Learn-In-Context

Learn-In-Context amplify the work of teachers, help them provide quality and personalized English instructions to their students.

The problem

Native speakers often take for granted the power of English and how hard it is to learn as a second language. more than half of all content on the internet is in English , over 80% of scientific research and spoken by 80% of global corporations.

Yet, worldwide, only 6 percent of people are native English speakers, and around 75% doesn’t speak a word of the language.

500 million youths from non-English speaking, developing nations require quality English training to be ready for the global workforce. This drives an urgent need for English teachers to provide effective English training, especially vocabulary as the foundation of the language.

For many English teachers and students from developing countries, access to quality, affordable language lessons is an urgent issue. However, most English teaching products at the intermediate level are too expensive compared to the average income in those countries.

Our solution

We focus on vocabulary mastery, the foundation of English ability. The best way to master vocabulary is to read and learn in context. Research shows that students need to encounter each new word 12 times to understand it, and to read an average of 20 books to learn a thousand words.

To save students’ time, our algorithm picks and delivers 12 reading passages for each new word. Since not all passages are created equal, the algorithm presents only the most helpful passages. To help students remember new words and revise learnt words, our platform helps them manage their word lists and automatically generates engaging games.

Teachers can select contents from legitimate source on the internet and select words to send students and get updated about student’s progress. Learn-In-Context amplifies the work of teachers, and help them bring better quality education to more students.

As Android devices had gotten so affordable, some as low as 30 US dollar, students can use our app on their phones to learn anytime, anywhere. Using artificial intelligence and automation allows us to provide high quality learning for less than the cost of a morning coffee.

Impact

In many emerging economy, internet connectivity has exponentially improved, with countries like Vietnam achieving nationwide coverage, due to efforts from both government and internet giants. In conjunction with the drastic commoditization of Android mobile devices which can be purchased at as low as S$30, Learn-In-Context is presented with a golden opportunity to leapfrog and provide personalized English learning for all corners of the world through empowering both teachers and students with personalized and automated technology.

With the current global economy, English proficiency equals better jobs, higher income, and learning opportunities from global firms who are outsourcing to developing countries. An HBR research clearly demonstrated the link between English skill and national & personal income. The British Council report “The Effect of English” reflected how it changed lives and brought about economic benefits. When our learners have mastered English, they can start acquiring a myriad of skills and knowledge offered online.

For teachers, content creation and grading students’ work make up almost half of teacher’s non-teaching time and a third of teachers’ time. We allow teachers to rapidly create quality teaching contents by automatically evaluate the difficulty level of the content, picks out appropriate vocabulary and automatically generate practice exercises, access to real-time update on student’s progress. We provide teacher 150% more time to provide the motivational and habit-forming human touch with students.

For students, Learn-In-Context’s automated technology, backed by 50 years of research and natural language processing technology, save the student time and effort to own new English words.

As a MIT team, technology is in our DNA. We provide a different set of vocabulary to each student based on their ability. Our algorithm self-calibrate to students’ vocabulary ability after just a few learning sessions. We also developed an automated pipeline that sift through millions of books and news articles, then, smartly pick out the 12 most relevant reading passages containing the target words to deliver to learners. The system also continuously learns from the users to refine and improve our contents. This enable us to build a solution that could never have been possible with human effort alone.

In the next 6 months, we will be iteratively improving our current prototype by constant interaction and feedback from real usage from teachers and students in Vietnam as a test-bed. We will first focus on news article content. We have partnered with an English center in Vietnam with 5 English teachers and 200 high-school students to pilot our application. By mid-2019, we aim to get our solutions into the hands of 100 teachers and 2000 high-school students. We prize quality over quantity and want to make sure not to grow too fast before we have nailed our core experience.

In three years, we aim to empower teachers who help 10 million students taking English exams such as SAT, GRE, IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC to effectively master vocabulary, improve their score and get to their dream university or company.

In five years, we aim to be partnering with British council, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Department of Education from countries around the world to adopt our platform into mainstream English-as-a-second-language education. We hope to touch the life of over 500 million youth around the world by helping them master English, the key to opportunity and success in today’s world.

During the first three years, we will reach out to teachers directly through personal contacts, school and social network. To retain teacher, we are committed to provide the highest standard of service, listen to their needs and quickly respond to real problems faced by teachers while teaching English vocabulary. We also continuously improve our platforms by performing both qualitative and quantitative user testings frequently and gather users feedback and work on updated versions.

Our solution is still at the prototype and testing stage and currently have no customers yet. We finished two rounds of testing our prototype with a total of 4 English classes in Vietnam, worked with 4 teachers and 60 students. Based on the feedback we received, we are on track building our third major version which will be finished by October 2018.

After our launch in October, we expect to serve at least 100 teachers and 1000 students in the first 12 months. Within 3 years, we aim to rapidly scale the number of teachers and students served as much as possible. Our target is 5,000 teachers and 100,000 students within the first three years.

Tuan is in his last month of PhD in Artificial Intelligence/cognitive science (MIT), he also leads in developing intelligent technology.

Trained under the Integrated Design and Management program (MIT), Chinh leads in UX/UI design for mobile/web application and marketing.

As a senior full stack engineer (7+ years of experience), Quan has built systems used by millions of people. He leads in developing technical infrastructure, our web and mobile products.

We are also committed in forming the best partnership in areas that we lack deep expertise to advance the development and marketing of our product.

Our short-term driver will be advertising revenue. This model is strongly aligned with our goal to democratize access to English learning since it does not require users to own a credit card. Our longer term revenue driver is through partnership with other organizations similarly committed to delivering high quality, low-cost access to English learning in other part of the value chain. A number of revenue models are being considered including referral fee, revenue-sharing and sponsorship.

In applying for SOLVE, we want to be actively engaged and involved with a like-minded community who wants to the big problems in the world through impact ventures. We will feed on each other passion to do goods. The community will also connect us to ideas, expertise and distribution channels all around the world which is strongly aligned with our mission and product.

We believe the key barriers to our solution are distribution and adoption. One effective distribution channel is through partner organization, such as British Council. SOLVE can help us champion this connection. The presence of numerous low quality applications will make our distribution effort in the initial phase difficult. SOLVE can help validate our product to teachers and students.