Chris MacDonald has dedicated his career to identifying and capitalizing on unique and challenging opportunities. Over the past two decades, Chris has focused his strategic vision on innovative and emerging markets. He has a proven track record of creating, developing, and achieving success in national and international markets. He is a visionary who is now focused on identifying and developing prospective business opportunities that will positively impact the world.
Russ Alan Prince: What prompted the development of an English learning App?
MacDonald: We wanted to start a business that focused on education while having the potential to make a significant impact on local, national, and international communities. After conducting our research we decided to focus on Literacy. Literacy not only enriches an individual's life but also provides greater opportunity and the ability to contribute on a higher level.
Literacy or lack thereof is a significant global problem. There are approximately 1.3 billion adults and children that are either illiterate, or they fall far below the reading proficiency levels and that number includes 12 to 13 percent of the North American population. In addition, according to industry data, there are another 1.5 billion people trying to learn or improve their English due to globalization. English proficiency is clearly recognized as a key component to improving one's career or life prospects.
Most English language apps address foundational skills such as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc. but only offer predefined content that tends to become repetitive and may not be relevant or interesting to students. Then, if the basic skills are mastered, students must move towards classroom and live tutoring options which can be expensive and inconvenient. We identified an essential market gap for advanced beginners and above and began the development of an Artificial Intelligent self-learning tool to support these students throughout the remainder of the fluency funnel.
Prince: So tell me what’s so special about LillyPad.
MacDonald: Our goal was to foster an innovative learning platform into existence, something different, something better. In a nutshell, LillyPad is an Artificial Intelligent English learning platform, and Lilly is our Artificial Intelligent tutor that makes learning English easy. Lilly helps improve your English through the combination of reading, listening, and conversational learning modules.
The LillyPad platform is hyper-personalized and driven by our students’ interests and direct participation. Every student has the opportunity to focus on what matters to them, which we believe is paramount to any successful learning journey.
Many English learners understand that reading is the most academically studied and recommended path to fluency, but they spend a lot of time trying to find the right book or article to read, and often get stuck or frustrated with difficult words, grammar structures, and comprehension. It is also difficult and very time-consuming for students to organize and keep track of all the words or phrases they want to practice following a reading session.
LillyPad uniquely addresses the above challenges by focusing on guided reading as the main tool to acquire English language proficiency and fluency. Lilly is the “world’s first” Artificial Intelligent Tutor that reads with students in four interactive ways while students can rely on Lilly to inform them when they mispronounce words. Students can also instantly listen to, look up the meaning, or translate any word during a reading session.
Lilly also saves students a significant amount of time by tracking and collecting all words and phrases a student was interested in—that they listen to, looked up, or translated—or had difficulty with pronunciation, and will then automatically test them later during personalized learning sessions through our spaced repetition training. The platform also incorporates four powerful Learning modules which are all guided by Lilly—spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, and Lilly’s Gold, which is the world’s first learning software to allow students to design, write, speak and practice their own English phrases or they can learn 3,500 plus pre-made English phrases with Lilly.
Students are also not restricted to specific content instead they can choose from thousands of free books that are all searchable by level, Ted Talks, Famous Speeches, blogs, etc. They can even upload their own content from their computer or import articles from the web. This allows students to dive into topics of personal interest while improving their English language skills. Every book or article has the potential to make a significant difference in our students’ lives.
Prince: What’s the current state of LillyPad?
MacDonald: Our current focus is directed at the 1.5 billion global English learners that are advanced beginners and above striving to improve their English. We just finished our beta testing with thousands of students from 79 countries, and many of them spent between 30 to 50 minutes per session. This was a significant tell for us, as it validated our research and we were able to capture the attention of our students, which is very difficult to do in our world of distractions.
Our students are killing two birds with one stone. They are improving their English and learning about anything they love in the privacy and convenience of their own home. When you learn about something that you love, you embrace, and when you embrace, you spend time, and when you spend time, magic happens. In short, learning English with Lilly is far more interesting and significantly easier for every student to quickly progress as they are focused on their personal interests while being guided by a personal AI tutor.
Prince: Do you have a vision of where LillyPad will be in the next year?
MacDonald: We’re really excited to continue to build out LillyPad’s functionality and expand into the markets where we believe we can make a real difference including the children´s K-8 market. We will continue to relentlessly innovate because as you are aware, in the technology world it’s all about the next iteration and how that iteration will continue to impact the quality of life in some way, shape, or form. Our main objective will always remain on providing a superior self-learning tool for our students.
RUSS ALAN PRINCE is the Executive Director of Private Wealth magazine (pw-mag.com) and Chief Content Officer for High-Net-Worth Genius (hnwgenius.com). He consults with family offices, the wealthy, fast-tracking entrepreneurs, and select professionals.