 Well, yeah, it's great to be back for PhosAsia. Last time I talked was at 2018. I was talking about the old crypto space. And my company, biggestlab.io, we are crypto stuff. And so my last talk, if you YouTube search it, PhosAsia Proteus or PhosAsia Sherry, you'll see my talk and that's 45 minutes long. So we got to do some back and forth. So I really like back and forth. So if I say anything that you find objectiveful or you have a question in the middle of it, raise your hand. I like the debate aspect. That's the open part of Phos. So I'm hoping next year we're gonna have a little bit longer talks so that we can get into that. But this talk is something completely different. This is actually about a space that I kinda swore that I would never get into. And yet, here I am. So yeah, it was good to see I'm not the only one doing edu-tech stuff. Traumae here gave a great talk in the adventure room earlier on. With COVID, right? We've all been impacted. Education's getting changed. Education changes are generational, right? You almost for changes to happen, you have to kinda wait for the old school administrators and teachers to retire for the new ones to come on. And in fact, I was born in the very late 60s. I went through the 70s in America. And I remember I had some incredibly good public school teachers, Mrs. Fletcher in second grade. She would open up the class by reading a verse from the Bible. In America now, she would be put in jail. My best teacher ever would not be allowed to teach in America, that's this generational change. And it happened during the Carter administration when they created the federal education, federal department of education before then there was not such. And Thomas Sowell, great economist, has shown the inverse proportional relationship between SAT scores and federal government spending in education. So spending is not the problem, right? So what's going on? I've been a mentor for lots of tech startups. I was one of the first mentors for the JFDI incubator here in Singapore. And I've worked with a lot of startups and I've helped advise some edutect companies and I've just watched edutect on the sides. And for about 20 years and a lot of well-meaning people that are really trying to have a positive impact. But they have almost universally failed, right? And so the three things that we see commonly is that they believe that education, automation, I'm sorry, not education, automation can replace teachers and books. They have this, hey, our curriculum or our system is so cool that everyone will see it and adopt it, right? If you build it, they will come in mentality for getting market share. And they think that creating the curriculum is something that they can do with less than $20 million, right? These are all, you know, if you see a edutect company or anyone who's thinking that this is any of these, you'll see this commonality, right? So, right, public education is, you know, it's been focused on teaching. Teachers teaching, you know, we're going to show you what to do and what to learn, right? Teachers are the source of knowledge. You know, it's rote memorization. Students are measured by how well they can repeat back what the teacher has told them, right? That's what your classic education does. My focus, and I think what needs to just change is that we need to make sure that we're just focused on learning, we're not focused on teaching, right? And what is education? So, learning or education requires understanding the knowledge and demonstrating the ability to apply it, right? See, apply it usefully, recognizing these common recurring patterns in the real world. So, it requires the adoption, the enabling of critical thinking skills, ultimately, is what must be there. I also believe that the proper role of teachers is not to be the source of all knowledge, right? Because often, you know, in lots of school and places, the teachers aren't even smarter than the students, right? Or they have different exposure for things, right? They can't be the guides of everything, right? But teachers should be coaches that enable learning, right? And so, edu-tech, technology is not the thing, right? I'm a tech guy, and I just, you know, you have the best tech in the world, and in other words, somebody who's got a marketing department but crappy tech is gonna kick my butt every single time, it just happens all the time, right? There's even a phrase for it in the tech world, like worse is better, right? Well, they're talking about that, right? Technology is not the thing. Technology is a multiplier of the thing, right? You got a $15 million SAP accounting system and you have no accounting skills, anything times zero equals zero. Let that be lesson number one. But if you're a really great accountant, right? Technology, like this SAP accounting system, can make it where instead of you needing to be, have a staff of 20 people to manage this one company, you by yourself could almost manage 20 other companies for their accounting, right? So that's scalability, that's what's critical. That's what tech is at the tactical level. Now tech also introduces some other things at the strategic level, but if you haven't accomplished the tactical level first, forget about it, right? So I believe that as a good coach should be measured by educational outcome, that good technology should be measured by how much you enable, how effective you can help make that coach. So we're not trying to abandon teachers here, right? So my metaphor for education or for learning is like working out, right? If you've ever started to try to work out and try to get your body in shape, if you've gone to the gym and you've had a good personal trainer, like I was fortunate to in Atlanta, I haven't lived in Atlanta a long time as you can tell, I have no personal trainer. But I mean, I can just tell my workouts were three to five times more effective because I had this