SPEECH AND GAMES, March2010, notes.
Speaker:
·
David Topolewski, CEO and Founder, Qooco
Discussants:
·
Margaret Boothroyd
·
Jason Brenier
·
Mike Cohen
·
Farzad Ehsani
·
Yoon Kim
·
Nikki Mirghafori
·
Patti Price
·
Fuliang Weng
·
Jing Zheng
NOTES:
Background on David Topolewski:
David Topolewski is the CEO of Qooco,
which provides online spoken English and Mandarin language training on the
Internet and mobile phone networks. At Qooco, he has responsibility for strategy, finance, service
development, and business development.
He has over ten years of experience in the English as a Foreign Language
(EFL) field, complementing his decade of experience in investment banking
(Smith Barney, HLHZ), software development, and international business,
including positions as general manager and CFO.
Through various software businesses, Mr. Topolewski has produced dozens
of software programs, on several different platforms, ranging from Anpanman for Bandai in Japan, Jackie Chan's Stuntmaster for the PlayStation, TuneLand,
Monty' Python's Complete Waste of Time, and numerous EFL titles. He has taken several companies public, both
as an investment banker and as principal, recruited top talent in sales,
entertainment, technology, education, and management. Mr. Topolewski is a member of the Yale University Digital Committee established
by Yale's president to advise on
digitizing Yale's intellectual property.
He earned his MBA at The Wharton School at the University of
Pennsylvania and his BA in Economics at Yale University.
The main goal for Qooco is to provide motivation and practice in helping
Chinese students learn to speak English.
The games are always in conjunction with a language learning center with
trained instructors. The games are
analogous to drill exercises. Motivating
students to do more drills can sometimes get them to a place where they have
made progress and can then be more self-motivated. The goal is a hybrid of fun
and education. Qooco
has about 60 employees.
There are about a dozen different game types. The games need to be rather constrained in order for speech recognition to work well. An example of the games used is Jeopardy style, in which a question is asked or answered or a blank filled in. This constrains the speech recognition enough that it can give feedback on the correctness of the answer and the goodness of the pronunciation. Sometimes the games are ‘shooting’ games, but the shooting is at words to select them for sentences. There are also some cooperative games in which students play as a team and help each other. Some of the questions have more than one correct answer, but usually there is just one. In addition to language games, there is also a math game --- so that language instruction helps support math instruction and vice versa. Typically the games are used as a reward for making a certain amount of progress in a lesson. (Points are very motivating).
The threshold for scoring has 3 levels (easy, medium and strict). When the student misses the same questions three times in a row, it is noted, but the game moves on to prevent frustration. For some languages, tone patterns as well as pronunciation needs to be scored.
Most of the company’s work is devoted to teaching English in China, though they are also teaching Mandarin. Most of the students are 6 – 12 years old.
The technologies used include automatic speech recognition and tone recognition. Qooco is working with 3 technology providers: Nuance, IBM, and ATT. There is a rich client that can be downloaded to a desktop, but the internet is required to play. Subtitles can be toggled on and off to assist in adjusting the difficulty level. The audio provided by the students is reused to create better acoustic models. Qooco is also offering a client-less service for a mobile platform, using the video conferencing capabilities of 3G. The current tools are web-based but not the consumer level.
Lessons typically start with vocabulary exercises, then listening, then repeating. The approach is basically communicative but includes a portfolio of methods. Since much of English teaching in China has no native speakers of English, the focus is oral communication.
The software system plus center has been evaluated against the normal teacher-only situation. The software assistance enables reaching English proficiency levels about five times more quickly. Of course with the software compared to the control, the student typically has more time on task and more access to native speakers. The kids in the test school are now about one year ahead of the kids in the control group.
The initial approach was a purely online approach, but that did not work well with kids. Parents will pay for their children to learn English, but live instruction needs to be a part of what they want to pay for. The model is now a franchise model – there is some online instruction in conjunction with a language school. There are learning centers and with VOIP the students have access to the software in evenings and on weekends. It’s not clear where all the centers will go: Perhaps near housing areas, or near shopping areas, or both. When the parents go shopping the kids could be dropped off at a center. Qooco has received some inquiries from mobile carriers in India and there might be growth in rural areas. There is already a clientless version running on a social network in China, and this could be a model. It runs in real time and takes seconds to set up. Of interest is the Jay Walker TED talk on ‘English Mania’ http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_on_the_world_s_english_mania.html
Qooco has been one of the sponsors for the Scripps spelling bee, and for the last 2 years, the Chinese winner was a student who uses Qooco.