Education assistant

Running Head: ENTREPRENEURIAL/INTRAPRENEURIAL PTOJECT IDEA

Describing the Problem

We will inevitably encounter big and small problems in our intrapreneurship or entrepreneurship. A qualified entrepreneur or intrapreneur should use their knowledge or strategies to face the difficulties and tried to solve the issues, instead of giving up during the half.

The problem our group wants to discuss here is a real-life problem encountered by our group member Zeyu. He started his own business during the pandemic. He was an agent of Shuo Duo Duo Technology Co., Ltd. The main product of this company is a pad that helps those English as second language learners to learn English. The Pad can help users to create a native language environment, especially for young children. There are more than 20000 English books; cartoons; videos and movies. Users will be arranged at different levels based on the first test result since they created their account and using the Pad. The design concept of this Pad is studying English by acquisition, which was raised by Doctor Stephen Krashen. Krashen believes that there are two ways of human language development: One is "acquisition", which is characterized by nature, intuition and subconsciousness, such as learning the mother tongue. Krashen advocates that both children and adults are capable. The second is "learning", which is characterized by conscious repeated practice and memory, such as grammar and vocabulary lessons in schools and cram schools. Krashen believes that only "acquisition" is the correct way to learn because it focuses on the essence of language rather than formal "learning". Besides, "learning" usually involves many corrections (e.g. grammar, spelling), which may reduce students' interest (Krashen, 2003). We all believed the sales of the Pad would spur continued growth. However, the result was out our expectation. The problem we encountered was the low sales and the low reputation. We want to solve this problem not just because of economic considerations. Still, the most important is we all believed this product would save a lot of time for those children who need to learn English because English is not a subject but a tool.

We think our team can solve this problem because each of us has our strengths. Congzi Wu had an internship as a new media operation assistant & documentation staff. She assisted the marketing team with developing and implementing social media strategies. For our problem, she can use her experience from her internship to develop a feasible advertisement or promote our product using a way that is more acceptable to the public. Ning Jin majored in economic and had an internship as an investment analyst. For our problem, he understands what investors want to know. In the future, if investors are needed, we can better introduce our products to investors. Xiaoquan Liu had an internship in an early education institution as a manager; he is mainly responsible for training teachers. For our problem, he understands the needs of contemporary parents better and can better relieve the concerns of parents. In the future, he could train teachers and teach some strategies about treating young kids to teachers to improve the quality of the classes. Zeyu Liang was the one who knows the most thoroughly about this product. For our problem, he could introduce the Pad for those parents who have an interest and serve those parents who already purchased our product. Based on what we listed above, we all believed that we are qualified to solve this problem.

Describing the Solution

After group discussion and plentiful research, we have eventually decided to take advantage of entrepreneurial skills to alleviate the problem of the low popularity of our APP. First of all, entrepreneurship refers to those pioneering ideas, personality, will, style, as well as quality in an entrepreneur’s subjective world. The concept first appeared in the eighteenth century, and its meaning has been evolving ever since. Numerous people equate it merely by starting a personal business. But most economists agree upon the fact that the notion of entrepreneurship bears a much broader definition. To some economists, for example, an entrepreneur is a person who would voluntarily take risks in starting a business in the presence of profitable opportunities. In contrast, other economists tend to emphasize that an entrepreneur is an innovator who introduces innovative products to the public.

Meanwhile, some economists are inclined to believe that entrepreneurs are those who develop new products and services that are in demand but not yet available. In essence, entrepreneurship is a concept that focuses explicitly on “creating new value”, rather than “setting up new companies”. Hence, the key to entrepreneurial management is whether the entrepreneurial process could bring new things into the current market activities, including new products, new services, new techniques, new management systems, etc. Entrepreneurship refers to the pursuit of opportunities that do not yet exist within the scope of resource application but are likely to create new value for resource application in the future. Accordingly, it is safe to state that entrepreneurship is the driving force for the formation, development, and growth of new enterprises.

Expand the business in multiple areas

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, knows very well about the power of positive thinking, which can be reflected from his motto, “Every challenge is an opportunity.” Bezos started from a relatively small startup and ultimately turned it into the world’s largest online bookstore. Nowadays, Bezos has led Amazon from strength to strength, selling almost everything, ranging from books to furniture. Today, Amazon is known for its annual revenue, that is more than $10 billion. It could be attributed mainly to Bezos’s positive thinking, which has turned challenges into opportunities, through which Amazon has continuously grown over the recent decades.

