How Apryse Helped Arco Educação Cut Textbook Load Times for 4 Million Students

Arco Educação (former Arco Platform NASDAQ:ARCE) is among the largest educational companies in Latin America. Their mission is to transform the way students learn, by delivering high quality education at scale to a growing number of schools in Brazil each year. With a record yearly growth of more than 35%, they continue to expand their portfolio and territorial reach.

Arco Educação develops educational solutions such as providing textbooks to schools, financial services, and bilingual solutions, originating from their own methodology, comprising content of excellence, relevant educational technology, supplemental programs, and specialized services.

From kindergarten to high school, Acro Educação serves more than four million students and 12,000 private schools throughout Brazil. In fact, one in three students in private schools in Brazil use Arco solutions.

Arco Educação faced a few challenges as the student base expanded, increasing the demand for quick access to learning resources.

Complaints

Students complained about issues accessing their textbooks such as:

This was a clear burden for students and hindered them from efficiently accessing the materials they needed when they needed it.

Downloading resources

Other challenges became apparent with students being able to save textbooks on their own devices to reuse the following year instead of buying the latest version, such as:

Arco Educação needed to find a better solution to deliver quality learning resources to students and Rafael Oda, Director of Engineering, and his team were tasked with addressing these challenges.

One of the challenges Arco Educação faced when considering building their own solution was the effort required from engineers that can otherwise be focused on something else. This would have resulted in higher costs and lost opportunities as they would have to prioritize their efforts and focus on what's more important.

So, the decision was made to find a better solution that offers everything out of the box, such as a commercial solution like Apryse WebViewer. When looking for a potential option, Rafael and team looked at other products to use as benchmarks, including open-source solutions.

When the search began for a viable solution, Arco Educação was already using Apryse WebViewer in a limited capacity and looked further into what Apryse had to offer to tackle these new challenges.

After extensive research into Apryse and other solution providers, it was found that other options couldn’t match the same efficiency Rafael found with Apryse solutions.

Rafael and team found that adding the security and media add-ons allowed them to resolve the challenges they were facing and expand their usage across other platforms.

For the last 12 months, Rafael and team have been implementing solutions to tackle these challenges.

File size and access time: Linearizing and compressing the PDFs reduced first render times from 10–20 seconds to three seconds.

Continued problem: Downloading the entire content continued to take longer to finish.

Rafael and team needed to effectively reduce the file size without removing content, so they divided the solution into two parts:

The result: File sizes went from 150–200 MB down to just 50 MB on average.

Learn more about PDF compression in Apryse WebViewer. 

Downloading resources

This issue was solved by implementing the security add-on to add encryption and:

Rafael’s team was able to use Apryse’s intuitive solutions and clear documentation to solve these issues without the need for support. He noted that “fine-tuning the process was straightforward and tweaking the configurations was hard work with testing different textbooks, versions, and collections but was able to be done quite quickly.”

Rafael and his team are responsible for providing learning content for the platform that serves all the brands and have been using Apryse solutions to solve the issues of slow access speeds and students downloading and using outdated textbooks.

Measuring success

For Arco Educação, the success of implementing the security and conversion add-ons to expand the capabilities of WebViewer within their products had noticeable effects:

By adding to their current WebViewer capabilities with the available add-ons, Arco Educação can deliver a richer, secure user experience for students from kindergarten through high school. Rafael and his team continue to help Arco Educação support schools, teachers, students, and families in facing their challenges, integrating technology and excellence into their solutions.

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