Learn Education

I was born outside of Bangkok in a low income family (30 USD/ month). I helped my family to earn money by harvesting vegetables and fruits and climbing coconut trees to pick coconuts. At school, I was a student president and an outstanding academic student.

When I was 14 years old, my father got an accident while working and could not go back to work after that. I had to get a loan to continue my education and graduated from an electrical engineering school and then MBA.

After I worked at a company for 10 years, I decided to quit my job and fulfill my passion of contributing and helping others. I started a social enterprise “Learn Education” to give equality of education opportunities to others as I believe that education is the door for opportunities. After about 7 years, I was honored to be elected as an Ashoka Fellow.

Learn Education is a social enterprise with the mission to innovate learning platforms by leveraging technology to provide quality education. Over 2 million students in Thailand do not receive education, and more than  1.8 million students are underprivileged. Challenged by the low quality education, ranking at the bottom of equity in education resource allocation (PISA 2018) and the lack of 66,000 quality and quantity teachers, especially in Science and Math. We have developed the first learning platform in Thailand that integrates technology into the curriculum for Math and Science. The system creates one-on-one learning situations between the student and the coursework and helps to combat the extremely high student to teacher ratio (45-60:1). Til now, we have served over 300 schools, 100,000 students, decreased 50% dropout rate (for hill tribe schools), and 30% increase in academic performance. We have supported many underprivileged schools and students in low income neighborhood.

The education of Thailand has faced many challenges. Over 2 million children are not in the education system (28% of all children) and about 1.8 million students (aged 6-14 years old) in the education system are underprivileged (https://isee.eef.or.th/national3/index.html, ISEE, 2019). Moreover, showing from the PISA scores (PISA 2018), Thai student scores are ranking at the bottom for all Math, Science and Reading which reflects severe poor quality in Thailand’s education system, and that also leads to other societal problems. Despite massive attention by the government, education quality still has not improved, as indicated by the low average score on the national examinations in recent years. In addition, the inadequacy of quality teachers is also one of the major problems. This causes the tremendously high student-teacher ratio, and there are a large number of teachers teaching subjects which they are not qualified. In addition, Thailand was ranked among the lowest of the participated countries in the equity in educational resources (PISA 2018).

Our blended learning platform is targeted to school teachers with aims to elevate students’ motivation in learning and ability to apply Math and Science to their daily lives. We also aim to develop students’ logical, critical thinking and reasoning which are fundamental aspects to lead better lives. Here is the 3 main components.

1. The core teaching content is designed to capture Thailand’s basic education requirements, upon which we consistently induce ethical thinking and introduce the academic content in a fun and interactive way from experienced and high quality teachers. It is produced both in video files and aligning textbooks. 

2. Learning software is designed to be a 1:1 learning platform, where students can personalize the speed of the content to fit their needs. The software also comes with post-evaluation tests, and teachers can keep track of students’ progress.

3. Implementation services involve understanding schools’ teachers and directors for us to adapt our product to fit their needs.

Since the COVID-19, we have improved our platform to be more complete for virtual learning system. The platform can be used anytime and anywhere with personal live coach and 24 hour clear services to answer questions from students.

Our blended learning platform from Learn Education serves school teachers with the purpose to improve students’ (beneficiaries) academic outcomes and close the gap in accessibility of quality education. We work with both private and public schools. It has been our passionate mission to help underprivileged schools and students who live in rural and poor communities with lacking quality education and resources. 

Before scaling our solution, we pilot tested our product with a school diligently for over 2 years. Our solution has proven to increase students’ motivation and engagement in learning in the first pilot school resulting in higher academic performance by 30% (measured by ONET national examination score). To consistently improve our quality, we use online surveys (at the end of each learning module), in-depth individual interviews and focus groups to understand our teachers and students in order to develop our implementation process. Every year, we have an annual seminar to get teachers together to share their experiences and feedbacks.  We work closely with schools to customize our solutions to serve all school appropriately. We believe that building a community learning and a good relationship for teachers is a key to our successful implementation. 

