“Technology Engine and Education Revolution” at the 2018 Global Education

The CEO of DaDa. Zhi Hui's speech

On November 13th, at the GET2018 Education Technology Conference, the CEO of DaDa, Zhi Hui, delivered a important speech “Technology Engine and Education Change”.

Zhi Hui pointed out that 5%-10% children have dyslexia or reading disorder, and these children actually have their own natural advantages in many aspects such as thinking and creation. She believes that the ultimate goal of education which is using technology to help teacher release their potienal and work more efficiency, Therefore they can pay more attention on child's personalization growth, and make themselves better.

The following is a selection of guest speeches:

Hello everyone, I am Zhi Hui from DaDa English. I have counted the frist three speakers who are all women. Therefore I wonder maybe online education is more suitable for women. At the same time, I believe  that right now is the best time for online education entrepreneurship.

Why do we say that? Online education in China has actually gone through a very long period. Everyone feels that the outbreak period will be there soon. And in fact it has been born since 1996. Our earliest online education was called “distance education”. I don't know if anyone heard about that. Do your guys have still remember that? During the high shcool we always can see their advertises have been played in TV & classroom. But only 4 years later it has been upgrade to 2.0 version and we call it “online shcool recording”. This period is relatively long, it almost took 10 years time; many famous companies was born during that period such as “New Oriental”, “TAL” and etc. Now finally the 3.0 version has been arrived and we name it “live interactive” ; this period’s developments brings my company lots benefits , such as mobile Internet acceleration, mobile devices Popularization, the popularity of cloud computing, so I think I am very lucky, everyone is very lucky.

I have been in the online education business for 5 years. As many people know that I don’t have any education backgroung. When I started my business, I was just a mother and wanted to make a 1-to-1 platform for my own kid and provide he a efficiency way to learn the English. There is something very impressive behind me that has changed my view of the industry.

"Morning Schedule Student"

I want to tell a story abut one of our students. His name is speed and 10 years old. He has been DaDa for almost a year. This child is very smart and study at the most famous private middle school in Shanghai. English is very good. But this child’s schedule is very different. Most of the children's schedule are after school or on weekends. But speed’s schedule is at 9 am every day. We feel very strange, how is the child's schedule is so different from other children’s? The child has been in DaDa for a long period. Therefore we start to know each other better.Then one day we asked her mother, “Why speed always have the morning class?” The mother told us that “he actually dropped out of school during his kindergarten and elementary school time. In the past few years, we have changed three schools. In each school, because of reading disorder, he was laughed by the teacher and his classmates. His selfconfidence was greatly affected. He did not want to go to school.

I don't know if you are familiar with dyslexia and ADHD. I probably explain that ADHD is called attention deficit disorder. This learning obstacle is the most common learning disorder among young people around the world in the whole learning process. In China, its incidence, I don't want to call "incidence rate" because it is not a disease, it is very popular, about 5-10% The incidence.

If there are children in the family, think back, is there always 1 or 2 naughty students in the class? Teacher always tell others that kids has ADHD. Is this child's IQ low? This child's attention is always not concentrated. It always affects others... I saw many people nodding, indeed. In fact, there are already 10 millions of children in China who have such learning disabilities.

We look at a lot of patients, they are very good, and they have proved to be geniuses when they grow up. These people will have ADHD when they are young. Eventough Steve Jobs, who had dyslexia when he was a child. These children have their own natural advantage aspects such as critical thinking & creation. But we just see that they are different from other children in learning and attention. However, in most of the study, they are treated as "heterogeneous", slowly self-denying, becoming the "stupid" they feel, and there is no way to get along with their classmates. Later, the speed mother introduced a lot of students who have the same issues like speed to our platform, so we have a lot of ADHD children on the platform. We finally analysis that why these children can finish the study 1 to 1 in the online school. There is no way to do this in the classroom for 45 minutes.

First, because these children are more interested in innovative ways of education; second, it may be because there is no pressure from the people around him, without such pressure, he can be more focused. So later (speed) mother took him to the United States, in the United States his mother wrote me an e-mail says "Now, speed is studying in a american school that specifically for dyslexia and ADHD children." She said: "After I came here we found out that there are so many ways to help children solve the obstacles such as encountered in learning, and let his innovative ability and his advantages be maximized. There are so many We didn't even know the method. I really don't blame those teachers in china, eventhough they hurt speed, I don't blame those teachers, because they are too busy, because they have too many thing to pay atteion on and too many relationship to deal with. speed’s mother said: "You are doing online education. Is there one day online education can release those teacher from the “busy” and let them can really pay attention to these children. They are not heterogeneous, but they are different. I believe each kid is a star. No matter what kind of stars they are, they will shine. They are not good or bad, they are just different.”