According to the spirit of entrepreneurship, our solution is to increase the methods of instruction. In the era when the Internet is booming, online English courses emerge as the times require. For instance, you could easily make an appointment with an instructor online to teach your child at any time at any place. Nowadays, parents are usually busy working and thus do not have sufficient time taking care of their children's study. So, choosing to let their children study online would save time for those busy parents. However, the majority of parents would choose in-person sessions for learning English for their children, simply because, from their perspective, children’s cognitive abilities and habits of learning make them inadequate to take courses online and focus on them well. Education can generally be categorized into active learning, as well as passive learning. According to the U.S. National Training Laboratory’s research, it has been confirmed that different learning styles can determine the average efficiency of learners, which is well known as the “learning pyramid”.

Additionally, studies have shown that children absorb only 5 per cent of what they are taught through listening, 10 per cent through reading, 20 per cent through listening and watching, and 30 per cent through demonstrating and applying. All of those teaching methods belong to passive learning. In other words, children would quickly forget what they have learned, making it challenging to store knowledge in their long-term memory. To replace passive learning, some effective learning methods would include group discussion (up to 50 per cent absorptivity), hands-on exercise (up to 70 per cent absorptivity), and teaching other people (up to 90 per cent absorptivity).

Strengthen the promotion of the APP and take full advantage of online media

The tentacles of the Internet have extended to every corner of human life, revolutionizing our ways of living, and also have changed the mode of corporate marketing. An enterprise’s brand image construction is no longer just the traditional propaganda through mass media. Increasing enterprises are now relying on the massive power of social networking and online communication to carry out brand promotion to achieve the purpose of brand image construction and product/service promotion. On the Internet, information related to a brand is permanent, in contrast to outdated newspapers and magazines that are rarely accessed, and television programs that are never seen again. On the Internet, no matter a piece of information is in the form of text, news, comment, picture, video or any other document unless it is deleted, the data will continue existing forever. They can be potentially spread all around the Internet. Right brand image online, once generated, can continue to influence the users of the Internet. Similarly, if it is a bad brand image or negative information related to an enterprise, it would also bring the enterprise with the pain that the enterprise can no longer eliminate the impact. Therefore, we are inclined to increase the popularity of our APP through online media, which serves as a reliable choice for leaving the positive brand image of our APP in the mind of the public. (Smith , & Paul,1997)

Firstly, we ought to make full use of the advantages of integrated communication of new media. Specifically, multimedia reporting should be integrated. Moreover, typical publicity should be innovated in the form of expression. Simultaneously, new platforms, such as mobile media, should be skillfully and carefully used. Secondly, we should pay more attention to the interactive feature of new media. To accomplish that, entrepreneurs must be good at promoting their brands with a relatively objective attitude. In the era of new media, only by enhancing the influence of positive brand image online can brands shorten their distance with the majority of their users, making people believe subconsciously in the quality of education. Thirdly, we definitely should pay more attention to the construction of a delicate ecology of public opinion, along with the typical two-way promotion of publicity.

Adjust and increase the APP’s range of services

According to the investigation and analysis of numerous primary and secondary education APPs in the APP store, the current primary and secondary education apps can be roughly divided into four categories: online teaching videos, homework Q&A, real problem banks, and real-time tutoring. The video APP for online teaching is the earliest APP for primary and secondary school education. This kind of APP inherits the gene of online school in the PC era and then has been grafted to mobile terminals, including smart phones and tablets. Teaching video is divided into recorded classes, live classes, and online one-on-one sessions. Among those three categories, recorded classes can be said to be the earliest form of online education. In the mid-2000s, a significant number of online schools arose rapidly. One of the most crucial advantages of recorded classes is that they can be played limitlessly after their production so that the content of instruction can be better presented (Li，Jianqing, 2013). However, with the ceaseless advents of new educational models, more and more shortcomings of the traditional models, such as recorded lectures, are becoming increasingly conspicuous to their users. The biggest problem is that there is no interaction between instructors and students, so the students could not feel any sense of participation through their learning processes.

Moreover, students are often easily distracted while watching the videos, undermining the efficiency of learning. At present, many primary and secondary education APPs are still keeping the mode of recorded and broadcast classes. Nevertheless, its proportion is gradually decreasing, with live classes are becoming increasingly dominant in the market.

Hence, we will turn our thoughts to homework Q&A, real problem banks, and real-time tutoring, to attract more students to download and share our APP.

Modify marketing strategies; Design products based on users' preferences, and Create more exciting themes.