guy. Even when he would tell me what to do and do it by myself, it wasn't as good as when I was with him. That's what a teaching coach should do for education, right? That's what it should be. So it's trying to get your mind in shape, right? Regular school is like going to a gym, but everyone's got the same equipment, everyone's looking the same weights, and everyone's gonna do the same lesson, right? So if you look at the, on a standard distributed curve, that's great for the majority of the class. There's some people, they're never gonna be able to lift it, they're gonna be left behind. And there's some people that's gonna be like, okay, this is not a challenge, right? So there's like two to 5% on this one side, right? Who would succeed no matter what? So they're not getting anything out of it, but on average, right? You're better off having attended, they're not having done it, right? You're gonna be in better shape if you do any kind of workout, even if the regimen is very standard. Then if you did no workout at all, and also you've got your peers around you to cheer you on, which is a big thing, right? People kind of discount that. I happen to homeschool, I've got three boys, I happen to homeschool them, and you know, everyone, when you say homeschool, you know how to make friends and all that kind of stuff. Well, you gotta do other things about it, but it is an important thing, but it's the first thing everyone jumps at, right? But they don't think about this when they talk about edu-tech. So edu-tech is like, okay, you don't need a teacher or whatever. Instead of doing the same exercise that everyone's doing, you're gonna buy an expensive piece of workout equipment, you're gonna put it in your living room, and what's it really gonna do? Almost everybody is gonna be your news clothes hanger, right, because you are not self-motivated to educate, right? Now that two to 5% of people who are good at just naturally good learners, they might use this. So, you know, talk about the build it and they will come mentality and how do you get market share as an edu-tech company? Well, what you've really done by going with this model is you've eliminated all but 95% of the learning audience because they're not gonna do your thing, right? So our focus, again, is on, we're not, there's a group called the Acton Academy in Austin, Texas that's starting to get really big and they're doing a lot of Socratic Methods style of teaching, right? It requires that you have exceptional teachers who are really dedicated and it's a fantastic method that's not gonna solve this generation's worth of educational challenges, right? We don't wanna leave this generation behind. So what are we trying to do here? So a little bit more about my background. My parents were both educators. I was born in the Navajo Indian Reservation in Winter Rock, Arizona, because my parents had to leave Arkansas to get a good paying job in education. We don't pay good in the government, the federal government does. And my dad was a principal of the school there, my mom was a teacher and when we were about six years old, they wanted to move back home. So I grew up in Arkansas. My dad was the assistant superintendent of the Fort Smith Public School System. My mom was a seventh grade geography teacher. My dad started his PhD program when my sister entered kindergarten. And he got his PhD when she graduated high school. It's the longest PhD program in the University of Arkansas history. His PhD thesis was trying to attempt to measure the impact of educational outcomes by how good the administrator, the principals were, right? Dad's an administrator, you know? He's thinking, we're gonna prove this once and for all. The man taught himself statistics. I remember him going through all this stuff. And I mean, and you'll collect the data over time. Did this thing end of his dissertation? No measurable impact whatsoever, right? I think it was probably a disappointing outcome for him. But it made no difference. There was no way of seeing there was any correlation between good administrators. Of course, there's good correlations between teachers. And I asked, you know, this made me interested in other things that were going on. And so I read about other things. And really the thing, the impact of educational outcomes more than anything, by far, like nothing even came close, was parental participation. And it didn't mean that your parent was teaching. It means that your parents showed up for your football games or whatever. Your parents just showed by, you know, showing you that it was an important thing and making education a priority. They didn't have to teach you, right? And so one of the things that we wanted, you know, a lot of edu-tech that's inside the classical teaching system right now is focused solely on the teachers. And what we wanna do is we wanna focus on learning. If we wanna focus on learning, it means when you also need that we, absolutely, we gotta help the teachers, right? We gotta help them be good coaches. We're gonna enable them. But we gotta give resources to the students and we've gotta bring the parental participation. And we gotta give them an opportunity. Because what is the typical experience of a parent and their child's education system if they're in the classic school network? It is Sunday night, little Amy comes up and goes, daddy, daddy, daddy. I've got this assignment to do my own. And, you know, you may not have seen this subject in 20 years or maybe it's math and they teach math differently and so daddy, that's not how they showed it in class, right? It's not a positive experience. And so we can, we hope, with automation and stuff, build tools and things to let this parent know what the kid's been exposed to, even give the parent, hear some questions and stuff that you can do to, you know, be involved in your kid's education, right? Just help the parents out. Because lots of