Learn Education helps to elevate opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behind. Until now, we have served over 300 schools and 100,000 students. With our solution, we have helped to decrease up to 50% drop out rate (for hill tribe schools) and 30% increase in academic performance in our user schools. We have supported many underprivileged schools and students in low income neighborhood that the family earn less than $ 5 PPP per day so they can have a quality education and have better opportunities in the future.

While I was an executive in a company, and my career path was quite stable and growing, I came to realize that the successful career path was not fulfilled what I really need in my life. I need to make myself to be more valuable to others. One day I went to a temple in Chiang Mai which is in the north of Thailand. I saw about 300 young monks in a temple. I was wondering why there were so many young monks here, then I was told that they would not be educated if they were not become monks. Their families were very poor and had drug related problems. I learned that there were so many societal problems and to me lacking education is the major one. 

Later, I met two of my friends who are tutors, and we decided to make a solution to fix these problems. We founded Learn Education with the mission to innovate learning platforms by leveraging technology to provide quality education and reduce inequality gap in education. We have continued researching and developing our platform by getting feedback from teachers and students. Now, we have about 300 school partners and over 100,000 student users.

I was born in an underserved neighborhood, and my family was very poor. Since I was young, I realized that the only way I could change my life was to have good education. I have 2 main reasons  that make me believe I am passionate about delivering this project. First, I value education. I understand and empathize people who do not have same chances as others, and I look for ways to help them because I can feel their pain. Second, I enjoy learning through traveling and meeting new people. With this position, I get to travel to work with schools in rural areas and spend time to learn about what they need to increase their academic quality. Each school has its own problems and requirements, and that makes it exciting and challenging at the same time. Every trip I went to visit user schools, it was not only for my work, but it also fulfilled my desire to solve their education's problems. 

In 2014, we were awarded Thai Social Enterprise Award. In 2015, we have received Top award of Social Venture Challenge Asia at Singapore and Top 5 Finalists Bett Asia Edtech Excellence Award.

To deliver the project, it is required to collaborate and communicate with many organizations or groups of people in various fields including school administrators, teachers, students, parents, government officers, educators, and technology developers. I believe that my communication and diplomatic skills are significant to execute and carry on the project. Education is a long term investment. I personally prefer to build a long term relationship with people instead of a short term. Thus, I always ensure that our platform serves the needs of our school users, listen to their feedback, and respond to every concern. Moreover, I have a storytelling skill. I enjoy telling people about my project, and I have learned to engage them into my story. Since I graduated from an Engineering school, I understand technologies. I use my communication skills to find out what our users need and use the technology I know to support and fix their problems.  

I worked in an international company that just started a new division in Thailand when I joined for 10 years. I was the second person hired for the division. I learned how to build a team from scratch and supervised the team of 55 people. I managed a service system to serve 200 customers with limited resources (4-5 engineers). I found out how to utilize my resources in the most effective way to serve all customers. I am certain that with my experiences and skills that I have, I could continue leading our team to success.

The most challenging time was  5 years ago when I was having self-doubt and still needed to lead my team and tried to push through adversity. When we started this company as a social enterprise, we strongly believed in the mission of the project and our capability. After 3 years of working closely with pilot schools, we got very good feedbacks from teachers and students. However, after 5 years, we still operated at a loss. I lost my confidence and was not sure I was a good leader for the project. I asked myself and re-thought about why I started this project and eventually realized that I should not judge myself based on the financial status. I knew that the platform had benefited teachers and students based on the increase of students’ scores and responses from students and teachers. 

I started to look forward and continue my plan for the project without any uncertainty. I focused on working with active schools that were ready to make commitment, continued supporting underprivileged schools and improving the platform and collaborated with partners. By the 6th year, we started having some profit, and have reached the positive cash flow till now. 

