TikTok learning is superficial - Hanna Celina (Kinnu)
Hanna Celina - co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Kinnu
Hanna holds a PhD in Computer Science specialized in Human-Computer interaction design, has a background from Futurelearn & Google and is based in London, UK. The company is developing an app for curious people to learn effectively with the goal of changing the way billions of people learn.
The full transcript of the podcast can be found below for those who prefer reading rather than listening. The podcast is hosted by Frank Albert Coates.
FA: You have a really interesting background. From finance, from education and EdTech. So I'm curious what made you go into EdTech?
HC: So my undergraduate degree is actually in political science and politics of education reform in the US and France. So, I've always been interested in education. And actually, I got into finance because it was one of those safe career paths. And for many, many years, I just continued being randomly interested in education, working on some projects on the side. And actually, at some point, it just became clear that if I'm willing to work on designing learning experiences on all of my weeknights, and all of my weekends, then maybe this is trying to tell me that I shouldn't have do it as a full time job.
FA: How did you end up starting Kinnu? And find the team?
HC: So Kinnu, was not actually my first EdTech project. How I got into EdTech was a bit earlier. I was still at Google, I was working in finance and I was learning programming and I was doing a course on Coursera at the time. And I was just mind blown by how an online learning platform that teaches you something so useful, succeeded in removing all of my favorite aspects of university education, and leaving just the content. And I thought that this is just not the right way to do this. And I don't like saying, oh, it's just the wrong way to do it and not coming up with, well, this is how I would do it.
So then I started working on this community project, where we were doing synchronous online courses for high schoolers on the topic of sustainability. And this very quickly escalated into a PhD, actually, that I was doing alongside my career at Google. And I think when I was about 10 years into my career in finance, and kind of getting offers for interviews as a CFO, the feedback that I was getting was; you don't really seem to want the job. So, I went then, and I'm like, yes, you know, there's something to what you're saying. So I actually went and asked for a person who was on the very, very edges of my social network on LinkedIn, and asked this fairly random guy called Alex for career advice. And, with this outsider perspective, he was able to give me some of the most insightful feedback, were basically he just asked; What on earth are you doing in finance, you clearly care about education. And it was really an aha moment. And this is how I actually ended up at FutureLearn.
But, Alex didn't just stop at that. He actually introduced me to founder after founder after founder after founder and planted this entrepreneurial bug in my head. And when he introduced me to Chris, I just remember, we were just reminiscing with Chris about the incredible conversation that we had. And it is just one of those when you start talking, and you just don't want for the conversation to end. And what we were discussing is how to just completely rebuild a learning experience from the ground up based on first principles. So this is how I met my co founder, Chris, and he has been working with his co founder Abby for the last 15 years on other businesses. So there we were, a trio and then actually everyone, other than our editor who's working on Kinnu, is the team with whom I was collaborating when I was doing my PhD at Newcastle University. So, yes, I just joined the two streams of my EdTech and intrapreneurial experience together. And we're all having mad amounts of fun trying to rebuild the learning experience from ground up, based on first principles.
FA: So tell me a bit more about the company and what you do. And what stage are you in right now?
HC: Kinnu is a clearly a learning company. We are building a learning app for curious people to expand their knowledge and learn in the most effective way possible. So we started building the product, we started the company about a year and a bit ago, we launched the product in the summer of last year. So we've been around for a little bit more than than six months. And, yes, it's basically the only map based learning app that I know about where we're really trying to combine everything that all of us know from our research about the science of learning, on the one hand with the science of engagement on the other, and then combine it into a compelling, sticky learning product.
FA: What does success look like? And what's your secret sauce?
HC: Wow. I mean, we in our category, we have what I would consider really a resounding success and that's Duolingo. So, we want to do to the world, what Duolingo has done to language learning. And we're trying to become the Duolingo for literally any other topic. And we are building our app based on similar principles. So the learning design in terms of the science of learning that really inspires us is this space repetition algorithm, which I mean, it actually works, even if it feels a bit counterintuitive. And, the gamification aspects as well, which really help with engagement. So, what does success look like? We're looking at it really, from a user point of view, if we can help people learn things that they never dreamt they were capable of learning, and we can enable them to learn it better than they would and faster and forever than they would using any other method. Then I think we have succeeded, but in order for this to happen, we need to kind of crunch through the usability barrier, because the most effective learning does not necessarily feel like most effective learning.
