Wealth Magazine Interview—“Making Education Smarter”: The Founding Vision of WisdomGarden

In March this year, during the Smart City Expo, a video demonstrated on site by the Taipei City Department of Education went viral on social media. It showed plans to introduce classroom facial recognition in the city's high schools, raising concerns about potential human-rights violations and sparking heated debate. Recalling how he cut short an overseas business trip and rushed home to manage the crisis, WisdomGarden CEO YC Heng—whose company is the principal partner on the "Taipei CooC-Cloud" project—repeatedly clarified that, until society reaches a consensus, there are no plans to roll out facial-image recognition in Taiwan's schools.

Even so, Hsing revealed that detecting faces, expressions, and movements within a classroom setting is in fact the newest capability in WisdomGarden's AI image-recognition tool for analyzing classroom context and teaching, slated for release at the end of 2019. The company is already gathering image data at scale and advancing through the machine-learning process.

An unprecedented smart-teaching experiment: bringing ICT into the classroom

Taiwan's education policy has launched a new-generation effort to revitalize and deepen secondary education. The Taipei Department of Education's "CooC-Cloud" is an integrated teaching-and-learning platform built in response to the new curriculum guidelines, designed for emerging learning scenarios such as self-directed learning, cross-school course enrollment, distance learning, and OnO (Online and Offline) blended teaching. WisdomGarden, with its portfolio spanning smart-campus space management, cloud learning platforms, and learning-analytics modules, became the principal partner in advancing this educational experiment.

"All of these changes require introducing ICT and continually experimenting on the ground. For example, the personalized dynamic timetables and self-selected, class-hopping instruction that high schools will adopt place real demands on the allocation, scheduling, and energy management of existing classroom space; and the integration of courses across schools, together with the enrollment systems needed for cross-school course selection, is a severe test for high schools whose digitalization has so far reached only administration, learning sharing, and basic infrastructure." The system is now live at Taipei's Zhonglun, Heping, and Nanhu high schools. Speaking about this flagship project with the Taipei Department of Education, Hsing candidly noted that it has also been a valuable learning opportunity for WisdomGarden, and expressed the hope of extending and replicating it in the secondary-education systems of other cities and counties once the policy direction becomes clearer.

Delivering teaching support and analytics through mobile devices

According to a study released in late 2017 by the Institute for Information Industry under its "Smart Learning Industry Integrated Export Program," mobile learning grew by as much as 70% over the preceding two years, and much future learning will take place anytime, anywhere via smartphones and tablets. Hsing pointed out that from the very start of product development, WisdomGarden focused entirely on "mobile-first teaching support and learning." Its ROOMIS integrated hardware-and-software solution for smart-campus space management, for instance, won both a Smart City Innovative Application Award and an award in the Innovative Digital Learning category at Info Month in 2016. It was followed by TronClass for online (blended) teaching, teaching support, and learning analytics, and the URP academic-affairs management module.

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