Klik2learn: The Digital Learning Hub

A complete eco-system for English language learning, literacy and numeracy accessible via a mobile phone.

Klik2learn's Digital Learning Hub is already changing lives in India and is preparing to scale up to deliver learning to thousands of learners whose life opportunities are restricted through poverty, gender inequalities and not least by the long closure of schools during the pandemic.

The Digital Learning Hub is a web-based application endorsed by two leading UK awarding bodies. It was developed for mobile learning specifically for learners who are not native English speakers. From the outset, it aims to enable learners who would not normally have the opportunity to acquire a mastery of all four English skills, to do so, with no prior knowledge of the language whatsoever. That alone opens up employment and further learning opportunities normally beyond the means of those who cannot afford private education.

It offers sophisticated data capture on progress through the proprietary LMS, a suite of collaboration tools where optional tutor support can be offered and hundreds of hours of highly interactive multimedia learning at the heart of which are two award-winning courses at pre-beginner/ elementary level and intermediate level. Both courses feature a gamified approach with integrated adaptive learning, instant feedback and rewards. Additional resources include a simple grammar guide, dictionary, graded videos, ebooks and diagnostic testing even at pre-beginner level. 

The Hub puts learners in control of their own learning. Results prove that our deep knowledge of the pedagogy of language learning, can fast -track learners from zero knowledge to A2 on the CEFR in as little as three months.

We have just begun delivering teacher training and English language learning to the West Java government in partnership with Scotland's largest FE college.

Our first objective is to raise the skill levels of Indonesian teachers, not simply in English but in competence -based learning approaches. Our programme can offer them a certificate from a UK Awarding body, model good teaching practice through high levels of pupil engagement and demonstrate methods of developing autonomous learners and encouraging critical thinking. This addresses two problems: the lack of pedagogical training for teachers in the area and the current low level of skills among the English teaching profession not to mention pupils themselves.

Since we are focusing on teacher training, there will inevitably be a cascading effect on learning and teaching for pupils, thereby increasing the scope and scale of the initial programme.

Of all the countries in SE Asia, English proficiency is still low in Indonesia. According to data from English First, Indonesia is ranked 51 out
of 88 countries in English proficiency, lagging far behind Singapore
(3), the Philippines (14)  Malaysia (22) and Vietnam (41).

Research has demonstrated clearly that English proficiency can
improve the economy of a country and open up more opportunities for its
citizens who can earn in excess of 34% more with a degree of competence in the world's lingua franca.

The Digital Learning Hub has been developed to cater for a very diverse range of stages and ages of learner.

The target population we are currently serving is school age: youngsters aged 10 -15 who have been unable to access education during the pandemic and who attend a state school where facilities are basic. We are also addressing the needs of girls in a slum area of Mumbai who currently do not attend school at all. In both cases our solution is accessed via low cost mobile phones.

We have previously spent two years developing the first language programme for complete beginners of English: teaching them to read, write, understand and speak English along with basic numeracy. 'Journey 2 Basic Skills' won the British Council ELTons award last year for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

We also developed a unique diagnostic pre-beginner test for this cohort in order to understand their needs more accurately and direct them to the right level of learning resources. Our LMS tracks their progress and delivers charts and leaderboards on a weekly basis. When we work with local partners,which is our preferred method, we can facilitate support through our integrated collaborative learning platform and work with teachers to encourage learners and set challenges, e.g. using our grammar games or e readers.

Our programme has proved to be equally well adapted to adult learners with similar skill levels and has been described by this target audience as 'like a good series in Netflix.'

The objectives of the challenge are identical to the company's mission: to improve educational outcomes for underserved learners. That is exactly what we do in the UK for migrants and refugees and in SE Asia for school-age children. This has shaped our product and technical development from the outset. Given the enormity of the challenge in SE Asia, a digital solution is the only option, particularly in view of the additional challenges of Covid.

Our end user is rarely able to pay, so our business model is to negotiate high volume, low cost solutions at government level or through educational partners and CSR programmes. We can bring the annual cost per learner down to c. £4.00.

With access to funding, we could easily transfer our web application to native apps platforms, thereby reaching a much greater proportion of our target population.

Our multimedia content encompasses all learning styles: visual, auditory, text-based and kinaesthetic and allows the learner to work at their own pace. Our reporting dashboard provides granular evidence of progress at individual, class and organisational level.