So from study after study after study based on spaced repetition, it basically feels like eating dry unsugared cereal. You know, just that's the reality of it, like 80% of people who have used any kind of spaced repetition based learning, say that it's not effective, it doesn't work for them, they're learning less and then they get tested. And you know, you see that actually the learning that they have increases and day after day the kind of cumulative knowledge increases as well. So one of the challenges and success metrics that we're going after is just the stickiness. Do people come back? How many people come back? How often do they come back? And with what amounts of passion? Do they come back to the app?
FA: And that makes me think about the impact, in terms of learning, how are you able to measure that in some way today and make it valid in the marketplace?
HC: Yes, this is probably the hardest thing for us to solve, the learning. Like, how do you measure learning? And, it's kind of funny, because I was recently listening to a podcast about Duolingo, where they said that they gave up trying to design a learning metric, because it was just too hard, and they focused on engagement. But you know, the flip side of that, is that, how effective really is Duolingo for learning, we don't know, because we can't measure it.
So what we're trying to go for is more than trying to figure out one learning metric, we're trying to come up with a methodology. So right now we're in the process of designing and test where you measure what people know about a topic before they start learning with Kinnu, then you put them through the kind of Kinnu learning trajectory, and then you emerge on the other end, and you see what they take out of it by exposing them to kind of similar questions that they had in the first place to measure over the long term like, what did they know before? What do they know after? And, of course, in spaced repetition systems, you're asking people questions all the time. So it's not about just regurgitating the correct answers to the questions that you've seen many times. What we're actually trying to do, and the way in which we designed this test is, it asks for things that you have not explicitly learned in the pathway. So in the course of learning, but things that if you fully understand what's in the learning pathway, you will be able to answer these questions.
So actually, if we can demonstrate this, and if we can design a way to make this kind of pre, post test, more scalable than than this really does show learning. And I mean, the golden metric that you want to look at is transfer of knowledge. So that's why we designed this test in such a way because we want to see whether people are able to transfer what they've learned on Kinnu into similar related and far less related questions by fully comprehending the depth of the concept.
FA: One question around the long term vision for Kinnu. So, you've shared a couple of areas that you're looking at and exploring. And you're mentioning things like atomic credentialing without examination, and areas that essentially are in transformation today. How do you see Kinnu in the very long future related to some of these topics?
HC: First of all, I see us covering all the content. So all of it. Right now we have about 60 pathways and we're making three more per week. And we really would like to scale it massively to cover all of undergraduate level curriculum in the next 12 months or so. Which would sound completely insane if I said it six months ago, which I did say six months ago, it sounds insane. But, now because of generative AI with which we actually are making a lot of our content, it actually is perfectly doable and on the first step in our trajectory of building Kinnu. I think that bit that I'm really, really excited about right now.
And that's what's mostly in my mind for the next 12 months, is the economy that we're building into the app. So a lot of learning apps, they do kind of lip service to gamification. But, it's not truly deeply integrated into how the app works. And what we want to do with Kinnu is to build a system of kind of sinks and taps of stuff that gives you credits and stuff that you can spend your credits on, that gives a whole other level of value to the things that you learn. So this sounds fairly abstract. But, one of the things that we noticed, for example, that radically improved our engagement was that we gave people the possibility to vote on the direction of product development with their streak. So our engagement almost doubled for the long term when we implemented this. And also, we noticed that these learners then became super engaged in telling us well, did you consider doing this, did you consider doing that on our Discord.
And this idea that what you do in the app can give you access to unique opportunities, or to have your voice heard really, really resonated. So the more engaged you are with the app, the more your learning should theoretically give you access to better opportunities. So for example, access to in person events, or access to special learning sessions, or access to exclusive learning groups, or maybe an extra vote that you can use for content development direction. But, building out this entire system, really is from a learning design point of view, just wonderful, because you can use the very nicely defined system of nudges that is used everywhere else in gaming, to give people feedback on where else should they be going on their learning journey. And, that also gives you incredible depth of data about how people are learning and why are they learning and what's working and what's not working. So I'm just really, really excited about building that out from zero to hero over the next 12 months.
