Learning and education have undergone drastic changes that come with increased access to data and information. This has had an impact on how we research, collaborate, and share learnings. For one, technology has broken down geographical barriers to accessing information. “With technology, learners can make the best choices for themselves in terms of price and fit and geographical boundaries are no longer a constraint,” said Jamie Tan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flying Cape.

A startup based in Singapore, Flying Cape is one of the winners at the ORIGIN Innovation Awards last year in the category of EdTech. In this TechNode Global Q&A with Tan, we learn how the company is addressing the gaps in digital learning, particularly the inefficiencies.

Flying Cape powers SMART marketplaces that are built on its proprietary technology to pave the way for the future of learning. The company’s management team is composed of individuals with good domain knowledge in education and related fields. According to Tan, the current pandemic situation provides both challenges and opportunities in learning and education.

In 2020, Flying Cape set up its physical presence in China with its own local team. With the successful launch, Flying Cape China has been awarded exclusive partnership to manage the Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD) from Rosedale Academy through online learning for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and Singapore. Rosedale Academy is the leading international education company delivering world-class Ontario curriculum to global, digital students and its OSSD program offers admission credits to a network of overseas universities. The program will commence in September 2021 and will be wholly conducted by Flying Cape Singapore via online through Singapore-based teachers.

Flying Cape is currently on track to accelerate the growth of the company within the next five years by expanding into new markets across South East Asia. With its expansion, we also hope to build the ecosystem to bring Singapore Education providers overseas either through connecting to overseas students through the Flying Cape platform or partnering with preschools or international schools by bringing in Singapore curriculum.

What are the emerging trends driving innovation in education today?

Jamie Tan, Founder and CEO, Flying Cape
Jamie Tan, Founder and CEO, Flying Cape

Our core belief is that each child learns differently and that we need to find the right resource, materials and teachers to meet their unique needs.

More education offerings and greater innovation to support learning

COVID-19 has transformed the landscape of education. Before this period, the online learning industry was starting to grow and post-COVID with the brick-and-mortar education centres also going online, the solely online learning providers now have many more “competitors” in the online space. With more players, this allows us to expand our breadth of offerings to our learners. With an increase in investments made into the EdTech industry, we will also likely see more innovative solutions to support learning. Advanced Technologies used to create and reinvent education will help create a more engaging learning experience for learners, and better prepare them for potential challenges for the future.

Enhanced access to education, transcending geographical borders

With technology, learners can make the best choices for themselves in terms of price, and fit and geographical boundaries are no longer a constraint. Searching for the best teacher for various needs will become more efficient, and learners will have a broader range of options ranging from offline to online as well as home-based learning options.

To further improve the range of options for learners, Flying Cape is also working closely with overseas education providers offering a variety of enrichment options such as Chinese language and art from China, coding from Hong Kong, and math courses from India.

What are the three key challenges in education that Flying Cape is addressing?

Flying Cape aims to address the inefficiencies that exist in the education landscape today.

1. Inefficiencies in the matching of learners to education options

A recent survey has shown that up to 66 percent of learners are not learning effectively.  In Singapore and across the world, parents engage in tuition and enrichment classes to help their children succeed academically and explore their interests and talents. However, parents tend to send their children to either well-known enrichment brands or are referred via word of mouth. Often these choices are not based on the unique needs of their child such as learning style, personality, and interest, leading to ineffective learning outcomes.

2. Private Education Providers still operating manually

The majority of education providers in South East Asia are still operating through labor-intensive and manual processes and not harnessing technology to operate their businesses efficiently. This results in high business operating cost for these Education Providers and inhibits their ability to scale.

3. High marketing cost for Private Education Providers

At the same time, many private education providers also do not have the budget or know-how to communicate their offerings and differentiate themselves from their competitors. This cripples their ability to reach out effectively to their target audience and often leads to high customer acquisition costs.

How is your Flying Cape addressing these challenges?

To address these inefficiencies, Flying Cape has built the solutions to shape the future of education by connecting learners to the right education providers both locally as well as globally. Using our proprietary recommendations technology, learners are now able to find the “right fit” during their learning journey based on their unique learning profiles. Currently, Flying Cape powers 10 marketplaces serving learners of different groups, from children to adult learning.

To date, Flying Cape works with more than 800 education partners and provides them with digital solutions to help them move them away from manual processes and allow them to put up their offerings online through easy-to-use features. Without the need for technical know-how, our education providers can transform their operations through automating their processes and along with real-time reporting and data tracking, have been able to reduce their operating cost by 30 percent.

To enhance marketing and outreach, we partner with 12 distribution networks such as the major local banks, financial institutions, and other large organizations. Through our platform, education providers are able to upload their offerings easily and have them delivered straight to a large customer base, driving down marketing and administration costs for everyone. All transactions are integrated back into the ecosystem, enabling Flying Cape to gain the e-marketing insights needed to continually support the journey of Flying Cape’s customers.

What gives Flying Cape an edge amid a competitive EdTech ecosystem?

Validated assessment framework

What differentiates us is the work that we do with the global educational institutions and how we translate research to search results and recommendations to benefit learners. Using a validated assessment framework, learners are able to take a diagnostic assessment on our platform and gain a better understanding of their learning styles and profiles.

Proprietary technology

Our proprietary recommendations engine takes into account the learning profiles of the child, reviews and ratings from the community, browsing history of the user, booking patterns, and individual information such as age, price, location, and interest of the learner and recommend classes and education options that fit their needs.

Scalability

Our flagship platform, Flying Cape for Children, is Singapore’s largest tuition and enrichment marketplace, with more than 800 education providers. Using the same solution, our integrated SMART module is able to cater to various specialized needs for other marketplaces. For example, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) platform, which provides finance and professional development courses based on the ACCA Competency Framework, was launched in weeks which demonstrates the robustness of a solution that is built specifically for education.

Market insights and data

By connecting these solutions together, we have the benefit of collating information about an individual’s lifelong learning journey and can provide market insights and data that can help to improve the efficacy of future matching based on the way people learn.

ORIGIN: Reimagining education amid increased digitalization brought about by the pandemic

 

Featured image credits: Unsplash