MindAppz – Disrupting the Malaysian education system

MindAppz, an EdTech startup that focuses on education marketplace and advanced e-tuition for Malaysian primary and secondary students is the Top 30 Startups that have been selected for this year's Virtual Global Accelerator Programme Cohort 05 (GAP) by Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC).

What started as an idea in 2017 turned out to be a game-changing point for MindAppz when they won the MSC Malaysia Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards (APICTA) for the category “Best Of E-Learning.” After the feat in APICTA Awards 2017, they decided to incorporate the idea into their own company in January 2018.

MindAppz sought to find the main education problems faced by modern parents. The common concerns raised by parents are that they do not have enough time to guide their children with studies, especially if they have full-time jobs. For non-working parents, they are worried that they are not qualified enough to provide proper guidance for their children. Parents also spend a huge amount of money sending their kids to private tuitions and buying exercise books.

But students nowadays love spending more time on smartphones and gadgets. Slow learners always have problems with what to learn, how to learn and how much to learn. When there are problems and worries, there are business opportunities. So, to directly address these problems faced by parents and students they are building two amazing products, E-Tuition as a one-stop after school learning platform and MindAppz education marketplace to help students become lifelong learners.

At MindAppz, students are at the centre of their universe. They believe that every student is different and has different learning needs. They work relentlessly to solve student problems using advanced technology and help them learn better. They have thoughtfully designed E-Tuition to ensure that it is a one-stop after-school learning platform.

They noticed that there was a huge gap in the way students learn and how the concepts could be learned better. It is memory-based learning driven by fear for exams rather than love for learning. So, they started creating systems and learning experiences that made learning fun and easy.

E-Tuition has complete learning pieces for students from Standard 1 to Form 5 including Live Classes, Revisions, Adaptive Practice Questions, Target, Quizzer, Videos and Learning Analysis that come together seamlessly to give 360° learning. E-Tuition also uses gamification and artificial intelligence assisted learning algorithms on top of this strong infrastructure, to create personalized learning paths for students. E-Tuition brings some of the best teachers in the country to teach in their Live Classes. Their mission is to help students become better and lifelong learners. They made learning accessible, effective, engaging and personalized. It made learning contextual and visual and not just theoretical. Their aim is to make every student fall in love with learning and when that is achieved, they naturally will score good results.

The advantage of integrating technology in education is that it not only enables one to take classes from the best teachers but also personalizes the way students learn. It allows a combination of teachers, video lessons and interactive games - explaining concepts by relating them to real-life experiences. This improves understanding and retention of concepts for life. It makes complex concepts visual and contextual, which will help students understand not just the "What" of learning it, but the "Why" and the "How" as well.

To reach out to their target group i.e., students, MindAppz have obtained approval from the Ministry of Education to offer E-Tuition Free Trial for all the primary and secondary students in Malaysia through their E-Tuition School project. This will help them to create a strong brand presence. The brand targeted urban parents seeking high quality and innovative delivery of content to their children while making learning fun and contextual.

Nationwide expansion is on E-Tuition’s cards. In the last six months, their E-Tuition platform has seen great adoption. E-Tuition will revolutionize the way students are learning across the country today, making students fall in love with learning.

On the other hand, MindAppz education marketplace is a platform that connects the merchants, who invented the teaching solutions, with the buyers without going through the conventional method of doing business. It is tailored for the region, providing both buyers and sellers with an easy, secure and fast online education shopping experience. With a wide selection of educational product categories ranging from academics to personal development & language, health & lifestyle, culture & nature, business and audiobooks, MindAppz aims to continuously enhance its platform and become the region’s Education Marketplace destination of choice.

In order to ensure the system is successful in attracting more Merchants to sell their contents in ebooks, video courses or online tests, they implemented a win-win revenue sharing strategy for both parties that is different for Independent Merchants, publishers and established brands. MindAppz’s system is also built in such a way that it allows the merchants to profit more when they promote their products by themselves. This is done using the unique Promo link provided for each product as an invitation to any of their contacts to purchase the respective product. This will indirectly promote MindAppz to other potential users and consequently, increase the numbers of existing users.

They also launched MindAppz Affiliate Programme earlier this year. This provides an opportunity for Malaysians to earn extra income by promoting materials sold in MindAppz. Their programmes and initiatives are for all Malaysians and designed to open up additional income avenues, provide new skills training and offer opportunities to thrive in the new Digital Economy.

All products will be uploaded into the M-Store; a menu that serves as the online shelves for merchants to display their products, and as users, to browse other products in either a broad or categorical manner. In some cases, where the merchants wanted to share free materials in the M-Store, other users can obtain them without having to pay anything. This occurrence will eventually add more reading materials to MindAppz’s vast online store and inadvertently increase the awareness of its system.

The products range from online video courses, online tests, e-books and e-tuition for school students. Although the company has expressed its interests in opening up to other industries, it will remain faithful to its commitments towards the education industry. Due to MindAppz’s high marketing potentials, it attracted quite a number of interested parties, eager to become Merchants on their education marketplace. Currently they have around 200 plus Merchants onboarded offering more than 1500 online educational products.

MindAppz has a huge competitive advantage as they are creating a synergy between online learning and education marketplace. Their unique selling proposition is good quality education, bringing quality teachers to every student, one-stop after school learning platform, engaging content and creating lifelong learners. 

This content is provided by Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC).

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