small chair, which as you can see, was far from comfortable. Working from home is fun and efficient, but sometimes it brings with it minor logistics troubles.  

Once the videos were done, my team worked extremely hard to get the platform ready, and we rolled the pilot out to 40 learners with spectacular results. We learnt that high-definition videos are a nightmare for students because they take forever to stream. We started compressing the videos to make them much lighter. The team came up with fabulous ideas on applying gamification techniques and nudge elements to motivate participants to finish the module. 

With the massive success of the pilot program on our tech platform, I am proud to announce SoME version 2.0 is officially ready to be rolled out to our customers from July 2020. This platform will enable us to deliver a better experience to our learners and also scale faster.

As we prepare to face the new normal, I have a message for all the entrepreneurs out there. Hardships will knock you down, the pandemic might kill your revenue plans, and you may have to relinquish many dreams. But that doesn’t mean the end is near; we just have to adapt to a different scenario. Invest harder in your work. Go back to your drawing boards and rework your plans. As they say, this too shall pass. 

Visit our website https://some.education to know more about our work.

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