times parents don't have much of an education, right? It's the first time. So, right? Educate companies think that they've got the one true way. You see all these programming language education systems like, this is the way to learn Python. It's ultimate, it's great. No, people are different types of learners. Some people learn visually. Some people learn audio. Some people learn by just knowing the first principles. Some people wanna know mathematical formulas, right? Which means you need to make at least three types of curriculum if you wanna have the ultimate system. Curriculum is extremely expensive, right? And also, if you're only going after... If you really only market as these people who are good self-educators, well, in the classic VC perspective, you're either a vitamin or a cure is the way they measure you if you're a good investment. If you're just an incremental improvement on some problem, you're a vitamin. You're not a good investment. If you've eliminated the problem, you're a cure. You've got the potential to be a unicorn, right? Almost all edutec companies, their ultimate top-level possibility is only as a vitamin company, right? So what we wanna do is we wanna help teachers be better coaches. And so the most effective way to learn is with a professional coach or a teacher who is focused on your learning goals, right? And the most effective edutec is the one that makes that teacher more capable. So one of the things that we have that has been a big thing for me, I make a lot of domain-specific languages. We deal with ontologies and taxonomies. And also, so my client, by the way, is a company called Axorn in Thailand. They are the largest Thai publisher of educational curriculum. They have 40% of the commercial market, eight out of 10 Thai students who are in a Thai curriculum, whether it's public or private school, are using some of their books. Now they see an existential issue that books ain't gonna be the way to teach another 10 years from now. And so they have bought me on, I have signed on as a consultant as their CIO, to build an entirely new division, a digital division for Axorn in Thailand. And of course we're going to adopt and use a lot of open technologies, open-source technologies, and we hope to also participate and create some protocols to enable edutec to work together with this focus on learning. So this is my call out here for people who are interested anywhere around the world. Our immediate content inside Thailand must be in Thai, which is by the way a challenge for doing a neuro-language programming, or natural language processing, because we don't put spaces between our words in Thailand. It's a computational challenge just to separate the words. But we're working on that. So we have here the concept, we're introducing like an ontology of knowledge. Now an ontology is not specific to any language, right? It's not a cultural thing. So let's just pretend that our learning goal is to learn how to do division, right? So we have the orange box division, right? It depends on being able to know multiplication, which is an ontological concept, which depends on knowing addition, which depends on knowing what natural numbers are. Division also requires subtraction, so you can do the remainder. So we have these concepts and how they're related together. And what we do is we can take Axorn, it's a family-owned company, the Kungtawan, the current CEO, very, very much a guy who wants to have an impact on education. He is constrained by limits of having to work within the Ministry of Education's requirements, right? But he's still had a fantastic impact. He's behind making this happen. We've got 30 years worth of content. We're going through all this content and we're going to ontologically tag it. So imagine that we have the grade one map primes system, right? So we tag numbers and counting. And then also there's some other content. We've got a Sesame Street video. We've got a counting song for pre-readers. We've got a role-playing game over here. So we tag a lot of different content. And now, as students are introduced to stuff, our system will know what content that the students have been exposed to and also the type of content, right? Now, so we want to establish learning goals. Now the MOE in Thailand and almost all countries have specific learning outcomes for certain subjects, for certain students of certain grade levels. MOE has that. Those map very closely to ontological models as it turns out. So the MOE has some learning outcomes that are required by the government, but also the schools, the parents, teachers, students can set learning goals, right? You want to learn about the Renaissance and the Roman Empire. Okay, well, we're gonna generate a custom curriculum for you based off of the curriculum that we already know. That's gonna start with, okay, Christianity, Constantine getting in the Roman Empire and then the schisms and all that. And it was map. Here's a custom curriculum that is focused on your learning goals. So you can imagine if you've no doubt been in a situation where you're trying to learn something and you need to learn the prerequisites and the prerequisites are a couple of semesters worth of material, right? Well, what if you only need, this is one of those 20 chapters, you only need chapters one, four and seven to go to the next step of your learning goal, right? If everything is ontologically tagged, our system will discover that and only expose that to you so you can go through at your own pace, right? And so what is your pace, right? So you have to measure learning outcomes, all right? And what is the one thing that teachers hate? Can anybody guess what is the number one thing that teachers hate more than anything else in the world about being a teacher? And this is at all levels. Sorry? Fair to complain, well, maybe, I don't know, but it's grading tests. Oh my God, because you gotta give