The need to provide scalable yet effective education is undoubtedly one of the more pressing challenges of our age.  Whilst platforms such as Coursera and Khan Academy have hoovered up the lion’s share of our attention, a number of Chinese startups have been quietly innovating.

One of these is VIPKID, who are one of the fastest growing startups in China. The company, which recently raised $500 million to help expand their curriculum and technology offerings to include six distinct product lines, is also working closely with Microsoft China to develop smart classroom technology.

“With the support of our teachers and the pedagogical expertise of our curriculum team, we have taken several monumental steps in service of our mission to inspire and empower every child for the future,” the company said recently.

As with so many educational startups today, tuition is provided via video lessons, delivered by over 60,000 teachers to a student body of around half a million spread across 35 different countries.

Gig teachers

They operate a gig economy style approach to recruiting teachers, although far from a free-for-all, they perform background checks into each teacher operating on their platform.  Indeed, so effective has this been that they were recently voted the best company to gig for by FlexJobs.

They also make ample use of new technologies, with AI used to improve the teaching process.  It even powers a ‘stack ranking’ style assessment process that filters out those who receive poor ratings from students.

With the new funding secured, the company plan to open seven new offices outside of China, bringing the total to ten, which will allow them to scale up into 100 countries within the next few years.

“We are confident that the unparalleled quality of the learning experience that we offer through our teachers and education products will resonate with children around the world. We are proud to continue providing personalized learning to the next generation of global citizens, bridging cultures and countries around the world,” they say.

Their ultimate goal is to build a ‘global classroom’ where people can all over the world can learn a wide range of topics, both from the teachers and each other.  It’s an approach that has helped them generate around $720 million in revenue last year.

There have been platforms, such as Skillshare that have attempted to attract teachers from around the world to deliver video lectures, but few have achieved the scale and success of VIPKID.  It will be interesting to see if there’s is a model that spreads further.