When I founded Learn Education, I knew that I needed strong team members to work on this project. I started hiring young talents from various backgrounds related to education, sales and marketing, technology, and business. Till now, there are about 100 team members working on the project. These talents decided to work with me though they could work anywhere else because they believed in the project, and they believed that I could lead them to success. Not only the team members that trust me,  but also there are many organizations that we partner with. I have built connections with many organizations; leading universities, Bank of Thailand, and National Innovation Agency.

Below is my leadership feedback from my previous team member, Ms. Viria Vichit-Vadakan, who was 1 out of 8  outstanding students from Stanford University in 2011 and was selected as a Leader at Asia pacific program from Obama Foundation in 2018. She worked with me for 4 years before she went to pursuit her MBA at Harvard Business School. 

1) Unconditional support

2) Mission driven with strong ethical value and diligent 

3) Open to possibility and high tolerance for failure 

4) Power to influence with story and strong communication

With Learn Education’s holistic approach to students learning and teachers’ development which has proven to yield success in enhancing students’ academic achievement coupled with being the first mover that truly understands and with in-depth experience education technology, we believe that our work is innovative and unique in the following areas: 

1. First innovative 1-on-1 technology blended leaning platform with affordable cost for schools which will improve students to be critical thinkers, and able to apply Math & Science to their daily lives. 

2. High efficient business in term of the economy of scale. The values of cost per student tends to decrease every year due to the increase of customers and the lower cost per head. 

3. The expertise in IT System for content delivery which easily scale to many schools at a time. The teacher royalty program, recognition award and training process which proves to be our key success to build strong customer relationships as well as solving Thai educational problem at its root cause. 

5. Our learning platform which will gradually shape students to become active learners, and self-learners. These skills are not easy to develop in the ordinary classroom in Thailand, showing the efficiency of our solution not only hard skills but also soft skills development. 

6. The knowledge and know-how of implementation process which will allow our product to integrate into the existing school environment by using technology coupled with our teacher training to help teachers better execute their teachings. 

Our social value proposition consists of 

1. The increases students motivation & engagement in learning.

2. The teacher improvement in quality of teaching.

3. The decrease in dropout rate.

Clear plan to monitor and measure social output and outcomes 

We plan to measure success by our product enhancing the understanding of the subject content, greater relate to real life and foster critical thinking, resulting in an increase in student motivation & engagement in learning. These are key drivers for academic success (measured by O-NET national examination score), which motivates students to continue their education and have more opportunities attending better high schools and career pursuits—resulting in higher income and job security. Long term, we will elevate the quality of rural schools decrease the education inequality gap and decrease the student dropout rate and prevent societal issues occurred once out of the education system. We closely monitor teachers and students through our technological data tracking system as well as our frequent engagement with our teachers. Our software tracks students’ performances and gives statistical analysis to help teachers understand students’ level of understanding and their performances. For teachers, we organize quarterly meetings with the team as well as conducting interviews to understand teachers’ needs and how to best improve our technology. We also have exchanges between teachers in the Learn Education network through our yearly teacher conference. We work closely with school principals to provide the support required responding to the diverse backgrounds and levels of student engagement as well as their academic performance and collect all the useful data such as O-NET score and dropout rate, annually. 

Our key metrics for measuring the social outcomes consist of: 

1. Total number of schools reached in private schools and government schools in low-income neighborhoods.

2. Academic performance (measured by O-NET national examination score) to reflect student engagement, motivation in learning and the quality of learning.

3. The number of students not applying to the school in grade 7 (number of dropouts).

4. The percentage of students who pass school’s mid-term and final exams. 

5. The percentage of satisfied students studying with our system.

We are currently serving 100,000 students, and in 1 year we expect to serve about 150,000 students. By the end of the next 5 years we aim to serve at least 1,000,000 students which expected that 50% of them are underserved students. We also strongly believe that we have a potential to penetrate other ASEAN countries by leveraging our current platform technology and partnering with local companies whose interests align with ours in the next 5 years.