We are also developing a method using AI to measure impact in online learning. This yields insights into the effectiveness of resources, learner engagement and assigns a collaboration score to each learner. This disrupts the current reliance on grades and impacts directly on employability. Our product roadmap is therefore focused on Voctech: building on English skills to offer vocational learning through short, sector- specific courses and a 3D virtual interview simulation.

The Team Lead is the CEO and founder of Klik2learn. Ann Attridge, M.A. Hons.(Glasgow) M.Litt. (Aberdeen) M.Ed (Edinburgh) PGCE (Cambridge) and Chartered Teacher.

Our solution is innovative in a number of respects, despite the plethora of online learning language options and companies serving this market.

1. We have developed the first fully structured digital course and assessment that addresses the needs of learners with no prior knowledge at all of English. This is particularly relevant in SE Asia where the range of indigenous languages means that learning via translation is not an option. Some learners, indeed, may not be literate in their indigenous language.

2. We have developed an eco- system specifically for the non-native speaker whose technical skills are limited. No other Learning Management System has been built with this objective.

3. We have combined a deep understanding of how people learn with innovative technology: the pedagogy drives the technology. We know when and how to use speech recognition technology, animations, games, adaptive learning, gamification. Unlike many Edtech solutions, we do not use these functions without a clear, stated learning outcome.

4. We have integrated tutor support into our platform, both for teacher training and to support online teaching and the development of the relationship between teachers and pupils.

5. We have shifted the focus of data-driven learning management systems from administrative functions to learner-centric pedagogical insights. Our data analysis can visualise the learning network and provide an overview of learner usage that can drive targeted interventions to improve outcomes. Further development of our research in this field could, we believe, enable us to become the Facebook of Education.

Our solution has had functionality for testing built in to the Learning Management System from the outset. We track user time spent on our courses, percentage completed, time spent on each activity along with data and user feedback on all the digital resources on our platform. In addition to this, we measure progress at the start and end of the programme through our multi-level diagnostic assessment.

Our software is aligned to the curricula of awarding bodies and as an approved examination centre, we proved students could pass at B1 level in three months compared to an academic year. Recent results have shown that beginners can work through the A0 stage in as little as five weeks. Our use of gamification at conceptual level keeps students engaged and our method of developing short games to test and consolidate learning is proving extremely effective with the K-12 age group.

Our solution is digital first. We use React JS as our development platform which allows us to offer our own LMS solution but also integrate easily to other systems if required. React also opens up the possibility of re-formatting our content as native apps.  Having complete control of our codebase allows us to respond to market needs, especially with respect to the development of our reporting dashboard.

We do not use any content authoring tools which affords us complete freedom to design and code our own content aligned to the desired learning outcomes.

In addition we adapt AWS speech recognition tools and deploy them in areas where communication and spoken skills are particularly important.

Klik2learn has invested significant time over the last five years to research and development and has won a significant number of competitive awards for technological innovation. We have proof of concept of a completely new approach to teaching pronunciation skills, arising from the Applied Linguistics post-graduate study  of the company's founder. This has great potential for the SE Asian market but currently requires additional resources to launch a product onto the market.

Likewise, we have recently completed a very successful proof of concept project with Innovate UK, in data analytics, capturing and analysing data on learning networks in large Learning Management Systems. Our approach can drive improvement in learning outcomes through a pedagogical focus and the use of graph databases to provide new insights into learner activity.

Our theory of change can be broken down as follows:

1. Our day to day activities consist of a number of tasks related to  developing educational software, e.g. subject matter expertise, coding, instructional design planning, graphic assets, audio recording, user testing and review. This includes gathering market intelligence and conducting regular conversations with customers and end users.

2. These activities lead to our service offering: a licence to use our Digital Learning Hub and all that it contains for the purpose of language, literacy and numeracy learning and teaching.

3. Our short term goals are to encourage our learners to engage with our platform on a regular basis and gain a good working knowledge of all four language skills in English: speaking, writing, listening and reading.

4. Our medium term goals are to empower the learner with the skills they need to gain automatic external recognition for their learning on completion of our programme through our accreditation and certification partner: City & Guilds, London, the global leader in vocational education.

5. Our longer term goals are ambitious and can be subdivided into:

• user outcomes
• organisational outcomes and, crucially
• societal outcomes

A user who acquires competence in using English can earn on average 34% more over their lifetime. A knowledge of English therefore leads to a much improved chance of securing gainful employment and progressing to further study. We do not see English as an end in itself. It enhances the confidence, opportunities and life skills of our learners.

Organisations can improve their effectiveness and satisfaction metrics by using the data insights from our platform. They can fast track students on to more advanced study, optimise tutor time, offer flexible learning and extend their provision well beyond their catchment area. They can of course, generate revenue by so doing.

