Decentralized "network of classrooms" cross-cultural educational platform

The problem that Tianmei’s World Academy (TMWA) aims to solve is unequal access to high quality educational opportunities. Unequal access to high-quality educational opportunities perpetuates systemic injustices, exacerbates social inequalities, and hinders socioeconomic mobility. When certain groups or individuals are denied access to quality education due to factors such as socioeconomic status, geographic location, or cultural background, it deepens existing divides and denies them the chance to fulfill their potential.

Firstly, unequal access to education limits economic mobility. Without access to quality education, individuals are less likely to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to compete in the job market. This perpetuates cycles of poverty and reinforces socioeconomic disparities, as those from marginalized communities often lack the resources necessary to access better educational opportunities.

Secondly, unequal access to education undermines social cohesion and perpetuates discrimination. When certain groups are systematically excluded from quality education, it reinforces stereotypes and prejudices, leading to social fragmentation and alienation. This can further entrench divisions within society and inhibit efforts towards building a more inclusive and equitable community.

Moreover, unequal access to education undermines democracy and civic participation. Education is essential for fostering critical thinking, informed decision-making, and active citizenship. When segments of the population are denied access to quality education, it undermines their ability to fully participate in democratic processes and contribute meaningfully to society.

Failure to address these issues can have far-reaching consequences for individuals and societies alike. It perpetuates cycles of poverty and inequality, limits economic growth and innovation, and undermines social cohesion and stability. Additionally, it deprives societies of the diverse perspectives and talents that are essential for addressing complex challenges and driving progress.

Tianmei's World Academy seeks to address these challenges by decentralizing access to educational opportunities and redefining the traditional learning paradigm. By leveraging technology and innovative pedagogical approaches, TMWA aims to create a more inclusive and accessible educational ecosystem where learning can happen anytime, anywhere.

Through its decentralized "network of classrooms" model, TMWA breaks down physical and geographical barriers to education, making learning more accessible to individuals from diverse backgrounds and locations. By utilizing environmental psychology knowledge, TMWA understands what are the environmental elements that interact to create nurturing learning environments, as such TMWA is able to turn any available space into alternative learning environments, ensuring that learning is not confined to traditional classroom settings.

Furthermore, TMWA's emphasis on personalized learning and self-development empowers individuals to identify their unique learning needs and preferences. By experiencing different learning environments and methods, individuals can maximize their potential and overcome the limitations of a one-size-fits-all approach to education. In TMWA there is no “bad learners”, only learners who haven’t figured out what learning environments and methods work best for them.

Overall, TMWA has the potential to democratize access to high-quality educational opportunities and promote greater equity and inclusion in education. By leveraging technology and innovative pedagogical approaches, TMWA can help break down barriers to education and empower individuals to fulfill their potential, ultimately contributing to a more just and prosperous society.

The Story behind Tianmei's World Academy

In an era defined by rapid technological advancement and global connectivity, TMWA proposes an innovative approach to democratizing access to education and empowering individuals worldwide. Its mission is to turn equal access to high quality educational opportunities into a right, rather than a privilege. By reimagining traditional learning environments, TMWA aims to break down barriers to education and create a more inclusive and accessible educational ecosystem for everyone, regardless of gender, nationality, sexual orientation, cultural background or age.

At the heart of TMWA's solution is its decentralized "network of classrooms" model, which aims to change the way education is currently delivered and experienced. Traditional education systems often rely on centralized institutions and physical infrastructure, limiting access for individuals in remote or underserved areas. TMWA disrupts this model by leveraging a web 3 concept to create dynamic, flexible and nurturing learning environments that transcend geographical boundaries, thus taking the “classroom” to where the learner is and not the other way around.

After 7 years of constant research and prototyping, TMWA has developed its own educational framework taking into consideration both the physical environmental elements that influence learning (e.g. layout, sound, light, colors etc.), the social ones (e.g. language, NLP, culture, social media access, etc.), as well as the psychological impact that these might have on the learners’ inner motivation to learn.

With this framework, TMWA is now ready to scale and disseminate this knowledge by training more educators in different parts of the world to use these methodologies in offline settings, while inviting them to do more research and observations in their own communities to understand how these methodologies can be localized within different communities, further promoting mutual learning and understanding.

TMWA aims to leverage cloud-based technologies to facilitate anytime, anywhere access to educational resources and content for these educators, so that they can recreate nurturing learning experiences in offline settings wherever they are. This is because human interaction is key for learning due to the self-regulating effects they have on our parasympathetic nervous systems, something that online learning will never be able to achieve.