FA: Wow. That's very exciting. And I guess with so many ideas and opportunities, how do you focus and decide, prioritize among all of these wonderful things everyone needs?
HC: Yeah, prioritization is it's never easy. But, we kind of do the hard work in thinking. For every idea or product direction we try to do, we tried to do a lot of the kind of concept work by exploring the area; whether through advertising, whether through user research, or just kind of like, conceptual vision building.
We try to do a lot of it through user research, through discussions about where to take the app. And then we just literally will have three, four or five ideas that we've explored, maybe spent a few hours every week for a period of a month. And then we just keep one. So that's what I mean, like the hard work, we do it and kind of the conceptual state. And then once we commit we go all in and I mentioned before that we have this in app voting system. So this has been incredibly useful for getting live feedback on some of the ideas that we are exploring, and it's incredible because we get a chance to get feedback from our really engaged users, users who kind of stick with the app. And, it further drives engagement because the product is developing in a way. They wish for it to develop. So it's a wonderful, almost accidental product change that we did back in December that I'm surprised that more companies don't have; 1. a live visible to other users feedback mechanism in app, and then 2. a community because the depth of feedback that we get from our users and our Discord community, is just absolutely wonderful.
You know, I love all of the happy feedback that we get in our app store reviews from users. But it's so valuable to see our most engaged users really push us to the limits with, did you think about that? What about this? Did you consider this from this angle? So honestly, with this kind of level of communication with your community, you become much more confident in prioritizing because you get live signals before you actually spend a single minute building code.
FA: I wanted to ask your opinion on; is TikTok the future of learning? How much do you learn from these? Also other edutainment based services like Masterclass.
HC: I just hope TikTok learning is not the future of learning, because one of the things that really bothers me is that we are catering to the shortening attention spans; like shorter and shorter and shorter attention spans like say it in 10 second, say it in 15 seconds. Yes, I can, but is that really good learning? I think were things like TikTok learning are fantastic is they open up conversation, they start curiosity, and I think that some of these things are absolutely great. For example, there's a lot that somebody who knows a lot about Excel can learn from Miss Excels TikTok channel. If you haven't seen it, it's genuinely great. But, it's not the only way. And I think, part of why we built Kinnu the way we did, is we saw that lots of people learn from all kinds of social media. But, your first point is clear, maybe your second point is clear. But, where do you go next? It's the concept of just building your own path through social media as content.
So, we try to divide up everything that we do into short cards, like a medium article with 150, 200 words, but you can get chunks, and you can get recommendations about a logical and related next step to learning. And even so, with the content development that we're doing, and the learning design development that we're doing, we need to think about the next step. So we need to think about application, we need to think about community, we need to think about discussion, those are problems for future me. TikTok learning ends at this interest level, and it does not expand. So it cannot be simply all that there is to learning, it's very superficial.
FA: You touched upon who you measure yourself up against in terms of competitors. And you mentioned Duolingo. What other actors are there that you really are looking at in this space?
HC: So there's a lot of really cool learning apps that that I genuinely love. I mean, Duolingo, of course. We love Duolingo, we learn a lot from them. But, we try to prioritize, whenever there's a choice to be made between better gamification and engagement and better learning, we try to prioritize better learning where I'm not sure what Duolingo does. Other apps that we really like, are Brilliant. So again, you know, very visual, very cool, trying to tackle teaching some of the most complicated things to teach in a unique way. And that's probably one that that I would say is right. We sometimes look at MOOC providers as well, but mostly for just the topics that people want to learn about less how to do it. We were kind of walking down the not so well trodden path of trying to get people to learn with text where everyone else is going video first. And so this is why we're not looking at TikTok learning, we're not looking at YouTube shorts, etc as much as we are on proper gamification apps. And just in general, what I would say is that, we try to see generally what's available in the Learning App space, but we really tried to just focus on the first principles. I feel personally that I spend way more time looking at research and education and computer science and cognitive psychology, or apps that are not in education, but more like Clash of Clans for gamification, than I do on actual learning apps. And I mean, part of it is because we just don't want to solve the problem the way in which it has been addressed so far. We really just want to come up with a unique and science based way to do things right, as opposed to just following trends blindly.