a quiz because you wanna know if they're absorbing your material or not, right? But then that means that that night you're gonna be upgrading tests at home rather than doing something enjoyable. It is, you know, bad. And also there's this latency, there's a delay between taking the test and then getting the answer back, right? It may be tomorrow, or if it's a more comprehensive test, it may be next week. And so your mind determining did I really know this material or not and how can I do better at it is got this big time separation where you're not really in the mode. So we want to do gamification over testing. So this is a system called Kahoot that I think a lot of people have encountered and it lets you make little gamified things. So the teacher will have this up on the board and the students will have on devices and they can in real time do their own questions. It's a game, it's competitive, five minutes, thank you. And they can immediately see the feedback as to whether they got it right or wrong and the teacher doesn't have to do the grading. Matter of fact, at each end of each question, this is, so I'm very much into agile and we're doing planning poker. If you've ever done planning poker, everyone estimates at the same time, people who estimate at the very low end or the high end need to explain their estimates so everyone gets a consensus why. Well, so people who vote for the things that are wrong can explain why they voted that answer, why they thought and so the teacher will understand what aspects of it they didn't understand and the teacher will be able to provide more content and by the way our system, because the ontological stuff, will know what these measurements were and will say okay, for this class or even for the student for their homework tonight, this student needs more of this content because they didn't do so well on this but they don't need any more of this because they've already mastered it, right? So we're constantly reorganizing and re-optimizing and oh by the way, it knows what type of content the student has seen. So it starts learning what type of learner each student is as an individual. Now a teacher can't do that for all 30-something kids in their class, right? Our system will start to let the teacher know that and will start to let the parents know that, right? That's what we're trying to build. So this is our continual adaptive curriculum, right? So in agile, we like to discover things rather than prescribe things, right? How effective is this? Get rapid feedback and the things that work we double down on, things that don't work we toss out. Well, we're gonna create curriculums out of existing curriculum that do this and it's gonna do this automatically. So students will be routed to more supporting content for concepts with poor understanding and will skip over additional content for concepts already mastered. We're not wasting time consuming content not relative to our learning goal. And talking about different learning styles I need to get through this quick. We need more time next year. All right, and remember we have this curve, right? Average students, students that are poor, students that are great. And we wanna involve the students, right? Anyone know what is the best way to master a subject? Oh my God, you're brilliant, yes. If you can teach the subject, like the first time you teach it you think you're good at it and then you try to teach it to somebody who doesn't have the core concepts, oh my God. Once you can do that, now you've mastered it. Well, guess what? We've got these brilliant kids, two to five percent. We've got these kids that are being held back. And the brilliant kids are not being challenged, right? There was, my son is one of those kids, the teacher always used to play and he always looks the other way. So is he getting any grades? Well, yeah, he's the first to finish his test. Well, he's bored. I learned to hate school as a kid because I got bored because I was stuck in the standard curriculum. Sammy fortunately needs, you know, we're homeschooled. So he actually enjoys school. I can't even comprehend that myself personally. So what we want is we wanna give these same tools like the cahoots and whatever, and we wanna let those kids build content to help teach their fellow students, right? This will make the top smartest kids, it will push them and will make them better and it will take the kids who are being left behind and we won't lose another generation of people because we have a poor education program. So these are the types of experiments and we're doing dozens of experiments. I've signed up to do this for about two years. So the first year is just a lot of experiments, a lot of things that I met the only, Fosse is so awesome. I met the only office guys yesterday and like a whole lot of their clients in Europe are educators and it totally makes sense. We're gonna evaluate them. We might make that an offering to the schools in there. There's a lot of other challenges I can't get into but if any of this inspires you, please, please, please contact me. I want to be involved with what you're doing. We wanna evolve more open protocols. Like the challenge for CalHOOTS, for example, right? You'll find the good teachers will incorporate CalHOOTS into their program but they have to make the tests and all that stuff, right? A lot of the teachers, especially in these rural areas, they don't have the time to do that, they don't necessarily have the skills to do that. So we wanna make a lot of content for them and it needs to be integrated together because whatever the score was that somebody had on CalHOOTS, no system is gonna know what that kid's score was because CalHOOTS doesn't integrate with anything else. We need that to be part of the larger learning system and learning management systems are really, generally, horrifically awful. They're built for teachers and administrators