Most importantly, our programme can help to bring an end to the exclusion and marginalisation suffered by many disadvantaged groups. Education is the most powerful leveller in society and can by default, reduce poverty, gender inequality and the wastage of human talent. It is social justice and social mobility in action.

We emphasise the importance of evidence-based learning with our partners at the outset by highlighting weekly reports on time spent, percentage completed and last login. These are displayed through simple bar graphs and are archived so that historical data can be viewed as required. We also supply two leaderboards so that organisations and tutors can see at a glance which learners are making good progress and which are struggling.

These reports can be accessed on an individual basis, a group/class basis and an organisational basis so that comparisons can can be made.

In addition to automatic quantitative data on short term outcomes, we also collect qualitative data from our partners through regular account management activities. We gather testimonials from learners who have completed our course and follow up their progress beyond their experience with Klik2learn.

We are still at the stage of gathering evidence towards our longer term goals of societal change as inevitably this takes time. However, we are seeing learners who have gained vocational certificates with us for their language skills then gaining access to further study and pursuing careers in the sector of their choice. They are also reporting increased confidence in social interaction.

Part of this process involves us in educating the teacher as well as the learner and helping them adapt to the new role that they have in the digital world. We have a disruptive solution and have to support teachers to adapt to the transformational changes to education that technology is bringing about.

We are making important inroads at government level, through partnerships with the Department of International Trade and the British Council. Over the next three years, we plan to ensure that our solution has the greatest possible impact through large scale adoption in schools and communities. We are committed to transforming lives by removing the barriers created by poverty, gender inequality and the digital divide.

Our focus is firmly on vocational learning. We have a team who can deliver a wide range of engaging, digital vocational short courses to enable learners to explore options and find out if they have the skills and aptitudes to pursue a specific career. This will include, for example health and social care, construction, hospitality, early education, engineering, maritime studies, finance and business management. We will include interview preparation and a simulated experience in real time of answering questions from an interview panel. We can, if required, offer translation options if English is not appropriate for domestic audiences.

In the next five years, we hope to have multiple partners and distribution channels including a range of native apps and games to improve spoken English (or indeed any language) through our speech recognition technology, Protalk. We plan to have licensing deals in place  for our data analytics solution with FE and HE institutions and some of the large LMS vendors.

We will by then, have disrupted the education sector by displacing the reliance on grades as a measure of an individual's ability!

Our first barrier to growth and scaling up is talent acquisition. We have in the past, used recruitment agencies to source  talent but this has not always been successful. We have more success through partnering with organisations in our sector who understand the challenges we face and can filter applications on that basis. For some roles, it is crucial to understand the customers' needs and barriers to adoption and the complexities of the buying process in the education sector.

Our second barrier is obviously funding to allow us to expand the team, work on more projects and have the resources to adequately support the marketing and sales teams. We are a relatively small team with only three full time developers. This constrains our ability to take on new projects and develop new products. We lack the specalised knowledge in the current team to allow us to take Protalk to market and would need additional funding to bring in the required level of expertise in data analytics and engineering to build a plug -in tool for our data analytics project.  We currently use internship programmes to discover new talent and train students and graduates.

Finding the right partner to take our products to overseas markets is a particular challenge. We rely on services provided by the DIT and SDI to  find suitable partners and agents and we need to rely on them to convey their knowledge of the local market to tailor our offer appropriately.

I had spent my career until founding Klik2learn in various roles in the education and research sector, including secondary, tertiary and teacher training. Having become excited by the enormous possibilities of technology to address challenges in education, I successfully applied for a Fellowship to the Royal Society of Edinburgh to found Klik2learn and began the task of building a company, products and a team.

My goal has always been to  devise products that would create the maximum global impact. Having spent around nine years teaching ESOL and conducting research into second language acquisition, it was a natural choice to develop resources for  English language learning.

It was crucial to gain credibility and quality assurance so our first goal was endorsement from the Scottish government which we achieved in 2014. Over the years, we added new products for different levels of learner and developed new technologies to widen our market appeal. We are now regularly featuring as finalists in any competition we enter: the PIE awards, SuperConnect for Good, Edtech top ten Pandemic Digital Innovation and have won a British Council ELTons award for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

That means a great deal to us as it endorses our fundamental objective as a social impact company, developing mobile solutions which can transform lives and offer opportunities to disadvantaged learners. Delivering learning to girls in the slums of Mumbai is a particular highlight and we believe with the right partners we can extend our influence in SE Asia.

