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Daekyo: Self-Directed Learning System Design

PROJECT

CLIENT

Daekyo

SERVICE

  • CX+

INDUSTRY

  • Education

Daekyo partnered with Continuum to introduce a new education service experience in Korea.

Challenge

When Daekyo, the Korea-based global educational services provider, approached Continuum in 2016, their business had plateaued. The firm needed to drive new growth. With a decreasing student population, caused by low birth rate and the emergence of new rivals in the private education market, Daekyo launched a new offering: the Learning Center. The Learning Center is a type of private academy where students can drop in at any time and receive student-centric education. It aims to provide a better customer experience than Daekyo’s core offering: a home-visit, private-tutoring approach.

Unfortunately, Daekyo’s brand identity presented a challenge. Its motto “Noonnoppi,” or “Eye-Level Learning,” emphasized individualized coaching and was hardly embedded in the Learning Center model. Together, we sought to discover new values that allowed for future change and redesigned education services, while properly reflecting the new corporate vision.

Research & Insights

Getting to Know the Learning Community

Our goal was to establish a strategy that would allow the Learning Centers to deliver key messages that properly aligned with the company ethos. To achieve this, we conducted ethnographic research with all stakeholder groups to discover (a) what they valued about education in general; and (b) what their relationship to the Learning Center student experience was. Using feedback from parents, students, and teachers, we defined a set of shared goals.

Truly Putting Children at the Center

To a large extent, educational services in Korea are designed to appeal to those paying for them, rather than the students themselves. We soon understood that the Learning Center’s programming did not properly reflect children’s feedback. The idea of child-centered education needed to resonate better in Daekyo’s service design.

Changes in Parent-Child Relations

In our research, we saw that the typical relationship between Korean parents and children has changed. A new wave of Koreans have broken away from the country’s notion of a parentally-controlled culture. Many parents now view their children as individual human beings, rather than possessions. This change in attitude paved the way for self-directed learning, in which children themselves drive the quest for education and freely talk to their parents about what they want to learn. In other words, it became easier to design a new education service that enlightens children about the importance of continuous learning.

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Solution


Self-Motivating Content and Service Design

Since a child's growth is composed of various elements, it's difficult to evaluate individual development using a standardized criteria. With the input of parents, students, and teachers, our team re-envisioned a holistic service design aimed to inspire intellectual engagement for students and establish enduring relationships among the whole educational ecosystem.

Child-Centered Communication Is the Key

With the assistance of parents, students, and teachers, we first made Daekyo’s communications more child-centered, in a bid to motivate continuous learning. We identified possible conversation flows between children, teachers, and parents. From these, we developed a set of communications guidelines. Parents and teachers would communicate with children according to their learning styles, while children would spend time at the Learning Center recapping what they learned each day. This would better prepare them to converse with their parents at home. This system is expected to result in child-centered communication and richer, more natural, content.

A Customized, Multi-Layered Review of Growth

To develop a nuanced awareness of educational growth—one that not only motivates children to continue learning but also soothes parental anxiety—we created a broad concept called the “growth report.” Aside from test scores, the growth report includes various metrics to understand how each child gains knowledge at the Learning Center, including schedule, duration, process, and pace. This multi-layered review system will eventually translate into developing custom, individualized learning programs.

Results

Daekyo’s new service design addresses the specific needs and concerns of all stakeholders, and initial feedback has been positive. To maximize the result of change, Daekyo asked Continuum to proceed with a follow-up project focusing on the growth report.

Through this project with Continuum, Daekyo recognized the essential truth that test scores are not the only measure of a child’s success. The Learning Centers now assume the extended role of educator, not only empowering children to navigate their own learning, but also letting them know there are various pathways to take in the future.