Our aims are to reach 150,000 students within a year and 1,000,000 students within 5 years. The goal is to leverage technology in to classrooms and  see children in all areas have quality education. We believe that our innovative learning system with academic contents including moral and critical thinking would help our children to have the better future.   

Distribution Strategy 

In order to archive our goals, we plan to analyze the schools experiencing low student academic performance & motivation. In order for us to sell our products at scale, we will reach out to key decision makers who are influencers in the networks both private and government schools. We then, will have our sales teams travel to the schools and present to the school principals and relevant teachers. We also can scale our products by school referrals. Also, because of the schools we have worked with have gain trust of our quality and how our solutions has helped improved the students, the outreach becomes a natural effort where the schools we work with help refer others schools to use our services.

Promotional/Communication strategy 

To promote our product, we will highlight successes observed in our current schools and focus our core messages on three main key interests of decision makers, which are (1) student’s improvement (2) product’s affordability and (3) technology’s effectiveness. To some selected large schools, we will offer a special trial promotion where they can use the product for free for one semester.

Major barriers that may impact us to reach our goals are 1. lacking of appropriate internet infrastructure and hardware, 2. limited supports from government, and 3. challenges of our economy. 

1. Many parts of Thailand especially in rural areas still lack internet infrastructure as well as the network instability. In addition, many underserved schools do not have appropriated hardware such as computers or tablets for our learning platform.
2. Education development has always been on Thailand’s top priorities in terms of policy making, as the Ministry of Education (MoE) is the most funded ministry. However, there are still many challenges in our education system. One of the reasons is frequently changing in policies due to unstable politics. Private sections do not have enough supports from the government.
3. The overall economy is continued slowing down relating to COVID-19 and aging global population. Economic problem can lead to many other difficulties such as increasing in inequality gap and societal problems such as drug abuse. Schools have less budget to cover all expenses. All education, economy, and society problems impact each other, and they all will need to be solved together. 

For the infrastructure issue, we are working on collaborating with a major telecom organization that recently won the auction for 5G network so we can be ready to expand our network to support more students in rural areas. For the hardware, we already started a campaign to get donation of used computers and cell phones. We are also plan for a fundraising campaign to support underprivileged kids for better education. 

For the policy and support from government, we focus on following policies from the Ministry of Education closely and provide them options or innovative ideas to support their policies. However, we try not to get involve in politics because it is not always stable.

For the economy issue, this challenge is the most difficult to solve because it is very complicated. However, it will have a strong impact if we can fix it. We believe that having good education will lead to the better life. We are planning to collaborate with partners to create career opportunities for students. The Federation of Thai Industries is one of our partners that consists of over 1,000 industrial organizations and create over 3,000,000 employment opportunities.

We partner with various fields of organizations. We collaborate with top universities such as Chulalongkorn University, Thammasat University, Mahidol University or Silpakorn University to create a teacher training program. The program train teachers to have novel skills such as critical thinking or digital literacy. We work with major children foundations such as Yuvabadhana Foundation to support underprivileged kids by providing them education opportunities. We also partner with several banks in Thailand such as Bank of Thailand  and many organizations including National Innovation Agency and Thailand Collaboration for Education who believe in our learning solution.

After the COVID-19, there are many people who have lost their jobs due to the economic crisis that caused by the pandemic and have gone back to their hometown. We have initiated new project to use our platform to help to give education to people who are interested in learning new skills so they can earn money. Since agriculture has been a major part of Thailand’s development and has presented many job opportunities. With our partners Yuvabadhana Foundation (https://www.yuvabadhanafoundation.org/...), Sampran Model (https://en.sampranmodel.com), and Scenario Thailand Foundation (http://www.scenariothailand.org), we are planning to develop a platform for agricultural training to people who are interested in. Using the platform, we can keep our users connected. We can monitor the progress and have experts give them advice or answer to their questions in time. 

