Hey HIVE Educators! My name’s Emily, and I’m an ELT professional with about six years of experience in the field. I spent two years in public service through Teach for Malaysia and then two and a half years teaching at private school, and am now in Ed Tech – I’ve been with my current company, GuruLab for less than a year. So that’s my six years, which has been interesting. And along the way I have also written some books for traditional publishing houses like Sasbadi and made modules on student leadership and environmental awareness for orgs like Zero Waste Malaysia and Accenture. And I think as teachers, we’re learning people – we’re learning professionals. So I also deepened my learning with a Masters in Education and, before that, my PGDE. 

But I think those are just things that I did. And maybe it’s also important to share why I have this deep fundamental belief that education really is a powerful thing that can transform lives – because it changed mine. And probably the biggest thing that showed me the power of education was when I did my SPM. I was one of the top 50 scorers and was very lucky to get a JPA scholarship. But again, even that is just what happened, and not quite the why yet. Underlying that, I think, were two key things that happened in my childhood, education-wise. The first, is probably the first seeing real people like my seniors actually get that exact same scholarship before me. So when you see that concrete, flesh-and-blood human you’ve talked to do these things, you kind of feel like it actually can be done.

The second thing is probably – well, as a kid, my mom quit her job so she could take care of my sister and I. And after school every day she would drive me and a bunch of my friends home, make our lunch, and teach us. She would be the one teaching me BM, Science, Math after school, all the way up to Form Three. So, seeing how hands-on my mom was with my education and having all my great teachers in school – I grew up in a place where education was highly valued. I was lucky in that respect and saw the fruit of that with the good luck, the scholarship that I eventually got. 

I think like every other teacher during MCO, we were forced to go and use Ed Tech. Whether it’s DELIMA or FrogAsia at the time, I think we were kind of all forced to be users of Ed tech whether we wanted to or not. But I think that was when – similar to other teachers – when I started exploring and was actually quite inspired by how all these different platforms almost supercharged learning in class. In a physical classroom, it’s great that we get to build those relationships with students but sometimes we can’t see what’s going on in their heads. Or we can’t be at every table, or when they sit in groups, we can’t be at every station at one time. But with the tools that we have online, you can see formative assessment almost instantaneously – 40 responses come in at one time; you can be in six different Google Meet calls at a time – eavesdropping.

So Ed Tech during the pandemic gave me what I felt was a superpower in class. Of course there were challenges with kids, where you’re having to make sure that they are there in the first place. But once they are there, once they are engaged and using these tools, it felt almost magical. And I think I was one of those teachers – there are a lot of tech products out there that will charge you; I would never spend a dime, but I was quite gung-ho to the point where I would go and take part in those giveaways and get like a free premium subscription for a year. 

Yeah, so I was just generally an avid user. And from there during the pandemic, while I was doing my Masters, I got contracted by a bunch of people who wanted to use tech, to do something for education. So I just worked part time with them as a subject matter consultant and from there, became a full-time hire. So in my first year at GuruLab, I worked on some of the content initiatives, but across the whole company, I think there’s just this expectation to be very curious about how students learn, how students want to learn… and to test hypotheses on what could actually drive their learning, and from those tests, figure out what’s worth building upon. That’s a little bit of what I do at the company now.

We currently see ourselves as an after-school solution. We’ve iterated our program a few times to cater to students with different learning needs; but the technology side is all these programs run on our proprietary app where we are testing and building engagement tools to make learning feel effortless, feel fun, almost like give students the dopamine hit as they do their practices, and as we incentivize those behaviors for learning.These actions like asking and answering questions can normally can be quite hard for students to want to do in a regular class, so we build underlying mechanisms, for instance setting them out on secret quests, so they adopt the right behaviour for learning without feeling forced. This is where we are currently at, and what we are focused on, as a company.

And yeah, I think there are a lot of companies out there who do like, all the subjects or other subjects, including English. We’re probably not the only ones, but we are starting with English and starting to look at student engagement first from a language learning standpoint, because we feel that there is a huge gap when you look at national SPM results. Things like Add Math may be a bit hard, but then not everybody takes Add Math. Or it could be BM or Sejarah, which you must pass in order to get your certificate, but the one subject where students actually seem to struggle a lot more with is English. So we’re starting here. We are a for-profit company, and so there is a fee to it. But I think the way most Ed Tech is being built, it’s not like your super premium tuition center where you charge super high fees that only a small segment can afford, because that’s not going to help to drive growth. You can do that in your elite places, but it’s not going to help a lot of people. It’s also not going to drive growth of the company. So we price it, I think, at a reasonable price so that it’s accessible to most people, even while being a paid service.

I think we have a lot of companies who’ve been around a while, so it’s quite competitive. But there’s a huge market to serve out there – 2 million students in Malaysian schools that you can serve. So, I would say Ed Tech can grow. It probably doesn’t look like it’s going to tail off at any point. It’s always good to have robust, healthy competition. GuruLab itself is quite young, and there are lots out there who have been around for a while and who will continue to be around. 

But if you look at the Education landscape in general, some observers might call it a crowded and fragmented market with all kinds of solutions serving their different customers. But if you look at it another way – you could actually say that Education is a real market, served by imperfect products. Facebook wasn’t the first social network; Zoom wasn’t the first video conferencing platform. A crowded market means people have the appetite for something, but no one’s found the last move yet. So yes, am optimistic about Ed Tech in Malaysia.

I think the personality knowledge that you cultivate to do well in Ed Tech would be very useful in non-profit or public service spaces too. If I were to narrow down to two of them – it’s probably firstly to be curious, very curious about the problems that are out there because you might find opportunities to solve people’s problems and create value for them. So it’s not just, “Oh we need to go and make money,” but you have to go and solve the right problems for it to be a valuable solution for people to even invest in or to find that it’s useful enough to want to make it part of their daily life as a user. Be very curious, and because education is a very well researched space, also go and look at that research done so you do not need to reinvent the wheel. But it’s also, at the same time, not being hung up about best practices that work in different contexts. As English teachers, we all know about principled eclecticism and can relate I’m sure. 

The second trait would be to be very customer-centric where, when you observe what’s happening in a class, that curiosity would tie into you wanting to know how your students actually behave or what they really want – so that we build something that they actually become sticky users of. But with that, I think we’re not just building video games, we’re not just building like a shopping app. So it’s building what people want so that they will go and learn because learning is not easy. 

If you ask me about technical skills, I think it depends on which function you’re in in the company. But across the board, and even for a teacher in a school setting, you will need very strong problem solving skills. So to firstly be able to scope the problem because there are many, many problems to solve. But what is it that you should solve? Ask really good questions in order to narrow that down. Before you start thinking of and testing any solutions, you need to be solving the right problem first. Then once testing is underway, it’s being able to make good sense of data because as you get lots of data from the platforms that you operate, you need to differentiate signal from noise so that you don’t end up building the wrong things or building things that people don’t actually want to use. 

You also need to be kind of comfortable with not having one hundred percent complete information, but to be able to know what to do next based on what you have. Probably the last thing is strong communication. Because we work in multidisciplinary teams, the engineers might speak a certain way or others might understand about education from their experience as a student. So you might need to give them a bit more context. Similarly, they’ll give you the information as to what the pathways and contexts are to building something. So, make good notes, communicate well, I think. But these are general traits that should help someone do well anywhere, even in schools.

Well, probably in the long term, I think there will always be people, organizations trying to solve different problems in education. Hopefully EdTech will continue to be part of that solution and be part of that education landscape to productively contribute to students’ benefits in education.