Unleashing the potential of technology to revolutionize education in Indonesia

Unleashing the potential of technology to revolutionize education in Indonesia

Overview

Overview

Established in November 2019, CoLearn is dedicated to enhancing the standard of education in Indonesia by addressing the limitations of traditional tuition centers(Bimbels) and classrooms. Their vision revolves around providing a seamless touch point for students seeking academic support. Through this innovative platform, students can easily connect with qualified educators and receive real-time solutions to their academic queries, thereby empowering them with a superior learning experience.

Designed an AI-powered "automated doubt-solving" and interactive class learning feature to help students study in the COVID-19 situation. Today, Colearn is one of Indonesia's fastest-growing education technology companies, used by more than 2,5 million students. In 2020, Google Play selected Colearn as the best app category for personal growth.

Client Website

Geography

Indonesia

Indonesia

Industry

Education

Education

How built CoLearn

Problem Space

Research

Conducting on-site research in Indonesia, i gained invaluable insights into the prevailing situation and uncovered a fundamental issue concerning Bimbels. The identified problem lay in the insufficient integration of technology within these tutoring centers, and the lack of touchpoints for students with their teachers post their classes in bimbels. CoLearn tried solving that initially with live classes post-6 pm. This resulted in the optimization and streamlining of the educational system and consequently impacted its overall quality.


The platform


Android application

The initial phase commenced with the development of an Android application featuring a live-streaming module. After conducting extensive market research, the Zoom SDK module was seamlessly integrated into the application. This integration allowed both students and teachers to register and engage in interactive sessions easily. As a result, students could conveniently access one-on-one query-solving sessions, enhancing the overall learning experience.


Practice modules

In response to the specified requirements, practice modules incorporating quizzes and practice sheets were promptly introduced. This implementation allowed teachers to generate various questionnaires that students could access repeatedly. Additionally, teachers were equipped with the functionality to evaluate, provide feedback, and analyze the performance of their students in a comprehensive manner.


CoLearn established successful partnerships with over 25 Bimbels, granting exclusive accessibility of the application solely to the students enrolled in these Bimbels. To ensure secure onboarding, users were required to verify their accounts using their respective phone numbers.


iOS platform

Subsequently, recognizing the demand for an iOS platform, KeyValue took proactive measures to address user needs. Accordingly, an iOS version of the application, offering identical features, was released to cater to a broader audience.


Tanya

In a continuous drive for enhancement, CoLearn introduced a new feature named 'Tanya,' meaning 'To ask' in Bahasa language, which proved to be a pivotal addition to the application. To develop this automated doubt-solving system, CoLearn collaborated with another KeyValue client Mad Street Den (MSD), enabling the integration of an AI module. With 'Tanya,' students gained the convenience of capturing a photo of the specific portion they required clarification on, and subsequently, they could upload the image to receive a real-time video solution.

To ensure optimal performance of the feature, teachers diligently collected a comprehensive set of questions covering the syllabus taught across Indonesia, resulting in an extensive library of more than a million video solutions. Powered by MSD, the implementation involved leveraging an optical character recognition module to extract the content from the uploaded image. The extracted content was matched against the database of questions and videos to provide relevant video solutions. subsequent manual verification was undertaken to ensure alignment with the existing database.

This innovative addition significantly contributed to CoLearn's commitment to providing students with seamless access to personalized and timely doubt-solving solutions.

Changing business model

In the year 2020, the CoLearn team made a strategic decision to transition the platform from a limited-access model to a public one, thereby extending its reach beyond a select few Bimbels. This significant decision necessitated a comprehensive overhaul of the entire app workflow, including the onboarding process, Bimbel structure, verification flows, and more. Consequently, the app underwent a revamp to accommodate the expanded scope and cater to a broader user base.

  • An admin panel to onboard bimbels, teachers, verify students

    Existing bimbel-oriented features on the admin panel were modified to remove bimbel dependency for onboarding students. The manual verification flow for students was removed, thus allowing students to seamlessly signup and utilize the features of the application.

  • A class creation and management module

    A class scheduling and management module for setting recurring classes across various grades was set up. Students had the provision to signup for classes, book slots, and stay in touch with their teachers.

Colearn is an EdTech company that uses AI technology to help students understand math problems.

Colearn started the business by collaborating with the offline tuition center to escalate Indonesia's education. Unfortunately, the offline tuition model has many challenges, like cost and time, which are only accessible to some students. Besides that, everything offline has become inefficient and scary because of COVID-19.

As a Product Designer, I help Colearn transform its business from a tuition center platform to an automated and scalable learning tool in Indonesia.

Discovery

One of the challenges to transform the business is we only have a limited time. I collaborate with the Customer Insight team to validate the early-stage changes to save time.

We start by doing 1:1 interviews online with some students from various Indonesian cities. The goal is to understand how their learning experiences so far.

Through the interview, we found three main points:

The student has a problem finding the trusted resources to understand math lessons.

The student has trouble finding a high-quality teacher to improve overall academic outcomes.

The student has a problem practicing their skills because the available exam questions are limited.

Explore

We try to explore the problem by creating a customer journey. We defined how the student will interact with the Colearn.


Results

Wireframe

CoLearn at present


  • 5 M + users

  • CoLearn is on a mission to bring Indonesia to the top 50% of the Global PISA ranking by being laser-focused on STEM subjects

  • Over a billion questions answered

We create the wireframe base on the main flow that we make before. We try to confirm our hypothesis: Are the student problems solved by those features or not.

To start, we research with some students to test our wireframe. We hypothesize that students will not go to the tuition center anymore. So, we do A/B testing by creating two versions of the prototype; With the Bimbel feature and Without the Bimbel part.

The research results were quite surprising, revealing that some previously explored features did not align with student needs. For example, most students are not interested in attending tuition centers, though they still seek long-term learning for deeper understanding. They also find it inconvenient to book a teacher just to ask questions, especially when they need quick, instant help. Additionally, while there are plenty of role models available on platforms like YouTube, students don't see this as a primary need right now, so we decided not to focus on that area. Based on these insights, we revised and merged features into three main parts: Live Class, offering small-group, interactive sessions for deeper, long-term learning; Ask, an automated feature where students can snap a photo of a problem to get instant help, especially for math; and Practice, where students can regularly answer exam-style questions to build their skills.

© Adarsh Devanand 2023

Results

CoLearn at present

5 M + users

CoLearn is on a mission to bring Indonesia to the top 50% of the Global PISA ranking by being laser-focused on STEM subjects

Over a billion questions answered