HeyHi

Ever since the pandemic hit the world more than 2 years ago, schools and learning centres in Singapore and around the world had been affected by the temporary closure and restrictive measures put in place to control the outbreak. The usual mode of attending classes in person had been halted, causing a panic in the education industry. To reduce the impact made by the absence of physical classes, many schools and learning centres scampered and turned to incorporate technology as part of their teaching to maintain contact with their students. Video conferencing services such as Zoom were used to deliver their lessons virtually. 

However, this is inadequate for students to learn effectively as educators were unable to assess students’ performance nor assign worksheets or quizzes for practice to test their level of understanding. This caused the problem of huge learning gaps to surface due to different learning abilities of the students and inability to provide each of them with instant feedback.

Other than ineffective learning, educators also faced problems with inefficient use of their time. Majority of them have been overwhelmed by administrative non-teaching activities such as lesson preparation and marking. According to an OECD report, the average working hours of a teacher per week is 39 hours. Countries like Singapore spent an average of 9 hours marking assignments, which is double the global average. And this is excluding the time spent on preparation of lesson materials. Precious time saved from the mundane non-teaching activities can be better channelled to teaching, conducting meaningful discussion and having personalised consultation with students.

Now, technology has already altered the way of learning and teaching, the ability to learn and teach is no longer limited by proximity. However, most educators have not fully optimised the usage of technology to support them in both their teaching and non-teaching activities. And this is due to the lack of technical knowledge and resources, or simply, “have no idea where to begin”. 

How educators teach has a direct impact on how students learn. Education is essential to children’s growth and development, it is an ongoing acquisition process of knowledge, life skills and communications skills. 

Therefore, it is important to streamline an educators’ work processes to raise their efficiency and personalised education based on data, enabling teaching and learning to take place from everywhere. Students will also have the opportunity to learn at any time, from anywhere.

Our solution is a unique AI-enabled yet human-centric EdTech personalised learning system designed by educators for educators, optimising educators’ work processes based on data, ML and AI technologies.. Our adaptive learning technology offers transparency on learning outcomes and enables customisable teaching to best suit individual learning objectives – from the creation of lesson materials, to the assessment and diagnosis of students’ learning progress and gaps. Accentuating the experience of our virtual classroom with video conferencing and interactivity collaborative whiteboard, we make it possible for educators to provide onsite and online teaching seamlessly, efficiently and effectively. 

Our key features:

1. HeyHi Assessment: A holistic e-assessment and LMS diagnostic solution

• Content Management System

• AI Worksheet Generator for personalised differentiated instruction worksheets

• ~80,000 ready-to-use question bank based on Singapore curriculum 

• Auto-marking with instant feedback

• Detailed analytics reports to identify learning gaps
  

2. HeyHi Academy (Asynchronous learning) : Digital content library with ease of access from everywhere

• Digitise, organise & productise educators’ lesson contents and materials
• Lesson delivery in different modes such as Drip-Feed, self-paced & adaptive learning

3. HeyHi Collaboration (Synchronous learning) : Interactive and Collaborative Whiteboard in Learning Space and Virtual Classroom 

• Synchronous & asynchronous learning to engage students in live online collaboration

• Synergistic teaching tools from ease of drag-drop file access from personal library to live interaction via intuitive writing and drawing

• E-worksheet assignment tool with real-time attempt monitoring and instant coaching to each individual

4. Data & Artificial Intelligence Technology 

• Identify learning gaps through data leading to learning recommendations through AI-enabled Recommendation System

HeyHi supports educators, students and their parents. Our solution offers instant performance diagnosis and transparency across all stakeholders. We simplify digitalisation for educators and empower them to curate personalised education for students.

Serving the Educators

Teaching material:

Instead of keeping and making reference to piles and piles of hardcopy materials, we help educators digitise their teaching content accumulated over the years where they can easily access, organise, manage and update their teaching materials at any time, from everywhere. 

Worksheets/Quizzes:

With easy access to questions in both their Personal Question Bank and HeyHi Public Question Bank, educators can easily create worksheets and quizzes in 3 steps. Equipped with intelligent tools that helps personalise and format worksheets based on their selected criteria such as Level & Subject, Topics, Difficulty Level and Question Types (ie. MCQ, non-MCQ).

Upon generation of the worksheet, educators have the flexibility to edit it by rearranging or replace-and-reorder the questions from the Question Bank. 

After which, they can distribute the work digitally to students who can complete and send it back. 

This will vastly improve educators' efficiency in designing new worksheets from scratch and allow them to customise assignments according to individual students’ learning ability and weaknesses, which was quite impossible to do so previously. 

In addition to assigned worksheets, educators can prepare lesson modules for students to complete under the self-paced learning and drip-feed learning modes. Such learning modes enable educators to teach new students at any time of the year instead of following the standard academic year. There is flexibility to coach different groups of students or individuals should needs arise. 

Assessment:

Educators will receive notification upon completion of the assignments by the students. Fixed answers worksheets are being auto-marked by the system while open-ended ones will be manually marked. Instant solutions are available and educators can also give further timely feedback in text, audio and video format. 

