IKEMSO Hybrid Learning

We provide a hybrid educational platform of in-depth K-12 subject contents together with teaching-learning management system and analytics. 

Many young learners in Vietnam's remote provinces still have difficulties accessing diverse, high-quality educational resources due to limitations of financial capacity and local governments' budgets. Such roadblocks are amplified when schools close during Covid-19 pandemic under which online and self-paced learning have become more prominent. However, within our borderline, there are few sites providing sufficient and relevant K-12 contents with low cost and user-friendly interfaces that can serve big class sizes with a personalized approach.

IKEMSO platform gives teachers and students access to an abundance of lectures, exercises and other learning resources aligned with national curriculum and international benchmarks. Currently, the platform is focusing on Mathematics while Science and ESL will be launched next year. 

For schools and teachers, the platform can facilitate both online and in-class teaching by using built-in or self-uploaded lectures and personalized homework. For students, they can take ownership of their self-paced learning by following through lessons and practices with separate question banks. Both teachers and learners have data-driven analytical tools to manage their performance. IKEMSO's uniqueness lies in our investment in content quality and user-friendly interfaces, which, once scaled up, can become a one-stop hub for teaching and learning processes. The larger the scale, the lower the costs and the more students benefit, especially socio-economically disadvantaged groups. 

We believe that education is not a privilege but a right. Any child should find high-quality education accessible and affordable. This is the Why for our platform which students in any places with basic devices can access to.

There is a huge gap in education quality between schools within the same city and between cities/provinces, especially underdeveloped ones. Many students do not have access to sufficient, high-quality, systemized and internationally benchmarked K-12 contents, especially at low costs. The root causes are once again the ubiquitous income gap, incompatible economic growth rates within Vietnam, the limitation of content R&D capabilities, and the lack of adaptive learning management systems. The problems are intensified for public school, big-sized classes and disadvantaged social-economic groups. This further leads to unequal opportunities in children's later life and the gap we mention earlier keeps widening. The vicious circle continues. 

Therefore, to narrow the gap, IKEMSO platform offers students of all backgrounds and schools of all segments the gateway to high-quality and effective personalized teaching-learning resources that are closely aligned to the national curriculum and benchmarked with international standards. Not only students but teachers and school leaders can also attain maximized support from our adaptive teaching-learning management systems embedded within the platform. This allows for lightened administrative workload for teachers and more rigorous quality control for schools, even in environments that have previously strangled by big class sizes and low technological adoption.

Our solution would reach out to K-12 students, teachers and schools of all locations and models, with a strong emphasis on supporting public schools and socio-economically disadvantaged groups. 

Their current resources are textbooks plus scattered and incomplete or unverified contents that teachers often find online. These materials are not necessarily aligned with the national curriculum or benchmarked to international standards. Students struggle in taking ownership of their learning and once falling behind there is hardly any support for them to get back on track. Disadvantaged students even have problems coming to school on daily basis, not to mention their lack of access to high-quality learning resources. 

Class sizes of most public schools are also quite large, around 40-50 students/class, which hinders teachers' personalized support. Teachers in public schools lack the R&D capabilities to design their lessons effectively due to limited resources, language barriers and of course, time as they are clustered with overloaded administrative and manual tasks. 

We understand those struggles firsthand from our site works for more than a decade. IKEMSO is a member of our education ecosystem where we provide consulting, teaching and R&D services for more than 100 schools nationwide as well as non-profit activities in building schools in remote areas and provide free professional development programs and contents for teachers in almost every province of Vietnam. 

Our platform aims to eradicate the current predicaments aforementioned. Both students and teachers will have an easy-to-access content sources that can be personalized for class-based, group-based and individual learning.

The Octava Social Innovation Challenge is seeking EdTech solutions with underserved K-12 learners as the main pivot. The submitted solutions are required to align with at least one of the five dimensions and create positive impacts in target countries. 

