Lynn Beachy Head, from Chase Education Solutions – was our eloquent speaker last week (introduced by Janet) who spoke to us in depth about Amira AI Reading Tutor. Lynne is a business leader and advisor with a successful track record in the Education, Publishing, Entertainment and Digital Learning industries
Prior to co-founding CHASE Lynne was CEO of Juta, South Africa’s oldest publishing house, for 11 years. Lynne’s diverse experience includes Global Publishing Director at The Walt Disney Company in London and Paris, and directorship at Oxford University Press SA. She currently serves on the UCT Graduate School of Business Advisory Board.
A former teacher, Lynne’s MBA research into systemic challenges facing education in South Africa and the role corporates could play in solving them was awarded with distinction and the gold medal. This spurred Lynne to pursue her passion for applying Systems Thinking to address the challenges facing education in Africa, particularly through the application of new technologies for scale. It is with this ambition that CHASE was founded, focusing on literacy improvement as the gateway to all learning.
Lynne opened by describing what she identified as the bottlenecks limiting South Africa’s development. Chief among them was the inability of learners to read for meaning by Grade 4 in our schools, which compromises all future learning. She researched to find interventions around the world with proven effectiveness, and found AMIRA Learning, an AI enabled, internet based, reading tutoring program, developed by Carnegie Mellon University. This research has shown that AMIRA is as effective as a live, personalised tutor, increasing reading fluency and comprehension at up to 4x the normal rate of learning, with only two 30 minute session a week. Equally important, the children enjoyed the programme, and developed confidence with their reading. Schools with libraries should see even further academic improvement as with increased reading confidence, the children seek out additional reading opportunities, as additional reading develops the “background knowledge” essential for children to succeed at school.
The program can hear, understand and correct a child’s reading and can adjust to meet each child’s individual needs. It also collects rich data, enabling the teacher and the school to identify the reading strengths and weaknesses of every child using the program, allowing for targeted interventions.
Teachers can be trained in its use in a single hour long zoom session although there are additional training videos available online, and the company can be contacted vie Whatsapp for help as needed.
The cost at the moment is R425 per child per year, with unlimited use. The school needs sufficient computers and headphones for each child. The child can also log in to the website and practice reading via cell phones.
AMIRA offers a way to use technology to offer a scalable intervention that can surmount some of South Africa’s education al barriers. (Thanks to Janet for the transcription.)