This would greatly reduce the time spent on marking assignments and allow educators more time to give timely and constructive feedback and explanation on the mistakes made.  

Progress report:

Our platform offers diagnostic and analytics based on data collated from the completed assignments. They will be tabulated into a performance report accessible by educators, allowing them to look beyond the basic results and gain meaningful and actionable insights into the students’ learning progress. 

It is a concise and real-time evaluation that consists of strengths and weaknesses of each individual and class, and granular details like mastery of individual topics and attempted questions. 

The detailed performance report will showcase a more holistic individual and class performance where group analysis and cross-evaluation are easily done. 

Personalisation:

Based on the data and statistics from the progress report, educators can take prompt actions to address the areas of struggle and curate personalised lesson plans for each individual to bridge learning gaps. 

Apart from providing more practices on the weaker areas, educators can also identify teaching gaps so they can realign and redesign certain teaching concepts to make it more understandable for the students. This would enhance teaching and learning effectiveness within the same period of time, saving time spent on the less effective “one-size-for-all” teaching for everyone. 

Collaboration:

We promote constant communications and live interaction, mimicking the learning environment in a physical setting. Educators can conduct engaging lectures and seek instant participation from the students via the interactive whiteboard which were previously not possible in a virtual setting. This synchronous learning enables 2-way communications and collaborative learning for a more effective and constructive learning experience.

Serving the Students

Learning materials:

Students have the flexibility to access learning materials at any time from anywhere. The learning materials will always be up-to-date as they are organised and managed by the educators. 

Worksheets/Quizzes:

Students have the convenience of receiving and completing their assignments from anywhere. With auto-marking features, results will be instantly shown and they can reflect on the mistakes made with solutions given. In the event that they have further questions, they can easily flag and send a message to their teachers. 

For learning via self-paced mode, students can access the lesson modules created by the educators at any time and in any order. It is controlled by time period access (ie. Due date / expiry date)  indicated by the educator. 

For learning via drip-feed mode, it is a structured step-by-step learning controlled based on individual students’ progress. This is a gradual learning progression where the next level will only be unlocked upon completion of the earlier level. This mode of lesson delivery enables children of various learning abilities to continue learning and not be limited by any other factors. 

Results:

With full transparency on educators grading, students are also able to access and monitor their own progress. This provides further evidence on their knowledge of understanding and practice more on their weaker topics. Students can also prepare a revision schedule based on this for a more targeted revision on their weaknesses.

Communications:

The need for prompt and 2-way communications can better engage a student to promote a positive learning environment, and thus, encourage a more effective learning experience. Despite learning in a remote setting, the live interaction and immediate feedback in various formats provide students with assurance and confidence that they are not being left out and are still receiving attention from the educators.

Constructive consultation and collaborative discussion can still be done with the educators without constraint by location. 

Examples on Serving Educators & Students:

Locally in Singapore, we also like to do our part for the community and have offered our platform to a non-profit organisation in Singapore – Children’s Cancer Foundation (CCF). We provide support to their Place for Academic Learning and Support (PALS) which is a transitional learning centre for children who are recovering from cancer. The centre provides an infection-controlled environment, a holistic curriculum and personalised academic coaching to prepare the children for their eventual return to school. In addition to supporting their educators to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in teaching, we also created a more pleasant learning experience for the children who are undergoing treatments. A feedback received from one of the children who is undergoing active treatment and has to be awarded often. He highlighted the ease in accessing his learning materials without the need to bring any hardcopy materials, allowing him to do the assignments at his own pace and in a more convenient format. 

We are also involved in partners’ global outreach, supporting children’s learning through our platform. An example is where we assisted our partner in their Math challenge for children in Vietnam during the pandemic lockdown. Children were unable to attend school physically, thus, our partner has created a Math challenge through our platform to engage and teach them. It was a great success as students not only had the opportunity to continue learning, educators also gained more insights on the learners’ profile. 

Serving the Parents

Overview:

Through our platform, parents are well-informed of their children’s progress. Instead of waiting to hear from the educator at only specific times, they now have full transparency on the learning progress which they can access at any time from anywhere. As such, they gain more confidence and clarity of their children’s learning journey.

Our mission is to empower educators with solutions to deliver personalised learning experiences to learners. With a vision to build a world in which every student reaches their full potential and lives the life they most desire. Acquiring knowledge is a lifelong process and we truly think that it should not be bounded by proximity nor time.

Even though we are based in Singapore, our solution is easily accessible from everywhere. We work directly with overseas partners in countries such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and more are coming up. We have a dedicated and passionate customer success team who will assist the educators in their implementation and through their digitalisation journey. We work very closely with the entire team of educators from each school/learning centre, speaking on a regular basis to troubleshoot and customise features that best suit them. 

