LEAN Platform
Description
In Vietnamese education, children are not the center of the school. The educational system focuses on grades, not a process or the children’s context. As the result, the children lack motivation and study to pass the test, not to absorb the knowledge or enjoy the learning process. The long-term consequence is that students become dependent on extrinsic factors such as social or parental pressure, and lose sight of what they truly enjoy studying or what they want to do in the future. Intrinsic motivation - defined as the self-initiation of interest or passion in an area - fails to emerge in this process and sustainable learning is not achieved.
Our team believes that learning should be free and learners should be at the center of any model. Our ecosystem does not make money off students but instead offers them incentives to build self-directed learning, all the while partnering with NGOs/Educational Institutions to connect them with opportunities.
Educational payoffs are not inevitable, but we are here to make it so.
Our team plans to use behavioral economics to tackle the gray area in the literature where extrinsic incentives seem to crowd out intrinsic motivation to learn.
LEAN Platform is an online study ecosystem where students can live stream their learning sessions solo or with others and earn tokens for their study time. These tokens can be used to redeem rewards from entertainment brands (fun) or youth education organizations (growth).
Our learn-to-earn platform impacts the whole learning journey of a student making it not just more fun but an entirely more productive experience. We aim to revolutionize the way teenagers and university students view studying, cultivating intrinsic motivation along the way.
LEAN incentivizes students’ learning with rewards by brands that can post for free to attract customers. We address the missing link between what students like and the learning journey. Furthermore, we connect with sponsor institutions to provide growth rewards that foster self-directed learning.
The LEAN Platform has 2 main features:
- Learn (time) to Earn Detection: a camera records the students’ learning behaviors and rewards them with tokens for their study time. Students also benefit from peer accountability when having others observe their study session
- Community Learning Feature: students can join communities within the app to have a group study session to set study goals and earn rewards by achieving these goals. Furthermore, students can post whatever academic questions they struggle with on the relevant forums. Students who provide correct answers and are upvoted by other students will also earn tokens for their contribution.
The LEAN app will serve as a study-to-earn platform where it focuses on incentivizing students using a rewards system. Students are awarded rewards for studying. Rewards are broken down into fun rewards (discount vouchers) and growth (scholarships/interviews) rewards and can be redeemed with the rewarded tokens. Besides the main feature of studying to earn, LEAN plans to stick to the concept of community learning. Hence, there will be a feature for group studying. This feature will allow students to start a study session together and earn rewards together. To amplify the concept of community learning, there will be features where students can set study goals and earn rewards by achieving these goals.
The concept of community learning can be explored hugely and there are numerous ideas that could be expanded on. For example, a mentor-student model where students can request another student for a session to learn from one another and the student who provides it to other students will gain achievements/awards/rewards. Another example could be a homework help platform similar to StackOverflow for non-coding community discussions. These are features that are planned to be included in the further roadmap. The concept of incentivizing community learning could be very helpful for students as well as companies who are looking for hardworking/outstanding individuals.
The edtech market in Vietnam ranks in the top 10 in the world in terms of growth, with 35% of household spending on private educational services. At the same time, there are huge demands for a live studying platform, with traffic from the most popular site studystream.com recording 25% traffic from Vietnam and 50% from Asia among its 2.1 million monthly traffic. The business model of on-demand study streaming is a recent phenomenon out of the COVID-19 pandemic, with competitors such as study stream and studyverse raising millions of dollars in early rounds and attracting millions of users globally just after 1 year into operation. There is no equivalent platform in Southeast Asia.
With our advanced concentration analytics technology and an incentive system based on the behavioral economics of intrinsic motivation, we stand to attract huge demand from Southeast Asian learners.
At the same time, while there are plenty of platforms for brands and educational organizations to approach students in the West (school ranking sites, social media for students, etc), the competitor landscape in Asia and Vietnam is much less dense. By featuring a marketplace for brands and educational organizations to attract students, we stand to benefit other stakeholders in the industry as well.
LEAN Platform is a team for students, by students. We are students from many prestigious universities, including Vin University, The University of Hong Kong, SciencesPo, and Fulbright University Vietnam. Our team members come from many different backgrounds with knowledge and experience in many areas, giving us a more well-rounded perspective on the learning experience of young people today.
Our team combined experience also covers areas in education and technology. Our tech lead has built a full-fledged LMS before and is currently a solution architect at Amazon. Our product lead has worked on many social impact projects and has connections in the edtech community in Vietnam. Because we are fairly young, we can easily relate to the mindset of our target users, the young adult, and come up with solutions that match their needs the most.
Our team members are super young and we are leveraging that to get support from older startup enthusiasts to pivot ourselves ahead. We are passionate and dedicated to this project with the hope of improving the learning experience in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
Our revenue mainly comes from 2 areas:
- Adsense
- Subscription package for students that allow them to:
+ Earn more tokens per study time/question answered
+ More access to exclusive incentives
+ Access professional study help from tutors
+ Addons that help students elevate their desktop study space (notes, music, backgrounds, etc)
By this business model, we can sustain our projects.
Sustainable Development Goals
4. Quality Education
As can be seen in the case of Vietnam, domestic workers are put in a fierce struggle with foreigners as they are challenged to fulfill an international standard of vocational or technical skills within the context of being economically disadvantaged which leads to their disparities in reaching quality education. Imagine the issue of disparities as a ‘knot’, the number of economic disadvantages can be depicted as the quality of how many times the knot is tied, which makes it more difficult to be unknotted. Having the chance to visit rural regions in Vietnam, economic shortages is the reason driving the kids and teenagers to stop schooling and spend their life as unskilled labor. In the meantime, in the more developed areas such as Ho Chi Minh City or Ha Noi, the majority of learners do not share equal opportunity and access to quality education as the amount to attend those classes is targeted at the elite. It thus shapes the overview of the Vietnamese workforce, and also of other developing countries, as those with cheap and low-skilled. There are two main roots of the problem tree that we can look into, first the learner’s motivation and second the demand of business. In that case, our team would suggest deploying the platform bridging those with tenacious endeavors and directly related stakeholders who are probably giving the industry's demands, such as recruiters and educators. The platform is open for all to access for free. The unpaid version provides users with unlimited video conferencing with studying peers. While sharing video, the user's quality time of studying can be recorded by AI and the results can be exchanged for training sessions or internship opportunities. That scene of hard work pays off not only for the industrious but helps encourage the communities to approach the needs of the marketing and put their effort on the right track. We strongly believe that our startup idea can make a significant contribution to SDG 4 and will be a radically different approach to the edtech market, where most solutions are either boring, not student-centered, or not community driven.
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Members
Technologies
Product Type - System
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Type of need
Mentoring - We need an experienced mentor
Everyone who joins our team at this stage will be considered a potential co-founder. When we launch the product and prepare for our first fundraising round, we will give out co-founder titles to people according to their contributions along with suitable shares in the project.
Collaboration - We want a new member in our team
Everyone who joins our team at this stage will be considered a potential co-founder. When we launch the product and prepare for our first fundraising round, we will give out co-founder titles to people according to their contributions along with suitable shares in the project.
In-kind support - We need sponsorship or material donation
Partners who agree to onboard early with us will enjoy 2 years of free partnership where they can freely access our marketing tools to reach our users and advertise their products.
- No option -