For our case, we are developing a hybrid educational platform for K-12 learners and teachers in Vietnam with in-depth and adaptive knowledge resources of key subjects including lessons, lectures, practice exercises, quizzes and tests. This platform can be used for in-class teaching and self-paced learning with teaching-learning management system tools for various stakeholders. We invest substantially in the content quality, user-friendly interfaces and analytical tools while using technological levers to minimize system costs, so that we can reach out to users in need, especially those from the bottom social-economic groups. 

One of the main issues of Vietnam education is the huge gap in education quality between schools within the same city and between cities/provinces, especially underdeveloped ones. Many teachers and students in public sector and disadvantaged groups do not have the access to sufficient, high-quality, systemized and internationally benchmarked K-12 content resources, especially at low costs. Their current resources are textbooks plus scattered and incomplete or unverified online contents.

With this platform, we aim to support not only teachers, students but also school leaders, educators in enhancing and managing their teaching and learning processes. Alongside, with basic devices and low registration fee, our platform is expected to solve the lack of high-quality teaching/learning resources and address the need for personalized learning.

Our Team Lead is Dr. Nguyen Chi Hieu - CEO of IKEMSO. He is also CEO of IEG Global - IKEMSO's Parent Company.

Based on our market research, K-12 materials resources seem innumerable yet are scattered and fragmented. Besides textbooks, learners can find other supplementary books in bookstores or pieces of knowledge online. However, those resources are separate from one another and not systemized, nor are they necessarily aligned with the national curriculum and benchmarked to international standards. That's not to mention the expenditures to buy all supplementary books, especially for disadvantaged students. It would be more convenient, cost-saving and effective if teachers and students can have an all-in-one platform that not only provides high-quality, verified and diversified resources but also helps personalize teaching/learning and track performances.

IKEMSO is designed to meet such needs of individual learners as well as educational organizations such as K-12 schools and centers. Our approach is considered to be innovative as it is catered for users' varied needs and our content is thoroughly invested, tested and continuously updated. Materials will range from basic to advanced levels in tandem with national curriculum and international benchmarks. Furthermore, we target a diverse range of stakeholders, from which the cost per user will decrease significantly. This will in turn be more beneficial for low-income user groups.

As there are few similar platforms in Vietnam that have such features, the emergence and growth of our platform can help trigger the market competition, which consequently leads to more improved products for users. The booming market of EdTech can increase the equality of content resources allocation and further result in equitable opportunities for learners. 

IKEMSO has been launched and is now growing. We have on average 8,000 subscribers annually and a base of 50,000 free users. Our monthly new users registration rate is now increasing steadily, which is linked with the ongoing development of our platform. We have tested our approach through our surveys on existing individual accounts as well as through working directly with pilot schools and centers under a B2B arrangement as well as with direct B2C subscribers. We collect feedback on a daily basis to keep finetuning our platform functions and features to fit varying users' needs and school models. 

For multiple accesses to server (for example when students are taking online examinations), we utilize Serverless Computing technology of AWS (Amazon Web Service). With its automatic scaling technology, when the number of users simultaneously accessing to the system increases, Serverless will automatically increase the number of servers to ensure that the system run smoothly without any discontinuity or delay. Moreover, from our IT side, we can minimize the effort of managing multiple servers and fully concentrate on developing new features to serve other customer’s needs.  

For data storage service, we currently organize the storage contents (Lecture records, slides, questions…)  on independent services called Contents Bank. We provide APIs, so that other platforms can easily connect to our Contents Bank and use our contents effectively. 

We also utilize Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to ensure scalability, availability, security, and performance of data. By using this service, we can easily provide independent storage to schools, so that they can store their private data effectively.

The ultimate problems we want to eradicate are the insufficient and unequal allocation of high-quality K-12 content resources as well as difficulties in teaching and learning management. By solving these, we can narrow the gap between schools, provinces, cities, and social-economic groups, thereby empowering children from all walks of life with fairer opportunities in education. In bigger words, education will be improved and enhanced significantly and altogether not only in major cities but even in the most remote areas of the country. 