According to a survey of students who use educational APPs(C.，walIer，2015), the researchers found that students would pay more attention to the fun that is associated with the APP. Since the majority of users of educational APPs are teenagers, from their point of view, anything interesting tends to be more favorable. For example, many students asserted in the survey that they were attracted to several engaging activities before they used the APP for study, such as giving prizes for quiz contests and competing with other users. Many apps will also introduce some virtual characters to attract students accompanying them while they are studying, and regularly collect some users’ interesting stories or hand-painted works and share them with other users, to render the products even more enjoyable to use. Such activities are generally very well-rated: The ratings of them are usually even higher than those of the in-app free courses. Simultaneously, the regular opening of some interesting themes will form a high expectation among those students, for which they will be likely to be loyal to several specific APPs, which is also conducive to the launch of other services within the APP, as well as other APPs by the same developer, thereby effectively expanding the scope of business (Zeying，Won.2010).

Lastly, we, as developers, should focus on both the comprehensiveness and authority of the content of our APP. For example, in terms of the in-app exercises, we should not only provide users with correct answers but also attach them with a thorough analysis of the knowledge being used, so that students can truly master the knowledge and understand why the correct answers are valid, instead of merely memorizing the right answers.

Sponsorship for the enterprise

Sponsorship can be divided into four stages: planning, negotiation, implementation, and feedback, among which the first two stages, namely planning and negotiation, are the most significant, and thus are emphasized in this assignment.

I. Planning phase

First of all, the goal of the plan should be clear enough: to convince the other party to collaborate with you. What is worth thinking over here is a relatively simple question: How to conduct the persuasion? In my opinion, the stage of effectiveness is essentially a two-step process, namely the evaluation of advantages and disadvantages of both parties, and a plan for cooperation that is proposed to benefit both sides, creating win-win situations.

In the process of looking for partners, special consideration should be given to our advantages and the other party’s convergence point. For example, different departments of a school should collaborate during an event, making contributions to its success in specific aspects based on their respective strengths, as well as advantages. For instance, the department of information technology services ought to use its resources and network to find computer vendors; the department of physical education should look for the most cost-effective sports equipment. If each department cooperates with other ones by making contributions to the project with its strengths, while taking the school's collective success into account, the school will be more likely to succeed.

II. Negotiation phase

In the process of negotiation, what should be emphasized is the method of publicity, which is, what you could do and how you should prepare to implement it, instead of blindly exaggerating the benefits of promotion. Because advertising is also a kind of investment, advertising bears a certain amount of risk just as other types of investment. There are two meanings here: First, benefits ofpublicity are not equal to their economic benefits in the short run, the pros and cons of the judgment should be based on the long-term effects of commercials; Secondly, the benefits of publicity are ultimately realized through the process of implementation. Therefore, which methods of publicity to choose and how to implement them should be emphasized and ought to be consistent from the beginning to the end.

Feasibility of the Solution

Digital education under the environment

Digital education is spreading all over the world. For example，the European Commission has released its Digital Education Action Plan（2021-2027）recently. The plan outlined by the European Commission for Europe obtained a high-quality digital education vision. It emphasized the cooperation between Europe and other countries, to realize the importance of technology in education and training and let the national education and training system adapt to the current digital age. The action plan has two strategic priorities:

Firstly，to promote the development of the high-performance digital education ecosystem，it requires countries to improve the infrastructure, equipment connection and professional equipment of digital education. Train teachers and trainers with digital ability and provide them with high-quality learning content, safe operating platforms and tools. The Commission will also promote a hybrid model of remote and parallel online learning, develop a European framework for digital education, help member states access the Internet, purchase digital equipment, and use e-learning platforms.

Secondly, to improve digital skills and transformation ability，countries are required to develop students' necessary digital skills and digital literacy from an early age, including the ability to combat disinformation, a deeper understanding of advanced digital skills such as data-intensive technologies such as artificial intelligence, and to ensure equal rights for women in digital research and careers. The Commission will also train teachers and educators in digital literacy, provide learning resources for developing artificial intelligence for schools and vocational education, and create a Europe-wide digital skills certificate.

The European Commission will also set up a European digital education centre. The centre ACTS a "think tank" for Digital Education in Europe and aims to contribute to supporting policies, practices and the development of Digital Education and through competitions such as the Digital Education Hackathon to encourage users to create solutions to the educational challenges of the Digital Age.