Our senior management have been in the education industry for decades and some were ex-teachers who had gone through exactly what all teachers do. Our CEO was also directly involved in curriculum reviews, policy and assessment matters when she was with the Ministry of Education HQ. Having gone through the journey with hands-on experience, we fully understand the entire workflow and agony faced, as well as the bottleneck areas. Our platform is designed by educators for educators, built by a team of passionate and experienced engineers. 

With a vast background and connection in the education industry, we maintain regular communications with educators from various streams such as public and private schools, tuition centres, learning centres and individual tutors. We keep our ears open and keep ourselves updated on the evolving needs and demands of the educators in order to both innovate new and enhance existing features.

Our vision and mission are aligned with Solve in helping the underserved educators and learners.

We redesign an integrated solution to make it easy for educators to provide personalised learning effectively in an collaborative and interactive learning environment. Education is essential, thus, teaching and learning should not be limited by location.

We hope to work with Solve to penetrate more markets, making more connections with educators and learners around the world who are directly impacted and will benefit the most from our solutions.

We are unique in our integration of various features and functions on a unified platform. Instead of having various vendors to fulfil various teaching and learning needs, we combine them into one access point. We also offer beyond just the needs of a virtual classroom, adding in interactive and social elements to mimic as close as we can to a physical classroom setting. 

Our solution covers the planning and teaching aspects through our E-Assessment and LMS features, and the social and collaborative aspects through our interactive whiteboard and learning space.

Our vision is to redesign an Edtech solution to make providing personalised learning easy and efficient, in an interactive and collaborative manner. 

We want to increase at least by 100% year on year in the number of teachers using our platform which leads to about at least 300% growth in the number of students who will benefit from using our platform.

We would like to impact teachers in the cities to reach out to students in the rural areas through our platform.

We will partner with Foundations and Charities to tap on the pool of people whom they are impacting. In particular, we would like to reach out to Indonesia and Philippines in the next immediate year.

We have indicators to measure onboarding subscriptions, frequency of use, their profile and role. We will continue to use these indicators to measure our progress towards impact goals, especially among users in underserved communities.

HeyHi is built to be a comprehensive educational platform and we focus on some technologies to achieve this goal:

1. Real-Time collaboration via whiteboard

We created an online whiteboard as the core feature that allows the teacher to freely collaborate with students in real-time. The whiteboard is built as a web app so it works seamlessly across popular devices like laptop, desktop, tablet and smartphone.

2. Video conferencing technology (WebRTC)

HeyHi offers a live video call feature within the whiteboard to make it more convenient for teachers and students to communicate while collaborating on the whiteboard. This video call technology is powered by WebRTC protocol.

3. Role of AI

AI plays an important role in HeyHi platform where we use AI to:

• Make content digitisation faster, cheaper for teachers and organizations.

• Suggest content categorization via Natural Language Processing (NLP).

• Generate personalised worksheets with AI for differentiated instruction (DI)

• Visualise & analyse students learning data to identify learning gaps, strengths and weaknesses.

• Recommend learning contents based on Machine Learning (ML) powered adaptive worksheet generator.

We also work with partners like AWS (Cloud platform), Stripe (Payment platform), Vonage (Video API platform) to achieve best user experience and data security for our users.

The company is co-founded and headed by a female Singaporean co-founder, who has more than 25 years of experience in education. Together with her, she has a Malaysian male co-founder and COO who is 12 years younger, with a PhD in nano-engineering. Complementing the diversity is a 33 yr old Vietnamese co-founder and CTO, who has more than 12 years of experiences in building tech for startups across different industries.

Despite their age, gender, nationality, religious and industry background differences, all 3 co-founders worked perfectly well together, complementing each other in their skills and capabilities. 

HeyHi has a total of 45 staff, age ranging from 25 years old to 49 years old, stationed in 6 countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines and Hong Kong). We have staff from both genders, different ethnicity, nationality and religious backgrounds.

These diversity has never been a consideration in recruitment, as long as they show passion and desire to be part of the team. Everyone in the team has equal opportunities for advancement. Being different is never a consideration and our discussions are always open, with differing views, even those that opposes the CEO or COO. In the end, we will come to a consensus and carry on with the task.

We are on a subscription model and charge schools and learning centres based on number of learners.

We provide educators with an integrated collaborative and personalised learning system with assessment, synchronous and asynchronous learning based on data and AI technologies. 

Our solutions are easily accessible from anywhere via a unified platform. We streamline educators’ workflow processes to raise their efficiency and customise their teaching tools, enabling personalised education to raise their teaching effectiveness. We also create an engaging, interactive and collaborative learning environment to enhance learners’ learning experience and effectiveness. 

A majority of our fund is generated through the selling of our solutions to B2B enterprises in Southeast Asia. We also have funds raised from investors. We are currently in the growth stage and expecting to achieve operational breakeven 15 months from now. 

In 2 years’ time, our coverage will be expanded to South Asia and the rest of the world.

In terms of traction, we have achieved almost 300 % paid user growth from 2020-2021.

We have raised US$1 million of seed capital, and are currently raising pre-series A with plan to raise series A 12 months later.