Online Music Education

Online Music Education provides high quality music lessons to students from all walks of life.

Music education directly affects children's social-emotional learning (SEL), but it is still considered an "auxiliary" subject, while students focus on natural and social sciences. Therefore, teachers of the subjects feel dismayed with their job because their work is not respected. Consequently, Vietnam has inadequate music educational content and well-qualified teachers for music education.

We develop a mobile application to help children gain access to quality music educational content and a tutoring program designed by veteran music educators from Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, and The States. We employ on-device AI/ML and cloud streaming technology to enable connectivity and personalized learning.

Students from all walks of life learn how to be dedicated, persevere, and collaborate through music education. Music can be the preventative mental health students need so they can build resilience to cope with turbulent times, and bounce back from hardship and tragedy.

According to a recent article about student health in Vietnam, close to 80 percent of students have problems that needed to be shared and want a private space in the school to seek help and talk about their problems[1].

The Vietnamese educational orientation for primary and secondary[2] is perfectly aligned with the impact goals of the SEL. Its education system is massive with about 17 million students in 2020 (8.5 million in primary, 5.6 million in lower secondary, and 2.6 million in upper secondary)[3]. But only 2.5% population attends private schools where SEL framework is applied. This is the current limit that makes SEL framework not widely applied and has a strong impact on the development of Vietnamese students[4].

General Music Learning is social and emotional learning because musical experiences help improve emotional intelligence by aiding in the acquisition of skills related to proper understanding, assessment, and expression of emotions [5]. But, Vietnam faces a shortage of 10,000 music and art teachers, and its teacher training program goals are yet to be decided. Consequently, it is challenging to determine the teacher's quality[6].

Our solution to this problem is to combine the widespread use of mobile technology with music education to solve the inequity in social-emotional learning. In particular, we provide free and affordable musical instrument classes, music theory, and AI-assisted practice tools for personalized learning experiences.

Based on our estimation, there are 200,000 musical students who currently take private music lessons either online or in-person. That is a mere 1.25% of Vietnam's K-12 population, which is pretty low compared to 40% in western countries. The market has much more unrealized potential!

To some extent, children are missing out on the opportunity to learn to play music at a young age due to a knowledge-intensive curriculum that our education system set out. Consequently, most Vietnamese parents prompt their kids to take IQ enrichment activities over EQ subjects, in the hope that it can foster their children's school performance.

By interviewing parents with kids taking private music classes, together with our own experience as music learners, parents, and music teachers, we deeply understand not only their needs but also their wants.

• Parents want to know their kids' progress though it's "just a music class".
• Parents want to help their kids with practice but they have no tool or knowledge to proceed.
• Parents want a joyful music learning journey for their kids.

Integrating these insights into our product design, our mobile app gives parents access to students' progress, AI and human practice companion for constructive feedback and a like-minded community of music learners.

I believe that 80% of Vietnamese K-12 students have mental health problems due to negative feelings and mental stress, which is a problem aligned with SOLVE goal to improve literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional learning milestones while supporting a diverse range of learning pace and styles because:

1. We develop mobile-learning applications and leverage app stores to make our solution accessible nationwide and globally even for users with low-end mobile devices. Our product is designed for focused learning with a level-up ladder building foundation and step-by-step guiding. 
2. In order to keep our solution affordable for everyone, and ensure the goal of an inclusive education system, we design and develop an operation setting that can achieve economies of scope. We will make it available to music educators and content creators, so they can produce multiple and varied content under the same operation.
3. Our approach takes scientific studies including but not limited to the evidence-based benefits of music education. For example, we will integrate the Flow State of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi into the music practice and theory program, so that learners can be fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity at their own learning pace and styles.

So we truly believe with SOLVE's mentor and support, we can realize our impact goals.

Quang Mai - Founder & CEO

Based on CASEL wheel's 5 competencies, SEL concepts are naturally embedded in music education[1]:

• Self-Awareness: Musical performance reflect and convey our emotions, and allow us to show a piece of ourselves to others. Such sharing requires self-confidence and self-awareness.
• Self-Management: For students with anxious thoughts about performing, preparing for a performance can be a great opportunity to discuss and practice stress management skills.
• Responsible Decision-Making: Students can analyze, evaluate, and reflect on their experience as audience members.
• Social Awareness: Exploring other cultural musics, helps them develop an appreciation for those who are different from them. Making connections with the emotions and experiences of others through music helps students develop empathy.
• Relationship Skills: Teachers can promote collaboration and communication between students, as well as provide frequent opportunities to build relationships and engage with one another.

While Vietnam's MOET tries to integrate SEL in public school's curriculum at the descriptive level and as a separate subject in private school[2]. We're taking an innovative approach by leveraging the widespread use of mobile technology to significantly enable broader positive impacts from content creators and music teachers participating in our platform.

In particular, how we do it:

1. Pioneer creating content guidelines aligned with the SEL framework, make it available for the content creators to use and adapt to their teaching methods. This will help us achieve the theory of Economies of Scope.
2. Organize online recitals within our app, where students put all SEL Skills into practice from selecting a piece to getting constructive feedback from the community.
3. Provide free and affordable music courses based on student needs with mobile technology and cloud streaming capability.

We're launching beta test in November 2021, so we will provide details at later stage.

