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Photo: Veronica Tay
In five words, how would you describe what you do?
Building the future of education.
Why is your work important to the world today?
Education is an extremely traditional industry, with far less innovation than other industries. At Zenith, we want to transform students’ traditional education experience into something more data-driven, personalised and hybrid-based. We also want to help teachers teach more effectively and parents be more informed and involved in their child’s educational journey.
We do this by developing in-classroom teaching tools for teachers to teach more effectively while collecting student data to help personalise learning. We also have an online learning platform called Zendora, where primary school students can learn English, Math, and Science through various mediums, such as animated videos and live-stream lessons.
Photo: Zenith Learning Group
Screenshots from the Zendora app. (Photo: Zenith Learning Group)
What do people most misunderstand about what the work you do aims to achieve?
That Zenith Learning Group is just a tuition centre chain that aims to become the largest private enrichment company in Singapore. While we have established ourselves as the largest enrichment company in Singapore’s secondary and junior college market, we do not want our impact to be limited to students in these markets.
What we want to be is an innovative education company that will transform the way that students learn. We have recruited world-class educators from both the public and private sectors, experienced product managers, designers, and engineers from big technology companies (like Bytedance, SEA Group, and Alibaba) and established startups to work together to develop education technology to achieve our goals.
What would success in the work you do look like?
Photo: Veronica Tay
Success is defined by how much we can improve the lives of the various stakeholders in our ecosystem multiplied by the number of stakeholders we are impacting. This would translate into students enjoying learning while also learning more effectively, parents being more involved in their child’s educational journey and having a closer relationship with their child, and teachers being able to teach more effectively while still having strong fulfilment and work-life balance.
In the long run, success would be bringing the proven pedagogies, technologies, and systems that we are developing for the Singapore market to regional and global markets, where we believe we can significantly impact millions of lives.
What would make your bigger work goals easier to achieve today?
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We need more like-minded, passionate, resilient, and talented individuals who resonate with our mission to support us in our journey, especially since what we do will take years and have a high chance of failure.
Additionally, parents see online learning as useful but less effective than traditional learning. A greater acceptance of the role of online learning in a student’s educational journey would allow us to be one step closer to our goal of transforming the traditional way students learn.
Lastly, we believe that other organisations, both in the public and private sectors, are working towards achieving similar goals. Greater collaboration between these organisations, such as through sharing data, research, and resources or partnerships, will allow us collectively to be more likely to achieve our goals.
When you look at the state of the world today, what gives you hope?
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I get much hope from seeing many individuals from my generation vocal about the need to address social issues and acting upon their demand for change by taking matters into their own hands.
Many of these individuals have become founders of impact-focused startups that aim to solve these social problems in a scalable, profitable, and sustainable way.
We need more passionate, resilient, and talented individuals who resonate with our mission to support us in our journey.
Some Southeast Asian examples include Saurav Bansal from Global Artificial Intelligence Technologies (GAIT) and Theodoric Chew from Intellect. I firmly believe that the greatest amount of impact over the next decade will be achieved through the companies started by these ambitious and driven changemakers.