Another recent research has shown a similar result. On 20 October 2020, the National Literacy Trust released a new study that found an increase in the number of children and young people listening to podcasts during confinement can increase reading participation, especially for boys and secondary school children. Consumption of podcasts has been steadily growing in recent years, with most podcasts being free and accessible via free apps on mobile phones and laptops (such as Spotify and iTunes) or dedicated apps (such as BBC Sounds, Podbean and Audible). New research suggests that podcasts can be used to support children's learning, allowing them to learn more broadly beyond the classroom.

Here are several reasons children and young people learn more from reading podcasts and audio materials during a lockdown. The most common reasons are: they have extra time in the day; Podcasts can help you relax; The example of a podcast creator. Emily Best, director of the National Literacy Foundation, said: "As a charity, we’ve long known that audio can provide new opportunities to engage children and young people with literacy – and our latest exploration into podcasts builds on this. We were excited to discover that podcasts not only support children’s reading engagement but that their rise in popularity during lockdown could present new opportunities for the classroom and distance learning, particularly in terms of getting pupils interested in different topics, encouraging further reading around subjects and nurturing a love of storytelling."

Theories of Entrepreneur and Intrapreneur

An entrepreneur is used to describe a personality type (Brown & Cornwall,2000). Brown and Cornwall (2000) discovered that entrepreneurs are prudent risk-takers who enter into opportunities with a clear plan. They focus on building long-term economic security for their families and employees. They have a set of skills as follows: 1.Recognizing change and the opportunities and threats it creates. 2. Reacting proactively rather than reactively. 3. Harnessing one’s creative potential. 4. Understanding the difference between an idea and an opportunity. 5. Developing effective action plans. 6.Understanding the difference between forecasts and budgets. Also, refer to（Robin，2008），Entrepreneurship is often described as the ability to recognize and exploit opportunities. Identifying opportunities is intentional and idiosyncratic as they are identified as opportunities is a novel and conscious event (otherwise, the entrepreneur would be doing nothing new).

Both intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs are about innovation and risk-taking. Still, there is a clear difference between the two: Firstly, intrapreneurs is an innovation under the existing organizational environment, which should consider the material, human resources and other constraints of the organization，while entrepreneurs generally does not have this restriction. Secondly，intreprenurs can obtain the support from the existing organization's system, management, resources and many other aspects while most entrepreneurs shall get their venture capital investment.Thirdly，intrapreneurship has limited within the company radical changes within the scope, even if the failure, will not affect the survival of the entire organization, however，entrepreneurship is more like a "gamble"; What's more, intrapreneurs pay more attention to how to coordinate the short-term and long-term interests, and make detailed plans, budgets and plans, while entrepreneurs focus on the pursuit of short-term profits, and takes advantage of opportunities to avoid making detailed plans.

According to the above, We are more prepared to be intrapreneurs. Because the intrapreneur does not need to take the full risk, due to our lack of experience right now, we prefer to be agents of Shuo Duo Duo Technology Co., Ltd, which provides online English programs for K-12 students. We want to help this company to explore the market with our marketing strategies and funding resources.

Opportunities

We can see the opportunities as follows: In the Internet era, information spreads rapidly, and new media has changed people's traditional understanding in its innovative way. Teachers' teaching is also a new field, from the formal face-to-face instruction to video teaching and other information teaching means. The information-based curriculum and curriculum base's construction is significant market demand, and the market prospect is vast. Our online English learning program follows the digital learning trend. We would love to expand our online learning program offline with AI and VR technology to start a whole different learning era.

References

1.Brown, R., & Cornwall, J. (2000). The entrepreneurial educator. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press.

2.C ,walIer. (2015).Marketing Strategies of Mobile Game APPlication Entrepreneurs .Walden

University .

3.Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027)

https://ec.europa.eu/education/education-in-the-eu/digital-education-action-plan_en

4.Krashen, S. (2003). Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use. Portsmouth: Heinemann. 

5.Li,Jianqing.(2013).Comparative Study on Marketing communication Strategies,Journal of Lanzhou Institute of Education

6.Our new research reveals the positive power of podcasts on children’s reading, as lockdown sees rise in listenership

7.Robin, H. (2008). Using Activity Theory to Understand Entrepreneurial Opportunity. Mind, Culture, And Activity, 15(1), 52-70. 

8.Smith , & Paul.(1997) .Marketing communications strategy:AnlntegratedAPProaeh,Koganpage

9.Zeying,Won.（2010）.E-Learning Inputs,Process ,and Outcomes :Theoretical Development and Empirical Investigations.Canada:The University of Western Ontario.

https://literacytrust.org.uk/news/our-new-research-reveals-the-positive-power-of-podcasts-on-childrens-reading-as-lockdown-sees-rise-in-listenership/