• Mobile applications are built on React Native technology that supports cross-platform, high performance, and flawless. 
• Music Score Rendering using Verovio library for high performance and display customization using SMuLF (Standard Music Font Layout). 
• React Animated library is used for developing gamification education content for effective engagement.
• On-device AI/ML Technology using Tensorflow model for instant feedback of practice performance.
• Python backend system with the ability to handle distributed tasks through plug-and-play workers to process and analyze recordings recorded by users and evaluate the accuracy of recordings through the science libs provided.
• The server system includes packaged services using Docker technology, making it easy to deploy on cloud platforms like Kubernetes with high availability, dynamic scale in terms of infrastructure.

Children at risk of social isolation or emotional abuse may be reached through the collective practice of music: Its challenges and goal achieving process while maximizing executive functions[1] and building grit[2]. But, quality music studies is still inaccessible, something belonging to a small group of priviledge elite in Vietnam.

Our Online Music Education solution aims to make music studies accessible and affordable widely to children (and adult) from all walks of life.

Activities: Provide musical lessons in the form of bite-sized video with music practice tools for setting goals, tracking progress and getting feedback from tutors and peers through mobile technology.

Output: Students gain musical literacy. They can perform music either with their vocals or musical instruments, or even make new music of their choice.

Below is the Schematic representation of near and far transfer skills that benefit from musical instrumental training.

Short-term Outcomes of musical training: 

1. Improve listening skills [3][4]
2. Improve fine motor skills[5][6][7]
3. Improve concentration[8][9]

Long-term Outcomes of musical training:

1. Verbal memory
2. Social skills
3. General IQ
4. Executive Fuctions
5. Listening skills and reading

Currently, 97.5% of the K-12 population has limited access to the SEL framework, and only 1.25% study at private music schools. 

Besides mobile app and financial metrics such as:

1. Stickiness rate (DAU/MAU)
   Measures the number of people that are highly engaged with a product
2. Customer Acquisition Cost
3. Employee Satisfaction Rate
   Ensure that team member are satisfied with the company and its role
4. Progress towards Goals and Deadline
   Gain a better understanding of the company's capacity for production
5. Gross Margin
   Reflect on the efficiency of the organization's overall productivity and processes.

Other metrics that also measure both SEL & Music Learning Progress:

1. Practice Time
2. Minute of Performance
3. Constructive feedback received

By 2022, ensure equal access for all Vietnamese K-12 students to affordable and quality musical educational content, including musical instrument study by equitable distribution of funding and resources to children from all socio-economic backgrounds.

By 2024, substantially increase the number of music learners who develop SEL skills through music education by measuring participation rate growth in music classes and periodical SEL self-assessments.

By 2026, ensure that all Vietnamese youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve musical literacy by integrating our solution to enhance MOET's curricula.

Technology-wise, a barrier is building AI/ML models that can analyze sound waves and forecast the musical note and chord in real-time on a low-to-mid end mobile device. The talent in this particular field is rare and expensive, and even if it has, there is no guarantee the model would work.

Stereotypes about music education, since parents want a joyful music class for their kids, they mean it. Music is not valued as much, so it can be replaced by other priorities. Some parents even think music can be taught by anyone who can sing and play a musical instrument. This, in turn, negatively impact our adoption rate within the Vietnam market.

Competition for tech talents is fierce. Local startups have to compete with each other and regional players in projects like eCommerce, ridesharing, banking, etc... Edtech and social impact startups are underfunded while Vietnamese is inflated

Last but not least, the social impact fund focused on Edtech is rare which pushes founders into unsustainable growth and scale to meet VC's return expectation. Consequently, it can affect the long-term gains in terms of social impacts.

Compasison grew up from being alone in a foreign country during his tenure at Hewlett Packard - Singapore, Quang set out to participate in community projects to improve digital literacy of children and the elderly as part of HP's CSR commitment. Those are very first seeds planted in his mind about building education application. 

Till summer 2019, when his housemate brought home an acoustic piano, he started to recall those years of frustrated and boring piano lesson when he was in elementary school. He was anxious about the same holds true for his children, so he started to research music learning app with the goal to make music learning  effective and fun. It was a lightbub moment when he saw his housemate had struggled practicing a stumbling block without any support. That summer, he started to research about using AI as a music practice companion.

July 2020, He teamed up with Thach and Son to boostrap this startup. They all share the same value and vision into a better world where more compassionate and reslient people live in. They strongly believe music education helps kids not only getting smarter but also better mental health for lifetime.

With the amount of data from parent interviews in Singapore, user experience testing, they were able to build and launch the first LMS for music educators. After gathering feedback from stakholders, we pivoted our model, make the music practice app that has capability to grow and scale dynamically.

5 Full-time (Business + Tech + Product)

4 Part-time (Product + Tech + Content)

2 Contractors (Design & Content)

2-5 Freelancers (Content)

Our Business & Operation Team (2pax):

• 10 years in online business and formerly Hewlett Packard's ecommerce specliast.
• 20 years in Music teaching, public and private institue and National
  Representative of Southeast Asia Cultural and Education Network

Our Tech & Product Team (5pax): 

• 20 years in software industry especially game development, large scale marketplace & data managment system, end2end system to mobile app hosting over +1 million mobile game users.
• AI/ML Research & Development capacity

Our Music Team (4pax):

• Veteran music eductators from Consevatories of Music of Vietnam and other countries (Russia, America, France, Canada).
• Well-known pianist and judges of music contest nationwide and worldwide.,
• Deeply understand various musical study program, curricula, methods such as Dalcroze, Kodaly, Yamaha, Suzuki, MYC…
• Music Advisors sitting in Goverment Board.

HCMC Conservatory of Music

Elite Music School

Artiste Music School

Cecilia Music Academy