The future of learning
Edupops is a new social learning platform with short, one-minute videos. It’s focus - micro-learning with a social aspect. Co-Founder Thuong Luu sat down to discuss Edupops and her insight on the future of social-learning.
New start-up Edupops learns from education and entertainment to turn learning social.
Edupops want to help people utilise their time better and learn on the go.
“When you go onto your social media and you try to follow an account you’re interested in there’s always the clutter you find. So, you have the propensity to use social media, yet you find it very crowded and diluted with useless information that you don’t need there.”
Most people have the propensity to use social media because it is just natural. Mobile phones have become a common part of everyday life and one can become, almost, non-existent if they don't have accounts on different social media platforms.
Our phones have become an essential tool in daily life.
“I would even say a lot of people consider it as a part of their body, right? People fear not having it, not having their phone fully charged and they rely heavily on their phone in terms of checking the time, emails, communication…”
Edupops wants to leverage this habit and turn it into a good habit for people in the hope that it will help people to learn better and faster whilst promoting a lifelong-learning mindset. Luu explains that there is so much negative conversation around the use of social media and that this is something they would like to transform into a more useful experience that can add value to peoples lives and contribute to the widening opportunities for people to learn new things in the digital age.
The learning journey
The reason behind 60 seconds is because the retention rate after one minute drops down to 65% and after two or three minutes it's even lower - from what the start-up have observed. Many topics can be summarized within one minute and the the idea behind the platform will be to provide a space for online courses which would be segmented into a series of shorter videos no longer than 1 minute. The aim is to give people the information, quickly and readily available, making the learning experience less overwhelming and more engaging.
“The attention span of people today is very low, so once you have everything broken down in such small chunks the barrier of entry to the learning experience is also much lower.”
The team have built the platform on research into the learning journey, micro-learning and other online courses, gaining insight into popularity of courses, dropout rates and engagement time. However, the more interesting use of data for the start-up is in how they apply it to enhance the learning experience. The platform works using an AI-supported, tier-ranking system for individual videos. This enables the platform to understand when learners are skipping through topics quickly and select videos suitable to learners current level. It will also support repetitive learning providing frequent concept/ topic refreshes.
Micro-learning
Micro-learning is “bite-size” learning, building micro-steps and pieces of information to understand a concept or topic. It allows us to learn what we need in a very short span of time by receiving precise information needed.
A core feature of micro-learning is the use of repetition. It can be used for topic discovery to traditional research and a lot of companies are already using micro-learning to increase engagement with their employees because it's more actionable. The format of the learning is much, much more digestible for people.
“Today, there is the paradox of choice because we have so much access to anything we want, with one click. Back in the day when you had to learn or you had to or research something you’d have to go to library, you have to look through books… Today we are exposed to so much information that it’s been hard to navigate. Where do we look first or get the source?”
Traditional social media, what we consider today as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, are too diluted. They are overly saturated with content and information that's not often relevant with a lot of it being driven by hashtags that are not related to the post - in other words they are also too broad. The algorithms used in social media force people to film content that they would not necessarily do - exchanging usefulness for relevance. Adding music, dancing to something that's not completely related to the content because it will have a positive effect on the video - more engagement, more likes and drive the video up in other people’s feed.
Edupops wants to give users control over their feeds and greater control over the information they consume, so they get to choose what they're interested in and when. Eventually, Edupops plans to make the platform a self-regulating ecosystem where they are not going to be the ones controlling every single creator and all of the content that goes into it.