Precision primary education at scale.

Problem: Children are not receiving precisely the education they need because education systems were built to prioritize quantity over quality (originally an excellent systemic design-- the global literacy revolution succeeded! But by now, they are outdated).

The ed-tech space is vast. In it, players tackle different subsections of the schooling systems (e.g):

• Curriculum creation

• Assessment

• Ed Games

• Ed Content (stories)

• Classroom running (e.g. Zoom like tools with a focus on holding a class)

• budget management for schools

It is a pain to run a school with 20 systems that don't know how to talk to each other. Moreover, today it is not possible to get cross-platform data analysis. This means we are missing out on the incredible opportunity to balance standardization and personalization. 

There are 1.5 billion primary-age children across the globe, but only a select group of financially and geographically privileged families have access to high-quality primary schooling. We build quality education, serving at no cost to families at scale.

A "system update" for primary schooling. We are unifying siloed efforts in primary education into SaaS (school as a service), an adaptive, transnational schooling system. We now are running a digital primary school, serving families (and soon HR departments) globally while developing the product and brand. 

"Precision education" is finally possible. The more learners (students and educators) supported by bina, the more precise we become- increased adoption creates data loops, allowing scale. 

An operating system that uses existing tools to orchestrate them into a seamless learning experience allows educators easy transitions between various digital learning experiences through an anchoring system.

(so a class of 6yo can effortlessly digitally glide between only seeing each other's faces, to a centre of a math battle, through the layers of the earth, onto a board that they can all manipulate and back).

The cross-platform data set will support deep insights t using deep learning to provide valuable real-time feedback to learners (students and educators) and help personalize the curricula.

a. the start up- We are already running a private full time online primary school for families globally. What's exciting is- the lab school generates data insights and revenue. It serves three types of families now:

 directly to families and soon to HR departments.

• international families 

• educational deserts (e.g. living in rural regions, with no access to brick and mortar schools that share value, unsafe environments) 

• families of students with special needs 

• families that seek a new form of quality education 

We soon will start working with HR departments to promote diverse workplaces and the social responsibility of employers. 

Here are a few accounts of parents that are bina’s customers at the moment;

"Since Madison started with bina she has become so much more outgoing! Educationally, Madison has improved immensely and I would highly recommend bina to all parents across the globe, it has made us all so happy and connected!"

“bina has completely changed our perception of online schooling! Our boys relish every moment with their new friends they met in their class from another part of the world.”

b. the scale up- School-as-a-Service 2023 onwards: We partner with Corps, Govs and NGO's licensing bina, including the tech-based methodology for students and educators, as well as accreditation. We help them open the highest standard schools in no time at lower expanditure. We will support access to the highest quality of education at no cost to families.

Noam, Founder and CEO of bina, has 7+ years of educational research under her belt, where she sat in classrooms globally, interviewing students, teachers and parents. She aimed to grasp the differences and similarities between the systems and understand what would serve the stakeholders involved in the world of education better. 

Since 2021, the team has grown to include some of the best people in the early years of education, educational finance, and the tech world. We are mission-driven and aligned with the goals and mission of bina to make high-quality education available to all. Our team has 20+ years of teaching and curriculum development experience among us, founders who have run successful startups in the past and young talents from diverse backgrounds working on making the vision of bina a reality.

All our teachers have international teaching experience and hold a MA in education. 

Our advisors, including two former ministers of education, researchers and technologists, are industry veterans of the education industry who see the vision of bina as the future of primary education. With the educational insights and product development supported by budding talents in the industry, we believe the making of bina is in good hands.

We are building an operating system that requires a lot of cooperation from the technological field and a lot of technical data puzzles we are working on solving in deep R&D in both integration and Deep learning. It is an ambitious mission and we need help.

We offer comprehensive and live digital primary school for kids 4-12. Tiny classes of just six students learn synchronously with masterful teachers (at least an MA in education and over five years of teaching globally). We are designing our digital education to adapt to the learner offer precision education in a transnational setting.

We are unifying siloed efforts in primary education into SaaS (school as a service), an adaptive, transnational schooling system.

1. Pedagogy

Mission - precision education at scale: Our goal is to recreate education to accurately fit the learners (students, educators and families).

Vision - Quality primary education, everywhere, for all.

What we understand about learning and learning how to learn (pedagogy):

We respect each learner for who they are with a sense of wonder, vulnerability, empathy and openness.

Learning is a social activity - we design educational experiences at Bina to reflect that. We build live, synchronous activities that foster interaction with peers and teachers. In these lessons, they develop the tools for learning necessary to pursue the independent inquiry.

Active learning is sticky learning, and that's what we do (mostly).

Acts do not equate with traits - we give feedback and reflect on learners' actions and not "who they are", both academically and dispositional.