Beyond aiming to leverage technology, TMWA recognizes the importance of community and collaboration in fostering a supportive and nurturing offline learning environment. Through its decentralized model, TMWA creates a global network of educators, mentors, and learners who collaborate and exchange knowledge across borders and cultures. By fostering a sense of community and belonging, TMWA cultivates an inclusive educational ecosystem where individuals from diverse backgrounds can thrive and realize their full potential and where “different” is perceived as a strength and not as something “wrong”. When "different" means "wrong"

TMWA is currently looking to scale and further transcend geographical barriers, personalize learning experiences, and empower individuals to access high-quality education anytime, anywhere. Through its commitment to inclusivity, collaboration, and lifelong learning, TMWA is poised to shape the future of education and create a more equitable and prosperous world for generations to come.

In the long run, TMWA aims to serve each and every individual regardless of gender, nationality, sexual orientation, cultural background or age, thus stay true to its mission of turning access to high quality educational opportunities into a right, instead of a privilege.

The platform came as a result of the Team Lead personal experience and observations towards why current education systems are not addressing inequalities, but instead creating more of them. The Team Lead is someone who comes from a scarce economic background and had to work a full-time job since year 2 in university just to be able to support herself financially. This experience took a great toll on her academic performance, although it has given her a wealth of cross-fucntional knowledge and professional experience. However, her academic performance is being judged by society according to the same standards as someone who had no financial worries and whose time was spent only on studying. As such, for the Team Lead, credentials from well known univiersities are solely a representation of financial status (with few exceptions) with absolutely no weight in terms of individual potential. At the same time, current educational systems are mostly "one-size-fits-all", not being able to accommodate individual learning styles. As such, anyone who is not able to follow the teacher's methods is considered a "bad student", without anyone questioning if the teaching methods are inclusive and diverse enough to develop individual potential. Personal observations and a trial and error approach to reasearch (TMWA Research Report) have allowed the Team Lead to design a systemic solution to the worlds various social problems: Tianmei's World Academy

TMWA's educational framework has been prototyped based on trial and error research across several years with participants expressing feedback like "having a healing learning experience" or "not knowing why they couldn't stop talking when they usually are not very talkative". Even though the number of people who joined Tianmei's World Academy's learning environments is just slightly above 1000, but the way in which TMWA measures its' impact is not through numbers (quantitative), but through actual feedback (qualitative). Throughout the same number of years, the business model has also been prototyped into a "platform ecosystem", "customer funded" business model so that it doesn't have to rely on external investment or donations in order to be self-reliant and financially sustainable.

There are a few reasons why I am applying to Solve (reasons are not mentioned in any specific order): 

1. I truly believe the solution proposed by TMWA has the potential to become a global solution and I see participating in Solve as a mandatory step in achieving that in a shorther time. 

2. I would like to further explore the scalability of the business model in other countries outside of China, as currently the prototyping is very heavily China-based. 

3. One of the barriers that TMWA has in scaling is finding the most efficient way to train new facilitators who are able to use the educational framework in their own communities. Another challenge is finding the most appropriate technology that could serve this purpose, but also allow the platform to develop faster.

I believe that being part of Solve will allow me to come up with new breakthroughs to build up on what I have already created. 

By employing environmental psychology research frameworks, Tianmei's World Academy is able to take a more systemic approach to understanding human mindset and behavior, as well as how to design nurturing learning environments that promote diversity, inclusion, equity and cross-functional dialog. Many times in many areas of our lives we are taught to "focus" on only one thing, but "focus" distracts us from the interconectedness of things. "Focus" also limits perspective and impact. By zooming out and looking at the overall system, TMWA becomes a systemic solution for society's various problems beying able to provide solutions and intervene in various parts of the system so that the overall system can overperform. 

A lot of the problems in the world start from unequal access to information and education, because educational resources are not evenly distributed. This will create different perspectives for different people, which will then lead to risk of conflicts and misunderstandings, as often, people are chasing the "right" thing, instead of understanding and celebrating differences in perspectives that we could learn from. Through its educational framework design, TMWA emphasizes that "right" or "wrong" are often matters of time and perspective, thus encouraging independent thinking, diversity and inclusiveness for all participants and stakeholders. Apart from the educational framework design, TMWA also creates knowledge sharing programs in an attempt to democratize access to knowledge, but also shed more light on how different environments are influencing diversity. One such programs is “Environmental Psychology for Diversity and Inclusion”, a knowledge sharing project aimed to support Tianmei’s World Academy’s mission to turn equal access to knowledge into a reality for anyone, beyond geographical barriers, gender, nationality or any other labels that create division, instead of unification. Through this project we want to promote mutual understanding in cross-cultural, cross-gender and cross-functional dialog by sharing knowledge related to diversity and inclusiveness, conflict resolution, education and mental health. 