FA: So let's move over to learnings that you've had since you started the company. Could you go into a bit more detail on what's been the biggest challenge since you started the company? And how did you solve it?
HC: This is a hard one. I think the one that we have to solve, we have not yet solved. And it's literally been in my mind over the last four months. And we are not there yet. But we need to get there. And it's how to organize all of it. And how to provide a fantastic browsing experience. Because, if you think about the internet, and the history of the internet, everything has now converged into searching. But, searching assumes that you know, what you're looking for. And I had this experience when I walked into a library the other day is that it's wonderful that you'll find things that you were not looking for explicitly. It's just because they have been very intentionally put on their specific shelf to be related to things that you probably will will look for so that you can easily find them.
And I think that this is the kind of experience that we're trying to build in the app. And that's the kind of experience that really helps you with this self motivated inquiry and learning. And we do have a map based interaction, but it's not yet at a place where it needs to be to really be something that you just want to show to your friend. You know that this is related to that? And did you know that this happened at the same time as this? And we have some ideas, but this is one challenge that we've had since we started the company and we have not not figured it out yet. We've made incredible progress on content creation. We've made incredible progress on gamification and learning design. But, how to provide serendipitous browsing experience is one of those challenges that we're in the middle of solving.
FA: It's a good challenge to have. So as you've moved through the startup experience, any particular resources that have helped you along the way?
HC: Resources that have helped me? The Garage is actually a wonderful resource that has helped me. And, part of it it's just such a lovely community. People who are trying to do something in learning, yes, we're all competitors, but yes, we also love learning from one another. And supporting the broader ecosystem and with this kind of remote working framework, sometimes it's just absolutely wonderful to be able to reach out to other people trying to solve similar problems, but coming at it from different angles. So that's definitely one.
What else? Just in general, I would say, being part of the startup community and seeing what other founders are up to and talking to them about the, the daily struggles like. I think that the best resource that I've found so far is just becoming member of different communities or expanding my personal network to really discuss these challenges that I deeply care about solving.
FC: Is there any advice that you would like to give other ed tech startups that are, uh, getting off the ground?
HC: The one guiding principle that we have is just look at the trends, consider the trends, but don't follow the trends if you don't think that they don't make sense. And, I think that it's very easy to get caught in, particularly in education, what the current way to view the system is.
And right now, for instance, we're in this like problem based inquiry cycle. So there's like, the fact-based cycle, you know, rote learning, like fairness tests, examination. And then there is the kind of project-based learning, like you need to allow people to explore and do whatever people want in order to stay motivated.
And I think we're in that cycle right now. So, it's important to understand where these trends come from, but also you need to just find your truth. So, what is the unique piece of insight that you have about learning? Because if you're trying to build something that's unique and that resonates in a way that does not exist anywhere else, provides something worthwhile and valuable, then you need to be able to find your own answer to the question, how can people learn better?
FC: And one very, very important question is; why all the octopuses?
HC: Well, for that you should take our learning pathway about animal intelligence. Because one of the things about space repetition and all of those scientifically proven methods of effective learning is that they feel weird and alien and octopus intelligence it's just completely different from how we think and how we operate.
So that is what inspired us. Plus, we really wanna help people explore different topics and have their fingers in too many pies. And you know, an octopus has eight arms that she can just put all over the place. So this kind of broad level of explore and broaden your horizon, I think an octopus is a very wonderful mascot to help with that.
FC: Anything else that you want to share with our audience today?
HC: I spent 10 years of my life in a career that did not suit me at a personal level. And it’s just to figure out what it is that gives you energy. And, I think if you're working for a startup, it's, it's, it doesn't just stop being like, Ooh, I'm in a startup now. It's great. It's like, no, you need to be able to ruthlessly prioritize what is it that gives you energy and figure out how to do it extremely well. And then everything else, find somebody who's better than you at doing it. And hire them or get them to collaborate with you, whatever it is. But, just finding that personal truth about what makes you tick and where you can actually build something amazing is very important.