We are their attendants - our job is to direct their innate curiosity to get them to incredible places safely and joyfully (we make clear decisions on where we are headed and communicate those too).

Accurate, precise, ongoing assessment (yes, please!) vs general, broad, periodic summative assessment (oh, no, please don't)

Development is non-linear, uneven and circular, yet there are typical developmental phases in a developing brain. We balance standardization and personalization by continuously evaluating skill, knowledge and disposition (and their depth). We then craft their next step accordingly.

Methodologies:

Mobile: some traditional educational structures of education are losing relevance. We work in real-time anywhere, anyplace, and bring learning into being. Learners can work collaboratively with global teams or be highly mobile and maintain consistency regardless of location.

Agile learning takes incremental steps, constant review, and uses an iterative design process with and for the learners. We preach and exhibit trial and error, learn and do. We assume a growth mindset is fundamental for knowledge and therefore build educational experiences allowing constant revisiting and taking the next step towards learning.

Inquiry-based learning: we emphasize the student's role, including their voice, choice and ownership in the learning process. Rather than the teacher telling students what they need to know, students are encouraged to explore the material, ask questions, and share ideas. We include small-group discussion, guided learning, play, problem-based learning, collaboration, experimentation, and explicit teaching. Authentic inquiry allows children to build knowledge through purposeful and genuine exploration, experience, and discussion.

Theme/Topic based Learning: A theme or topic is a "big idea"—a principle or notion enduring and unconstrained by a particular origin, subject matter or place in time. Bina's themes are concepts that represent ideas that are broad, abstract, timeless and universal. Themes place no limits on the breadth of knowledge or understanding and therefore are accessible to every student. Theme-based inquiry builds conceptual understanding and creates deeper transferable learning inviting students to make connections to current events and personal experiences, helping them see the relevance of their learning. It promotes student agency by asking learners to construct meaning and articulate their understanding. Theme-based learning is a powerful vehicle for learning that fosters meaning and interpretation and challenges students to engage with significant ideas.

Our Curricula Pillars

A. Standards / Benchmarks

We use the UK standards (and sprinkle it with the parts of the US common core that are not represented) and break those down to micro-credentials. We treat those as curricular building blocks of three types:

Skills which -"I can" - competency

Knowledge- "I understand" - concept/theme

Disposition -"I exhibit" - character

B. Big questions

We explore time, form, function, fit, connection, causation, perspective, responsibility, and reflection. We weave these concepts and embed them throughout all units - they are repeated throughout time in Bina while the complexity of the question spirals.

C. Broad thematic topics:

These expansive and transnational categories (e.g. biomes) are the framework through which these questions and standards are interwoven.

Assessment:

We use micro-credentials of personalized/individualized statements that match developmental stages. The assessment has five gradations (from developing to independent).

Skills: micro-scale: sliding based on standards

Knowledge: macro-scale: longer, continua-based

Dispositions: micro and macro-scale (as above)

Assessment occurs in various ways, including teacher/guide observation, skill-based games, tasks, assignments, project-based continua and personal guided reflections, amongst many other forms of assessment.

Learning Experiences Crafting :

We map the learning with backward design by considering what we need to achieve at what point in time and building towards that point. We start with more significant concepts/themes addressed by standards/benchmarks and consider where learners CAN go before designing WHAT they will DO.

Bina lessons have templates that we forever revisit and refine as research advances. They involve the pace and timing of the activity rotation (and the involvement of physical movement).

1. We offer four activities that balance live/synchronous and teacher-led and asynchronous independent/home support. Live classes that are teacher-led collaborative group activities that expand children's horizons. Haptic exercises include hands-on and tactile activities to keep kids engaged and practice fine motor skills. Digital activities involve leading 3rd-party apps that bring a new dimension to children's learning. Self-guided learning activities build on live classes and allow students to follow their passions and curiosity around themes and topics.

How Bina educators Relate to learners

Language - We are all equal humans. Some of us have just been around longer and thus have different responsibilities. We use personable and warm language. Children don't owe adults respect because they are adults; we all respect each other bidirectionally.

Approach - We understand personalities, identities and mindsets as evolving continua. We discuss observations about actions and offer actionable feedback.

• *Intention -**We guide students with impartial observations and support their reflections. We, the learners (both young and not so young), recognize our preferences and identifications and observe our reactions.

In the next year, we aim to open up bina classes in 4 more timezones in the next year while increasing our student count to 196 with 25 classes running by the last quarter of 2022. Efforts are under way to develop a B2B2C model where bina classes can be offered as an employee benefit by corporations. We aim to have students filling the pipeline of the B2B2C model from the second quarter of 2023. 