To do so, our solution is building a platform that contains the following key attributes: 

(1) High-quality, systemized and diverse contents for K-12 key subjects with a strong alignment to national curriculum and international benchmarks, which are suitable for learners and teachers, for in-class and self-paced learning;

(2) Teaching and Learning management system tools embedded in the platform, which is used by teachers, learners, school leaders for curriculum pacing, assignment check, performance progress and quality control analytics. With real-time information, stakeholders can identify learning issues and solve them timely; 

(3) Low costs and user-friendly interfaces. Students with low-income backgrounds would be the ones that have most difficulties in accessing high-quality learning resources. That's why our membership fees must be affordable for most students, if not all, with various schemes/plans for both schools and individuals. Our target users are K-12 students, so we need to focus on our UX/UI design to maximize users' interests and commitment to continuous learning. Moreover, the site should also be light-weight, so that users can load easily even in areas with low connectivity. 

With those 03 attributes, if appropriately scaled to the mass market, we believe our platform can be the solution for the aforementioned problems and help bring about scalable lasting impacts in education quality nationally.

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We are measuring our progress based on 03 indicators: 

(1) New users growth which is the increase of new membership registration. There are two main types of membership: individual and partnered schools, Partnered school membership includes paid accounts for the school's teachers and students. This criteria shows the scale of our platform and the number of people we can reach out to who find our platform suitable for their demands. The greater the growth, the closer we are to our goals of nationwide impacts. 

(2) Old users retainment which indicates that we provide high quality products and services that speak right to users' needs, create substantial and sustainable improvements in teaching-learning qualities. Along with the growth criteria, this shows the sustainability of our solution. 

(3) Functions coverage which lets us know how many and which aspects we can serve our users most efficiently and usefully. We get this information from usage report and users' satisfaction survey to continuously update and innovate our platform for more varying school models, teaching-learning arrangements and personalized approaches.

For next year, we plan to deepen and expand our contents from just Mathematics this year to Science and ESL to cover all key subjects of K-12 students in Vietnam. We have a strong R&D team with that have extensive experiences in building curriculum, contents and lectures for those 03 subjects for more than 100 school systems in Vietnam and also consult for learning international publishing houses. At the end of 2022, we target to reach 100,000 users with around 35 partnered schools. 

For the next three years, we expect to complete our key contents for all levels and move to "fix & update" phase. We want to scale up our platform and concentrate on new users growth, including both individual and school membership, from the current 8,000 paid membership to 500,000 in 2024, which already includes memberships of around 200 partnered schools. The larger the scale, the bigger the impacts we can make. 

For the next five years, our expansion target would be 1,000,000 users with 50% of which are from partnered schools. During the 5 years phase, we speculate that there would be more and more Ed Tech companies emerging and growing as well as more advanced technology invented. To achieve our ultimate goal to narrow the education quality gap among geographical locations and social-economic groups, we are willing to explore other options such as merger & acquisition with other platforms for bigger scales.

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Finance is our main barrier. As we focus on content quality and want to scale up our platform for the mass market, we invest heavily into human resources, especially content R&D, and technological aspects such as server, UX/UI design. 

IKEMSO took root from a Math club and a resourceful site of exercises that helped students prepare of International Kangaroo Math Contest (IKMC). IKMC had 24,000 participants in Vietnam last year, and this number has been growing steadily over the past five years. We have a strong content team with extensive consulting experiences for both domestic and international education institutes, and also a deep understanding of users' needs and leads sources from contests and our network of partnered schools. Those are the competitive advantages we would utilize effectively, yet financing for staff and system costs are essential for our growth stage. 

IKEMSO took root from a Math club and a resourceful site of exercises that helped prepare students for International Kangaroo Math Contest (IKMC). IKMC had 24,000 participants in Vietnam last year and this number has been growing steadily. IKEMSO is a subsidiary of an education group called IEG Global which operates in various business lines such as English Centers, School Partnership, Consulting, Publishing and Non-profit services. Until this point, IEG has consulted for more than 100 K-12 schools, colleges & education organizations, completed 300+ education projects, conducted 2,000+ K-12 classes, trained 30,000+ teachers and educators, as well as impacted more than 1 million students impacted by our work.

