Smart Tutors, Literally

INTERVIEW

Smart Tutors, Literally

Synkers is the ed-tech startup that perfectly matches students and teachers

By Audrey Nakad

56 W hat is the concept behind Synkers and how does the system work? Synkers’ story began when the founders noticed the constant struggle of students and parents in finding trustworthy and qualified tutors. As a solution, we created Synkers, a mobile application that easily connects learners to highly qualified Co-Founder and CEO, Synker private teachers. Finding the right tutor can be done in three simple steps: select the course, choose your preferred tutor, finally, book a session with your chosen tutor.

The Synkers app eliminates the hefty 5-hour search spent on average to find a private tutor. The application utilises dual business models; B2C, whereby any learner can book a tutor; and B2B, for universities and schools to utilise the platform for their own students. Synkers is now operational in Lebanon and the UAE and teaches more than 60,000 learners. The team is working hard to build the largest community of synergetic knowledge exchange to make education more accessible and personalised.

Is the data derived from the app used to optimise the learning and teaching experiences? Our assessment tests aim to gauge each student’s understanding of the course material as well as identifying their individual learning style (visual, kinaesthetic, etc). The Synkers app then processes this information and matches each student with the right tutor.

Continuous improvements to our algorithm aim to provide learners with an optimum and personalised learning experience. To ensure satisfaction, Synkers collects data regularly after each tutoring session to track the learner’s improvement over time.

How is Synkers measuring its success? With a customer satisfaction rate of 99% across Lebanon and Dubai, Synkers’ greatest metric of success is the happiness of its clients with the service. Meticulous tutor selection and efficient training programmes with the British Council ensure that our tutors deliver quality sessions and adapt their content based on the learning style of their students. The second crucial success metric is the improvement in results and grades. For learners, the application has also spearheaded an average increase in results of 21% after seven sessions. Thanks to these two metrics, we were able to attract a large number of new learners and tutors organically.

As for tutors, Synkers has not only facilitated thousands of career development opportunities but also aided them in developing hard and soft skills essential in the modern business environment.

How are the Middle Eastern nations responding to new technologies that are allowing the community to develop the knowledge of the community? Often, our Middle Eastern clients are sceptical towards online tutoring as well as online payment methods as opposed to face-to-face interactions and cash on delivery payments. However, when we educate our clients and show them how easy and effective this solution is, they end up trying the Synkers platform. Once they use the application and enjoy their experience, they become our most avid ambassadors.

Any hesitance towards new technology quickly transforms into fascination and excitement towards its potential to transform the educational landscape.

achieve our overarching goal of stellar performance - “Adaptive Learning” is on the horizon as the next level for personalised training.

Which novel technologies is Synkers planning to implement in the future? As a technologically progressive application, Synkers is actively developing a plan to create an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tutor that elevates the tutoring experience to new heights of customisation. The shift from offline to online tutoring is being led by our engineering team which is introducing a new technology whereby the tutor will be able to explain the whole session using our intuitive note sharing technology. Going forward, we will start analysing the sessions and learning behaviour of students in order to see how private tutoring is impacting their performance and we will rely on AI to optimise the matching between students and tutors. How do you envision the education sector to look like in future smart cities? In the near future, grade levels will not be uniform for students across all subjects. Rather, each student will be assigned a grade level on a subject-to-subject basis via knowledge assessments. Such a framework acknowledges individual variations of understanding, interest, and pace of learning as it relates to different course material. This way, natural affinities for certain humanities or science subjects can be recognised and nurtured from early childhood. Different learning paces for various courses can be catered to in a more intimate manner than the current educational structure.

Additionally, our data scientist team will interpret data from students’ first sessions and feed our AI with the proper metrics. Such AI implementations will vastly improve the quality and accuracy of Synkers’ e-services, from creating compatible matches between tutors and learners to precisely computing student improvements after private tutoring. However, AI alone is not sufficient to

The Synkers app eliminates the hefty 5-hour search spent on average to find a private tutor. “ “