who are also technical, which just eliminated about 95% of all the teachers. The teachers hate them, frankly. The administrators like them but that's, as we know, the person who's gonna have the least impact on our learning outcomes. So we need to help our teachers be better coaches. We need to help our students learn better. We need to get the parents involved and that is my mission, thank you very much and any questions or comments, I would really appreciate it. Yes, sir. We need to get it. I initially dropped out of a college but now I'm running an academy with a lot of students full degree, one month and I mean, one semester and two weeks University of Arkansas, well that's my educational background. Go at it. So the presentation was amazing. So I just have this thought. We are all talking about education technologies but I believe people are less focused on learning technologies. Amen, brother. So as much as we are focusing on education technologies and how you said you could map these curriculums and tag these curriculums that will help, how do you see that, like we are all good with technologies and how do you see that we can make more technologies that could not just help teachers to, I mean, not just help students to watch the contents through some videos or through some contents but help them experience the contents. So that is what I consider a difference between an education technology versus a learning technology. Learning technology should deliver them experiences instead of just watching the content. So what is your opinion on learning technologies versus a learning technology? You're, we're completely in line and that is the thing, right? And like the gamification is the huge, huge thing and the kids really do love it. I've talked to kids who have used CalHOOTS in their classes and they all enjoy it. They would like to make their own. We're going to enable that, right? It's, you know, you got to make them feel good about themselves on the outcome. And that's the challenge. And let me say it's one of the things that like when I was talking to them, I started talking to them in December and we just started doing this as of February. This is brand new. And I was thinking, okay, I know how to do this for STEM. How do you do this for humanities? How do you do this with kids who do not yet know how to read? That's hard, right? That's a hard because, right, technology is the multiplier, right? You got to find out what is the strengths here that our technology can multiply? And one of the challenges that technology is good at that teachers hate or can't do, like grading tests, right? That technology can take off their hands. And so now the teachers will want to use it. They won't see it as a burden. So if we make the teachers want to use it, we make the kids want to participate in it, that's how we have to do this. And how to do that, I've got opinions. I'm always full of opinions. And we're going to start measuring learning outcomes and try to figure it out. Thank you. Yes, sir. Right here in the front. Let's take a couple more questions. Hey, thank you so much for the talk, Benjamin. Really involved in education myself. So my name is Aditya. And just want to ask you, so Kahoot is great at doing assessments. And I would, I have the opinion that it's one dimensional. Correct. And 21st century learning is not just about getting the answers right, right? It's repetitive. And there's something called Kahoot fatigue. So what would be your comment on making assessment more dynamic? Well, so it's, so it's not just, so I didn't look at Kahoot strictly for assessment, although that's like one of the good important things. But we also looked at it as a way like, you know, kids, I think it's very important that like for my boys, for example, I like them to do projects. So they're bringing in multiple disciplines at the same time. So it's not, this isn't just a math project. This isn't just, you know, English project, right? My kid, remember Tony when he was two years old burnt some toast in the thing and it turned black and he's going, I wonder what that is. I said, well, that's carbon. I said, well, why don't you do something about what the carbon cycle is and learn about that. So from his burnt toast to, you know, plants and the sun and all that kind of stuff, do a project. So we want to provide tools and Kahoot is kind of an inspiration for that with that kind of a model where the kids can create their own content, right? So they can do their own offering system very easy and then do gamified challenges is what I call them for the assessment, intermediate to that. So the kids can see if their own efforts to their classmates is effective in their classmates learning or not. Acton Institute also has this great program where kids, like you're going to do a book report. Kids vote to see if you should get a badge that you accomplish this. So we're gonna do, we're using AI art, which my CEO demonstrated yesterday for our IDs and you can have badges that show you did a good book report. The second time you do it, is it better than the last one? The third time you've done it. Okay, now are you mastering this? So, and it's gonna be voted on by the other kids, but then it gets audited. So if you vote on somebody who didn't deserve it, you might lose your badge. Programs like this that get introduced by the Acton Institute's kids helping teach the kids and the parents or both parents and the teachers are now like agile coaches, right? They're not doing the work. They're not telling them how to do it. They're just enabling and make sure that they put them in a position where they can succeed. And thank you very much. I think Benjamin will have to come back next year to tell us how it's going. I'll see how it's going. Hopefully publish all of this into the open source, right, for all of us to use. So thanks a lot of applause for Benjamin. Thank you so much.