The platform itself and IEG Global Group were born with the one and only ultimate mission that every child has the right for high-quality education. That has always been our True North for everything we did, have done and will do.

We now have a team of 20 full-time staff, 8 of which work as Content/R&D specialists and 8 others as IT developers. The rest are our admin staff. 

Under leadership of Dr. Nguyen Chi Hieu - IKEMSO CEO, we have 03 main teams including Content, System and Finance & Administration led by 03 experienced team leaders. 

We have Dr. Dao Thi Thu Ha who completed University of Paris Ph.D. Computer and Science to be Head of Content and is managing a team of 08 members. All team members are experienced specialists and researchers that have years of experiences in teaching and content R&D fields. 

We have Mr. Nguyen Chi Trung as Head of Finance and Administration who is also CFO of IEG Global to control funding, cashflows and other legal matters. He has more than 20 years of relevant experiences in international companies. 

For System Development, we have Mr. Le Anh Tuan. He has 20 years of experiences in the IT industry. He takes the role of chief system architect and has designed and managed for over 100 IT projects in various business fields. He also has experiences in recruiting and training over 500 IT engineers. We have acquired 08 talented IT engineers that not only have excellent technical competencies but also possess passions for EdTech and understanding of educational products. 

We have always tried to create a working environment wherein all members can discuss and execute new ideas, with space to grow professionally. Each team members came to us in different ways but we all share the one similarity: the purpose of our work is expressed through the potential impacts we can make in children's learning journeys. 

Our Team Lead is Dr. Nguyen Chi Hieu - CEO of IKEMSO. He holds a BSc. Economics (LSE), Ph.D. Economics (Stanford) and MBA (Oxford). He has nearly 15 years of experiences in education and currently acts as senior advisor for leading educational organizations both in Vietnam and overseas. 

With his deep educational knowledge and experiences in teaching students of all ages, training teachers and school leaders nationally, he has been the head for ideation and execution deeply rooted in purpose-driven and quality-oriented education. The establishment of IKEMSO would be one of the most representative examples. 

When first started, our parent company - IEG Global held International Math Contests (IKMC). We had a small Math Club and a simple website for students' self-practice before the contest. Back then, he realized that a few winners of IKMC came from schools in the most remote regions. This proves that once learners can have access to sufficient high-quality resources, they all can make substantial progresses regardless of their social-economic backgrounds. Therefore, he and the team developed the idea of IKEMSO, tested, retested and implemented it till today. Despite countless setbacks along the way, he keeps realigning and connecting us all with our mission.

Currently we are not partnering with any organizations.

Our solution is strongly aligned with several dimensions and targets of Octava Social Innovation Challenge. We love to share our solutions not only for the potential partnership with Octava and MIT Solve but also the golden chances to have our solution shared, assessed and improved along the application process. Furthermore, we can exchange ideas with other teams and be a part of a community that truly cares about positive lasting educational impacts.

For the barriers we are facing, in financial aspect, we hope to receive support in funding preparation process and/or connections for further pitching and fund raising. In evaluation aspect, we would like to have more objective assessments and insights on our platform, so that we can measure our impacts and continue to finetune and enhance the platform. In technology aspect, it would be appreciated if we can connect with other EdTech or Tech Companies for deeper understanding of frontier innovations, from which we can explore opportunities to upgrade our platform. 

During the partnership, we would love to receive support in the following areas: 

(1) Financial: preparation process for funding and/or connections for further pitching and fund raising. 

(2) Monitoring & Evaluation: assistance in building impact measurement practices

(3) Technology/Technical Support: connection to relevant organizations or experts that we can have advice/assistance in technical issues. 

We also really hope to have comprehensive needs assessment to determine appropriate resources and support together with opportunities to expand our network.