Pathshala — Online Learning Platform

The build

Bangladesh has no shortage of recorded lectures; what it lacks is a platform where teaching survives contact with the country — a student on a 3G evening data plan, an academy whose fee collection is a phone call, an instructor whose “course” is a hundred Drive links. Pathshala is the full loop built for that reality: a studio that makes publishing a lesson as easy as saving a Google Doc, a player engineered for low data with real completion tracking, live classes that never die in a Zoom room but archive into the curriculum, and certificates with verification codes a future employer can actually check. It runs our own upskilling cohorts; the academy deployment is a configuration of the same engine.

What we handled

• Creator Studio: module/lesson/quiz authoring, per-lesson publish, transcoding pipeline with resume-safe uploads
• Adaptive player that respects the data bundle — 360p defaults, Bangla/English subtitles, offline lesson downloads
• In-lesson quizzes gate progression — certificates reflect completion plus understanding, not watch-time theater
• Live classrooms with whiteboard, pinned Q&A and auto-archive into the recorded curriculum by morning
• Verified certificates: public code + link, revocable on refunds — LinkedIn-shareable proof instead of PDF decoration
• Fee flow on local rails: bKash/Nagad checkout, early-bird coupons, batch capacity, refunds with audit trail

Recordings are not a course

Every coaching center in the country has discovered the same trick: film the class, drop the files in a shared drive, charge for access. It holds for a month and collapses by the second term — students drift, completion evaporates, the academy has no idea who is learning until the refund calls start. The gap was never video; it is the difference between a pile of recordings and a platform: structure, progress truth, a moment of assessment, a proof of completion, and a way to get paid that does not require a phone call.

Pathshala was scoped against exactly that gap. Each of the five surfaces exists because an academy's month two fails without it. We ran it on our own cohorts first — same rule as every blueprint here: the author has to survive their own product for a full term before pitching it.

A studio that publishes like a document

Instructors should spend their writing budget on teaching, not on ops. The Creator Studio treats a course the way Google Docs treats a file: edit a lesson, hit publish, it is live for enrolled students while the rest of the module stays draft. Uploads are resume-safe — a 400 MB lecture surviving a Dhaka power cut is a feature we consider table stakes, not a demo flourish — and transcoding runs off-box so publishing never waits on ffmpeg.

Quizzes are first-class blocks, not attachments: written inline below a lesson, versioned with it, and wired to the unlock rules that make completion honest. An instructor can require a passing score before the next lesson opens; that one switch converts watch-time theater into progress with evidence behind it.

Engineered for the evening 3G

The player assumes the worst connection of the best student. Adaptive streaming defaults conservative — 360p until the network proves otherwise — with a data-saver promise the UI actually shows, subtitle tracks for Bangla and English, and offline downloads for the commute. Resume-exactly-where-you-stopped works across phone and laptop because the progress state lives on the account, not the device.

It is also where the pedagogical contract lives: the quiz gate, the timestamped notes, the “one-tap rewatch the flagged 8 seconds” loop students actually use. Nothing here was designed for a screenshot; it was designed for the four-minute bus ride where a course either survives or doesn't.

Live classes that do not die at “bye, everyone”

The live classroom is a whiteboard, a teacher tile, and a chat where the best questions get pinned into the record. But its defining move is the morning after: every session is transcoded, chaptered by the chat timeline, and filed into the curriculum as a normal lesson — searchable, quiz-attachable, permanent. The choice our cohorts made for us: recordings nobody can navigate are storage, not material.

Because live and recorded share one module tree, a coach can run a hybrid batch — two live sessions a week, everything else self-paced — without operating two products. That shape is the actual market: most academies will not go fully online; they will go online for the repeatable parts.

Proof, fees, and no hostage situations

Certificates only matter if someone can check them. Ours carry a public verification code, a landing page that shows the score and completion date, and revocation on refund — a LinkedIn post that survives scrutiny does more for a student, and for the academy issuing it, than any embossed PDF.

Money moves the way the market pays: bKash, Nagad and card checkout with early-bird coupons and batch capacity, receipts and refunds on rules the academy sets, revenue split per instructor settled monthly with a ledger every party can read. And as with everything here: the academy's course library, student records and revenue data are exportable in documented formats, always. Platform lock-in is a business model we are explicitly not in.