Our goal is to provide quality education for all schools in Thailand. We channel our efforts to tackle the issues of lack of and unqualified teachers in the education system. We are a social enterprise where we target schools that have a need to improve due to the students’ academic performance and ranking. The schools that we work with are schools that have the ability to absorb our cost, which costs from 25 USD per student per semester. To cover the schools that are unable to afford our cost, we also have a flexible pricing model and sponsor model where we are able to adjust our cost based on the schools needs and affordability. Our capital structure, which mostly consists of the fixed capital, employment and software development, is the key for us to be able to expand our market inversely to the unit cost. 

Based on our business model, we group our customers to 3 segments.

1. Public and private schools: We provide our solution to these school with affordable and reasonable cost.
2. Underprivileged schools with sponsors: The schools in this segment cannot afford our solution by themself but they have sponsors that support them. We reduce the price for them 50% off.
3. Underprivileged schools without sponsors: The schools in this segment cannot afford our solution by themself and do not have any sponsor to support them. We provide our solution to them with no charge.

Our business model is low-income client which is selling the learning platform to schools directly but focuses on providing access to those who could not afford it. The price of our product is strategically structured to 10 times lower than in-city cost of living. This price has proven to be affordable for middle-income schools as we have already sold to many middle-income schools. On the other hand, our ultimate goal is for the low-income. Now, we expand to 100 low-income schools by approaching our product to the private company or charity as a sponsor. In addition, currently we have already reached to 20 low-income schools on merit basis by ourselves.  

We charge about 25 USD/ student/semester for the schools that have the ability to absorb our cost or have sponsorship. To cover the schools that are unable to afford our cost, we provide flexible pricing-model depending on schools affordability which also relies on the volume of purchase. Our strategy to achieve sustainability is using pricing vs scaling model. For example, in 2013, we charge 40 USD/student/semester to cover all the cost, but now we can charge about 25 USD/ student/semester due to the increase of users and the lower cost per head. When we reach 500,000 users, we should be able to charge only about 10 USD/ student/semester and that will be more affordable for low-income schools.

Based on our business model, there are a few ways of earning revenue. The total revenue from last year was 2.7 million USD.

The revenue from selling our platform to schools 1.5 million USD

The revenue from selling our platform to sponsor of schools 0.9 million USD

The grants from domestic and international organizations 0.3 million USD

Next year we have a fundraising goal of 3 million USD to cover our plan of scaling to reach 1 million users which will support the most number of underprivileged students in South East Asia. We categorize the sources of the grants into 3 ways.

1. Children Foundation: 1 million USD
2. Domestic organizations &  Crowd funding: 1 million USD
3. International organizations: 1 million USD

The grants will be used to support underprivileged children to have quality education from our online blended learning platform including contents from our partners.

Our estimated expenses for 2020 is 3.3 million USD. The details of expenses are as following:

Human capital = 1.4 million USD 

New R&D ( e.g.Platform & Technology development) = 1 million USD

Operating expenditure = 0.5 million USD

Underserved Schools support = 0.4 million USD

One of the most important barriers that the Elevate Prize can help us overcome is building connection with government and partners. If we win the prize, our company will have more reputation and credibility and that will make it easier for us to get support from our government and partners. We have a plan to collaborate with the government to leverage digital learning platform to help teachers to provide quality education and that will help us for scaling into public schools which controlled under the government. The fund also will be used to develop the solution to better increase student’s motivation, engagement, and skills such as critical thinking & collaboration skills. We will continue to develop our learning platform to best fit students at different levels and different backgrounds. 

Since MIT is best known for its program in engineering, sciences and technology, it would be the most meaningful for us to be recognized by the world’s top university. It would help to increase the reputation and trustworthy of our learning solution and that would open up more opportunities for us to scale and support more students to have better education in the future.

We would like to partner with MIT Media Lab and MIT online courses. I aim to bring valuable resources of knowledge and innovation from the well known institute to support  the learning system for students in the South East Asia.