Wednesday, September 5, 2012

A Small Intro of MGL

Since this blog will mostly be about my work at MGL, allow me to give a small introduction of MGL.

MGL was officially found in May of 2005.   It was found during the boom of Hakwons(Korean word for after-school academies) in Toronto.  I use the word Hakwon here because it is different from what most Canadians expect from an after-school program for math.   Canadians think "tutoring" when they think about extra help: a one-on-one set up between a teacher and a student.   Hakwons in Korea are class/group based where a teacher delivers a pre-determined curriculum.   The student selects a particular program that is suitable for them.  MGL was a Hakwon in this sense.  Our aim was to have our own program that sufficiently helped students to better prepare for university in math and sciences than the programs in school.

MGL started with a group of my friends at University of Toronto, Trinity college.  Math was taught by myself (Hon. Bsc. in Computer Science and Math), physics was taught by Joseph Mocanu (Hon. Bsc. in Molecular Bio and he went on to receive his M.B.A from Richard Ivy and Ph.D. in Mol. Bio. at U of T), chemistry was taught by Peter Yoo (currently a Pharmacist), biology was taught by Dennis Kim (M. Sc. in Genetics) and english was taught by Monica Lee (then a recent graduate from Law School from Western University).  All of us had a passion in education and were very serious about teaching.   We started with the intention of providing the best possible classes to prepare students properly for math/science related programs in university.

However, there was a problem.  MGL didn't have an exit strategy.  We were all committed for about 2 to 3 years but one by one, my co-workers/co-founders decided to leave.  For most of my co-workers, MGL wasn't going to be their career.  We hired new teachers but finding teachers as passionate and serious as the founders, I learned, was impossible.  Inevitably, the quality of the classes that were not taught by myself started to fluctuate, a lot.  I realized then, I needed to build a "system" that was much less reliant on the quality of the teachers.

Essentially after the first two years of MGL, I started looking for ways to build a system.   It was a difficult task.  I also realized, because my specialty was in mathematics, I had to first focus on building a system for mathematics before even attempting to build a system for all of the other subjects we provided at the time. As a result, in 2008, MGL stopped providing all courses except for mathematics.

It was a difficult time for MGL financially, but it was a fun time for me.  I was free to be creative and try to come up with new ideas for a "system" for teaching mathematics.  I was particularly interested in using teaching videos and online tools to deliver videos that complemented the in-classroom experience.  About a year after I started making lecture videos at MGL, I discovered Khan Academy, which was gaining huge support in the U.S..  Seeing similar developments in the U.S. was a welcome confirmation to me that I was headed in the right direction.

Fast forward to summer 2012.  MGL launched the first program that relied heavily on the system we built.  The system consisted of:

  • Over 600+ pre-made work sheet modules for every level from grade 7 to Univ. Calculus
  • Modules were organized in a way for students to work through them in at a steady but challenging pace  
  • Each work sheet covers typically one to two major concepts
  • Approximately 30 modules per grade level
  • Each work sheet module consists of pre-recorded video lectures that were recorded live from previous years
  • Each problem in the work sheet has a corresponding video solution which replicates homework take-up in the classroom
  • All the content above is wrapped in an online cloud system through our site PrepAnywhere.com where we manage student accounts allowing an easy way to assign relative content to the students

This summer was the first time where MGL did not depend on myself teaching the math classes.   In fact, I did not teach a single class of any kind.  Students used our system to self-study with assistance from our teachers.

Teachers assisted students in two different ways.   The first involved students approaching the teacher when they had a question.  We also had a management system which stored each student's daily work done in the classroom.   The cloud* based system allowed instant access of a student's work to both the student and the teacher.  The teachers marked and managed student's work daily. The second way the teachers assisted students was to approach the students when they noticed any difficulties the students were having during the marking process.

*For those who are not familiar with the term "cloud", cloud is used to describe a storage system (hard drive) that is outside of a user's computer.  The storage is typically set up in a powerful computer with larger bandwidth capacity that allow many users to access it anytime through the internet.

The overall system described above is called PrepAnywhere.  Using PrepAnywhere we were able to run a program where no student got lost and every student went at their own pace with the support that they needed.  It was an amazing summer with record breaking student enrolment and positive feedback.  It was so successful, in fact, that MGL is only focusing on the PrepAnywhere classes in the fall term.

The system is not perfect but neither was the older traditional classroom setting.  I feel that with this new system, we are able to zone into each individual student's needs in a group setting.   I also discovered that students love doing math when they are engaged.  Students have a hard time being engaged in mathematics when they get stuck.  Being stuck causes frustration, which is something that happens a lot when working alone at home for many.   Not only did our students have PrepAnywhere and teacher assistance but also peer support.  Having other students that are engaged produces an environment that was conducive to focusing.  Each session was 2.5 hours in length but many students told me that time flies by and 2.5 hours seem short!

Wow, my short introduction ended up a little longer than I expected.  Let me try to wrap up here and tell you that there are many things about this new system that we are continuing to refine and innovate.  I think we are on track to provide an excellent program that can compete with one-to-one tutoring by a very good tutor at a fraction of the price.

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