Help with education: This online platform is aiming to provide cheap and quality online tuition to low-income families. — Screengrab
LIKE all parents, Wong Xiu Ying wants her children to have a happy and bright future.
The 41-year-old knows the key to such a future lies in giving them the best education possible, but as a single mother to three daughters aged between six and 16 years old, she finds herself struggling to afford any extra tutoring and attention.
She sees her friends sending all their kids to extra tuition classes after school and wants to do the same for her children so they can further excel in their studies.
“But I have to work and my mother, who helps me to take care of them, is too old to be running around to send them to tuition.”
The boom in online tuition during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 gave her some hope of providing such classes for her daughters, but the high fees cut Wong’s enthusiasm short.
“I checked the prices for the popular sites because I think their quality should be good, but they’re so expensive, at least RM100 plus per child every month.
“I can afford it for my oldest daughter now but what about when the other two grow older and need tuition too?” Wong says.
Stories like Wong’s are precisely the reason Raja Yusuf Jamalullail Raja Mufik Affandi and his team at Ivory Task Holdings decided to come up with Gnius – a digital platform incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) analytics that offers cheap but high quality online tuition aimed at bridging educational opportunities between the haves and have-nots.
“The main reason why we are doing Gnius is to democratise education, because right now you have school education which is available to all but tuition is very expensive and tuition creates huge opportunities to excel.
“Those who cannot access tuition have their opportunities reduced, and those who can, the world opens up to them,” Yusuf tells Sunday Star.
Recognising that low-income families have to grapple with providing quality tuition for their children, Yusuf and his team developed Gnius with B40 families in mind.
“Our target market would be the B40 families, creating a product that is affordable to them and solving issues that are specific to them but we also can cater to the non-B40s,” he adds.
One subscription for all
Gnius is an online platform with a simple and clean interface, offering over 15,000 pre-recorded videos covering all subjects, made by experienced teachers per topic, and playable upon demand.
As this is a product aimed at helping low-income families, the price of subscription has been kept relatively low at RM19.99 a month, or RM15.99 a month for those who pay a lump sum for one year.
This price is already low compared with other online tuition platforms, but Yusuf and his team have made it even more enticing to low-income families by offering unfettered access to all the video lessons across all grade levels per account.
This means a family only has to pay a singular subscription fee for all their children to reap the benefits of the video lessons on the platform.
One of the main reasons why they can keep the subscription prices so low is because this initiative is part of a corporate social responsibility initiative from their sister company, investment corporation Tidal Holdings.
“We are a large conglomerate, we have other sectors but we’ve always wanted to build an arm that gives back to the people. And education is an area where we think we can contribute.
“Because there are a lot of solutions you can give to the market but not a lot of people are giving the right solutions, and not a lot of people are giving affordable solutions.
“So we saw a gap there, a noble way where we can offer a service to people and give back through this education platform,” says Yusuf.
AI makes things easier
To further set themselves apart and to solve another pressing issue for time-deficient parents, Gnius has also incorporated three levels of analytics, as well as a weekly report driven by AI to make it easier for parents to monitor their children’s educational performance and progress.
First, the parents can easily see which subject their child needs more attention on with a personalised dashboard showing real-time performances based on assessments after every lesson.
Then, the analysis dives deeper into the microlevel, showing how the child is performing on each topic in a subject.
“This identification of the student’s weaknesses in target topics enables early intervention and personalised learning plans,” Yusuf says.
The platform also provides analytics on the child’s attempt history on any particular topic, to see if they can improve on their own, or if they need assistance.
Finally, parents will receive a weekly two-page AI report card on their child’s academic performance, which includes details such as peer comparisons, the student’s progress compared with the school term’s progress, and advice on specific areas of improvement in easy-to-digest language.
“So as a parent, you can just focus on the areas that your kid needs to improve on.”
However, he acknowledges that while a single subscription tied to an account can be used by every child in a family, the analytics provided will only be tied to one child at a time.
The platform will be officially launched within the next few weeks.
Despite the promising premise of Gnius, among the feedback Yusuf has received is that people may think such a cheap product may not be of good quality.
To that, Yusuf stresses that their lesson content comes from reliable, experienced teachers who have been involved in online education for years.
Not only that, he already has plans to expand the platform in the future to focus more on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), as well as on soft skills which he believes will afford students even more opportunities.
For parents like Wong, Gnius is an initiative that has certainly piqued her interest.
“I will definitely check it out to see if it is suitable for my kids,” she says.