Another issue identified to have a great impact towards the achievement of all the SDGs is the outdated definition of business as having as sole purpose profit making. This creates a divide between the "bad profit making people" and the "good charity/philanthropist people". However, NGO's rely on other companies' profits (through CSR campaigns) or philanthropists's donations who make their money from profits. Apart from NGO's being financially unsustainable models, the underlying idea is that the bad thing in the picture is not "profit", but how it is used (The way we think about charity is dead wrong. ) For this reason, through its proposed buisness model, TMWA also aims to redefine the purpose of business as providing solutions for social problems in a financially sustainable way. This way, profit comes second after natural protection and human wellbeing. 

The indicators used in TMWA to measure impact are focused on qualitative assessments based on the changes that people express having experienced by participating in the learning experiences. One way to collect the feedback and measure impact is through the "Mindfulness Stage" that any learning experience will have at the end, when participants can reflect on their own change and growth throughout the learning experience. As previously mentioned, participants in our learning experiences have expressed having "healing learning experiences" or "not knowing what happened that they couldn't stop talking when usually they weren't as talkative".

Another way to measure for impact is to follow-up with participants and members to see what they were able to create following the participation in learning experiences in TWMA. One such outcome is the creation of a MOOC course for Creative Thinking by a university professor who took part in one of the workshops. 

TMWA is currently exploring the best way to use technology to scale up and also maximize its impact, so one of the main reasons to apply for Solve is to gain additional support in overcoming this challenge. 

Due to various reasons, I am currently a solopreneur having developed the solution through constant feedback loops over several years, so no contact details available at the moment apart from those already offered for the Team Lead.

7 years

One of the ways in which I ensure diversity, equity and inclusion is by recruiting based on interest and potential, rather than asking for CVs. One pilot program in this area is an Apprenticeship Program for University Students to which students can apply based on the skills they want to improve and not based on what they are studying in university. After they are being matched to projects that they can be involved in according to their interests and skills they want to enhance, clear objectives and deliverables are determined together with the students and they also get additional professional mentoring throughout their apprenticeship program. Student feedback is available here.

Another way to ensure equity to access, diversity and inclusion is through the positioning of the branding that doesn't focus on gender, age or other similar labels, but on the type of people we want to attract, i.e. curious, willing to go out of their comfort zones, open to different perspectives. With this approach, our current followship is made of ~60% women, ~40% men, >90% aged between 30 to 60 years old. Among our members we have people from different professional backgrounds (e,g, designers, educators, entrepreneurs, etc.), with different sexual orientation (we have members who have self-identified themselves pertaining to the LGBTQ+ community), as well as in different stages of life (e.g. married, divorced, single, with children, without children) and evryone is learning from each other without any labels-related stereotypes.

Another way to ensure diversity is through the brand story. “Tianmei's World” represents a set of values that the founder wants to make available for everyone. None of us gets to choose where we are born or the education we receive, yet these things are going to influence the resources we will have available as we grow up. As such, “Tianmei” is a person who just happened to come across some values as a result of where she was born and raised, that she felt more people should know about and be able to use. Anyone who feels empowered by these values is "Tianmei", because anyone else could have been born in the same environment and had the same experience. As such, "Tianmei" is just a set of values, and not a person. The “world” represents the environment that we are trying to create through the values that we promote and the work that we do.

Tianmei's World Academy aims to become a B2B2C platform ecosystem customer-funded business model. Due to current limitations, the services are divided in B2B and B2C to further gain cash flow to reinvest in adoption of technology that will allow us to bring both the B2B and B2C services onto one platform and achieve the B2B2C model.

On the B2C side our main sources of revenue are membership fees, tailored learning programs fees. Even though our offline learning experiences also have entrance ticket, these are calculated to cover just for the expenses in organization. 

The highest part of our revenue (70%）comes from B2B services: educational marketing, talent development trainings and workshops (leadership, cross-cultural communication, conflict resolution, etc.), ESG and DEI-related consultancy services. 

Tianmei‘s World Academy's development has been funded solely through service provision (customer-funded). Although numbers can't be made available, but the fact that the organization is still developing is a proof that the business model is self-sustainable.