VivaLing (micro-age) wants to do is to give children aged 3-15 ambitions to immersively learn languages. In order to help children make full use of this golden age of language learning, Weiling gathered a group of native speakers from all over the world with professional teachers to teach them one-on-one video.
At the age of micro age, tutors who teach English, Chinese, French and Spanish will be divided into three categories according to the level of experience value, each category corresponding to a different rate. The founder said that they interview about 100 teachers every month. Although teachers of micro-age age are not full-time, the screening is still very strict, and the final retention rate is not high. Teachers who pass the interview will receive a series of training in the future. When choosing a teacher, Weiling values the teacher's professional accumulation, but she also values the teacher's personality: Given the particularity of early childhood education and online teaching formats, a passionate and contagious teacher is more important than anything else.
Micro-age focuses on personalized "teaching according to aptitude": when parents sign up for the course, they will be asked to fill out a series of questions about their children's personality and hobbies. Therefore, before the course begins, teachers can prepare lessons according to their individual conditions and quickly mobilize students' interest during class. Children aged 3-5 are active, so each course is generally around 15 minutes; children aged 10 years old are within one hour. Generally, classes are held twice a week. Before the new class, the teacher will ask students to watch the videos of the previous class for review.
Although Singapore attaches more importance to scores than China, ’s goal is not to help children improve their exam results, but to allow children to use the foreign language freely through immersive teaching. At present, its strategy is to focus on families with experience in exotic life, because these parents understand the importance of mastering foreign languages better and agree with the educational philosophy of micro-age. The founders of
positioning of micro-age is not a "tutoring platform market", but an "online language learning college". They spend more time and energy on selecting, training teachers, and communicating with parents. With deep cultivation and careful work, this "college" that was officially put into operation in July 2014 has attracted students from 12 countries to learn thousands of video classes on the platform.
and micro-age are similar platforms that are locked in the foreign language education market of the same age group (3-15 years old), the more influential domestic ones are VIPKID, which focuses on kindergarten to primary school English education, and VIPABC (junior) which focuses on teenage English training; the Jiliguala (for children aged 0-6 years old) we have reported previously overlaps with the age group targeted by micro-age, but its entry point is not tutoring, but providing children with multimedia English learning resources.
Now more and more parents are aware of a natural law of learning a second language, that is, the younger the age of children entering the language, the less difficult it is to learn. In view of this, there should be a lot of room for the young and teenagers market for foreign language education.
The common difficulties encountered in video teaching products for children are: video teaching itself is an adult-like teaching method. How can children be focused and interested and thus ensure learning results? looks like Weiling gave a very simple answer: take great effort to select appropriate teachers, pay attention to each student's interests, and design courses of different lengths for students of different ages - sometimes, improving satisfaction does not require much fancy high technology, just work hard.
Micro-Age has just received 500,000 SGD (US$375,000) in the seed round. After financing, they will further optimize their learning experience and even consider developing outside Singapore.
Original article, author: Xiaotian