Klik2learn team:

CEO

CTO

3 full-stack developers

Creative director/animator

Head of Marketing

3 Business Development/Customer support/Marketing staff

Commercial Director

Finance Director

In addition, we sub -contract additional graphic design work and audio recording to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Our Board includes Nick Kuenssberg, OBE and Dr. Helen Wright.

We have built the team over six years - largely from student internships. They have all identified with the company's mission and vision for social impact and are committed to delivering products with a unique look and feel. Several of our developer team are themselves second language learners so understand the objectives of our activities. They have a significant amount of creative freedom and as a small, close-knit team, they remain close to our customers' needs and ideas.

We are constantly developing our customer success capabilities so our young marketing executives have learned to demo our products and train staff to exploit the functionality of the platform.

We recruit high quality graduates and can retain them against competition from multinational companies due to the opportunities we can give them to deal with a wide variety of customers from high level contacts and decision makers in government and educational organisations to young pupils in schools in Asia.

With Klik2learn, they can immediately see the impact we are having on underserved communities and can contribute directly to that by  our openness to new ideas and encouraging initiative among the team. The fact that we are competing successfully with much larger companies allows them to network at award ceremonies and motivates them to develop their skills and knowledge and go the extra mile for the company. I am immensely proud of each one of them!

The most recent example of my ability to conceptualize and implement a new idea was an Innovate UK project completed in May 2020.

We won an award against competition from all tech sectors - in itself an achievement for Edtech.

I wanted to go beyond our own pedagogical focus and scale up our approach to other Learning Management Systems. Commercial LMS data does not address issues of the efficacy. It does not give sufficient attention to creating actionable insights for teachers or presenting data in such a way that it can be grasped by non -specialists. Above all, it is not informed by current learning theories or a deep understanding of how students learn or fail to learn in an online environment.

I therefore devised two hypotheses: one to test the connections between the learning network and educational outcomes and one to calculate a collaboration score using AI. I have long felt that the reliance on grades as a measure of future success needs to be challenged.

We succeeded on all accounts and were one of only 10% of projects to deliver on time and on budget. We now have a technology waiting to be developed and launched.

We have a very positive collaboration agreement with Scotland's largest FE college and have become their digital partner. We work with them to respond to tender opportunities, especially overseas. The combination of their reputation, status and pool of qualified staff allows us to greatly widen our scope and gain access to public sector funding that would otherwise not be possible. With a fully online option, we have created a unique offer in the UK market place which is essentially still reliant on traditional methods and we have access to subject matter expertise in any vocational area we need to develop more resources. We also work with them on our data analytics project.

We also partner with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who provide us with industry standard voice over recordings in any accent and for any purpose of our choice. Glasgow's School of Art simulation and visualization department work with us on 3D simulations.

Our international work is greatly assisted by our close partnership with the British Council and the Department of International Trade who introduce us to contacts at government level in a range of overseas territories.

We believe that an investor who has a focus on social impact will be best placed to support us and will be aligned with our values and mission to a much greater extent than an investor who is simply interested in maximising ROI.

MIT Solve offers an exciting prospect for us to find and partner with talented individuals who can mentor and coach our young team. Access to the peer-to-peer base would address our first barrier and the package of support offered would be an invaluable objective assessment of our business plan and strategies. Like all Edtech companies, we have struggled with defining our business model in a complex and multi-layered market, so expert guidance and further learning on that would be greatly appreciated.
Investment would give us the opportunity to scale more rapidly, leverage additional investment from other sources and develop more solutions to reach more markets and users.

The global reach of both organisations would undoubtedly increase our capacity for new market entry and add significant value to our brand. It would inspire confidence in potential partners that they were dealing with a company which had secured  high level approval from global leaders in their field.

We would benefit from adding expertise to our current team - particularly on our technological roadmap. We feel that MIT Solve would be ideally placed to support us with that.

Undoubtedly we would welcome help in refining our business models. It is the key challenge for all Edtech companies and the experience of Octava and MIT would be of enormous benefit in this respect, particularly in the area of developing and measuring social impact.

The network we would have access to would boost our young team enormously and and give them a real opportunity to work with a global network.

While we have our own methods of measuring impact, it would be refreshing to evaluate this in light of the experience of the MIT Solve partners whose experience we would love to benefit from.

Last but by no means least, we do need to expand and train our current team of developers if we are to succeed in launching the technology we have worked on. We have several gaps in our capacity which access to the talent pool at MIT would undoubtedly address.