So I am thinking, in the end, what is the ultimate meaning of technology-driven education? I have been thinking about this question. Is it just to spread our knowledge more efficiently? Or is it just to make our knowledge more personal? I don't think it is ture. The ultimate meaning of education is using technology to release more freedom for our teacher. And give them more potential and effectiveness. And let them pay more attention to the child's personality growth and make these children become better. I think this is how technology support online education, and finally achieve the ultimate goal and ideal.

Of course, DaDa is actually a five-year startup company. We have also made many attempts to promote education reform in science and technology.

How technology support education

We made a DaDa TV, which is an live AI interactive class. Every night, we have thousands of children interacting with teachers on the platform through live lessons. In the course of the class, each lesson is a story. At each node where the story occurs, the teacher will send questions to the children, and will give different story directions and feedback according to the children's choices and answers. We call this TV, why? Because we found children who’s age were 4-6 years old, many parents do not want their children to watch mobile devices, so we call it TV and put it in the living room. TV's interactive AI live lessons can be screened to TV, which is our attempt.

At the same time, because we are 1 on 1 video courses, we have made a lots of different models to judge the expression, and judge whether these lessons are good or bad through various models such as children's attention. More importantly, we made a teacher-teaching behavior and expression management model for the teacher; because the number of 1 on 1 online courses is now over 100,000, it is not realistic to manually check the quality of each teacher. In what way can I determine whether this online course is a better course or a less good one? What kind of criteria does the teacher use to judge whether her teaching has achieved good results? We made a lots attempts. 📷

We will check each teacher's expressions for each lesson. Red is angry, purple is disgusting, gray is scared, yellow is happy, blue is sad, pale yellow is surprised, and no expression is green. This is the modeling data of four different teachers. From left to right, you can take a look at it. If you are the referee of our teacher quality monitoring center, which class do you think is the best class? Which section is the worst class?

I revealed the answer. The first and last ones are the best teachers. We found that in fact, during the course of the class, his interaction with the students was not really angry, sad or disgusting. In fact, his expression was richer and more average. The law of discovery through big data. The upper right course may be a big problem. The lower left course is not necessarily bad, because if the child is over 10 years old and his English communication level is very high, the lower left course is sometimes good because the teacher does not need to be very Exaggerated body movements ensure that the class has quality and allows students to concentrate.

At the same time, we will also judge the time the teacher speaks with the students. This is not a class to judge, we will use 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months of the cycle to determine. As the time period for teachers to communicate with students has become longer, have the proportions of their two people changed? In theory, the proportion of students' speech is getting higher, and the teacher's lower, indicating that the child's output ability has become very good. This has been widely used. When the teacher is behind self-evaluation, he will say, "Why do you think that I am not good at teaching? I think it is very good." Speak with the data, you look at how long your student's speaking ability is half a year later, what is the percentage, and what other students are, it is clear. This is also our management tool for teachers, which allows teachers to improve their effectiveness and empower their teachers. We also count the time when students and teachers don't talk, and check if there is an abnormality in this course. If two people don't talk often, this is not quite right. We have to check the free time.

At the same time, we will also look at some teachers' behavioral norms. For example, does he have a lot of descriptions about leaving the camera for a period of time, and how much time the students have left to judge the teacher's code of conduct.

In addition, we also cooperated with Ali Cloud to develop a high-definition online video classroom with the highest resolution, which is currently under development. This is some technical breakthrough we have made. At the same time, we also made a DaDababy product, which is actually aimed at families with children aged 0-6. We found that the young family's education subject is not only for the children but also for the parents, therefore we did a lot of parent-child learning on the DaDababy English platform, doing a lot of AI family classes, and let the children learn the lessons with the parents. Start from June 2018, the total number of users has now exceeded one million, and the next day's retention performance is very good with 50%.

These are some of the attempts made by DaDa become better and shows us how technology support education. Of course, these attempts are far from the meaning and goal of the ultimate online education that I have just mentioned. But I believe we will make it works and it may take less than 2-3 years, and the effectiveness of all our educators will be greatly improved through the technology of online education. The focus of these teachers and educators can be returned to the child's personality development, so that each child shines like a star. I believe that it can be achieved with the efforts of all online education entrepreneurs.