In five years, bina aims to have 900 students being simultaneously educated through The bina school having live interactive lessons with our in-house teachers, while another 1000 students can have access to the bina methodology through HR organizations and employee benefits. 

We will have the bina- as-a-service accrediting and licensing the tech, methodology, and educator training, serving >12,000 students by the end of 2027.

- Student retention rate- (We have 100% so far!)

- Number of new enrolments per quarter- (We are seeing a steady increase in interest from parents from around the world). 

- Family referrals (early traction)

- Feedback from parents, educators, employees and of course students, and how those relate to each other, we call it “the 360”

- Feedback from teachers, and their time usage- Lift administrative burdens, so they can solely focus on the development of their students.

Education systems throughout history and societies reflect the way those communities operate. In the systemic design of primary schooling we now reflect a society that does not exist. The new natures of life and work should be reflected as we craft new models. While quality over quantity was the only option to school the masses, we have reached a point in history where quantity supports quality. With ethically and carefully crafted feedback loops, we can make use of the data generated in a classroom to precisely design an individualised model for the students, and their educators.

While we are running bina as a physical school now, we are proving the viability of the methodology that people thought was impossible. bina’s model eliminates the communal barriers that may exist in a physical environment and promotes diversity and awareness right from a young age.

An educational platform on the front end allows educators the most seamless transition between various learning experiences in a digital classroom with an anchoring system.

(so a class of 6yo can effortlessly digitally glide between only seeing each other's faces, to a centre of a math battle, through the layers of the earth, onto a board that they can all manipulate and back).

The back end will support deep insights through a cross-platform data analysis using deep learning to provide valuable real-time feedback to learners (students and educators) and help personalize the curricula.

As we serve students from different countries and different cultures, we aim to have similar diversity in the team as well. We make sure both the recruitment and enrolment processes are bias-proof and are not affected by any other factors other than fair partnerships and compatibility -qualification wise.

a. the start up- We are already running a private full time online primary school serving families globally. What's exciting is- the lab school generates data insights and revenue. It is marketed now directly to families and soon to HR departments.

b. the scale up- School-as-a-Service 2023 onwards: We partner with Corps, Govs and NGO's licensing bina, including the tech-based methodology for students and educators, as well as accreditation. We help them open the highest standard schools in no time at fewer costs.

• In its first stage, the bina school is operating as a fee based model where the parents pay a pre-set tuition fee to educate the students. We charge $113-$338 weekly (regional based pricing) and offer financial aid baised on needs and marrit. Scale will come with the SaaS model eliminating all education HR costs.

• We've based the school model on per student economics. We estimated tuition in the current market to be within $5k-$14k p.a. Currently, the unit economics is in "blitz at the start mode". Here are the reasons why that is the case right now, how it serves us and what we are the next steps:

A. tuition increase

1. Our tuition for the first full year is discounted- We are removing the early adopter discount over the first year.

2. We are running younger ages groups in which class sizes are six students per class. From 8YOs on, the classes are eight students.

3. We now market directly to families (B2C). Starting Q1 2023, we work B2B2C at a minimum commitment of 1 class for this channel and will charge 20% more intuition for the group.

B. Teacher time optimization

1. Our teachers are doing product work, thus teaching only one class- once we have a curricula developer fully on board, they can teach two classes each.

2. There are no teacher assistants, and all teaching staff is of the highest global grade. Teacher assistants will support the kids while practising, improving both the quality and the use of teachers' time.

C. Ops and sales optimization

• We have not yet streamlined the work of family support and teacher assistants' - We are learning and building processes and automating a large portion of their work. TA roles and family support functions will become more automated over time and reduce the number of staff to students. For E.g. both the TA and family support ratio increases from 1/28 students now to 1/56 students by 2024

• Sales costs are high at the get-go. Acquisition costs per student will lower as an outcome of the following:

a. ads costs will lower

b. referral programs

c. content marketing

d. simply growing reputation

• Experience: we anticipate getting more cost-effective with filling classes. E.g. our success rate on lead conversion is expected to improve from 4% to 14% between now and 2024. Additionally, we anticipate that the acquisition cost for B2B2C will be less expensive than for B2C.

Different channel margins: The idea is that B2B2C and B2C will receive the same product, but due to higher tuition and lower CAC – the margins on B2B2C will be better.

• An EU grant-funded our POC last year, and we've launched a pilot in Q4/21. We have gained families' trust with their children's schooling, a whopping 100% retention, steady early revenue, and are rapidly growing. Starting Q4 2023, we will license School-as-a-Service offering methodology, educator training and accreditation globally. Great advisors and funders (such as Taizo son, Jutta Steiner,27v, and Lord Jim knight) are supporting us on our way to making quality education scale.

• We have had a steady increase in revenue from tuition fee as well with a life time revenue till date at $ 16,800.