Looking back, looking forward.
Today marks our one year anniversary! I am so proud of our team and we have much to celebrate!
Our new Wordspace is here… along with tools that will help take your learning to the next level. Our team has worked hard, listened closely, and delivered what will be the basis of everything we will build on in the future. But as excited as I am to tell you what that means, I’d like to also mark our first “birthday” by taking a moment to tell you where we’ve been.
Our journey to here
When Lawrence and I started building our toolset a couple of years ago (at the start of the pandemic, no less), we started with a question: in a world where education will be disrupted, how can we continue to help learners learn? While we had no way to foresee the scale of that disruption – or the impact it would have on our own model of in-person, workshop-dependent instruction – we knew that was the time to focus on capturing the essence of our proven method in electronic form.
We started with a very early version of our Artificial Learning Intelligence and Comprehension Engine, that we lovingly call Alice. Her job was to act as a learning companion that would scan through your text, identify your topic and make a few suggestions on where you should start to engage with your material.
Here’s a baby picture of Alice:
Her colours ebbed and flowed in the background: at the push of a button, topics, scoring and related articles would appear. It looks pretty basic now, but it blew us away. There were more than a few virtual high fives exchanged… these were heady times, let me tell you. Our concept was born and ready to take its digital steps forward.
We added more tooling, better ways for you to engage with your material. Importantly, we added new ways for Alice to engage with you on your learning journey, ensuring help was always available when you needed it:
Iteration and evolution of our tools and method – how do we better apply our method to the needs of our learners? – have always at the forefront of our thinking. New ideas came fast and furious, and our interface – and our Alice – evolved as a result.
Our new Wordspace is a leap forward in that evolution
Instead of being buried deep in the technicolour dream coat Alice once wore, our LEARN method is now front and centre… and Alice is there to support your learning adventures every step of the way, helping you get the most out of your materials. Our interface has been simplified to reduce distraction and to keep you focused. Alice helps you engage with the steps of the LEARN method as you work through your materials in the Wordspace. Our new Learning Center is filled with an ever-growing set of guides, videos and more to help you along your journey.
If you’re a current member – or, if you’ve just seen our platform in the past during a trial – I encourage you to jump in and explore our new tools! While the look of the interface may have changed, it has become even more intuitive to enable an easy transition. And if you’re new to us, there’s no better time to learn more about what we do and how we can support your learning journey.
Over the coming weeks and months, we will continue to reveal new exciting tools:
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Materials tailored around your workflow – be it as a resource room teacher preparing how to engage with your class or as a student trying to master a subject matter they have struggled with.
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The NK Prep School: a series of intensive online programs to boost old skills, learn new ones and prepare for entrance exams.
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New ways to test and review your work, including quizzes and multiple choice questions based on your materials.
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…and more!
To sum it all up: our new Wordspace is here, we’ve incorporated mountains of user feedback, we’ve found new ways for you to engage with your learning, and we have refined our method to make it even more effective for you. As always, we have our loyal users and evangelists to thank! And, we are honoured to be a helpful tool in your comprehension and learning journey.
We will communicate more as we get closer to placing these new tools within your reach… please stay tuned for updates.
Happy Learning!
– Stephen and the NK Team