2023 EdTechX Award Winner Spotlight — Lessonspace
A conversation with Matthew Henshall, Founder & CEO at Lessonspace.
Based out of South Africa, Lessonspace is a fully white-labelled SaaS focused on Making Teaching Easier. As the recipient of the 2023 EdTechX Africa Award, we spoke to Founder and CEO, Matthew Henshall to learn more about the platform, the company’s mission, and Matthew’s vision for the future of education.
Can you tell us about your background and how Lessonspace was founded?
In 2015, my co-founders and I started a business called SkillUp Tutors (skilluptutors.com) in South Africa. It was a B2C tutoring company and our core business thesis was that we could find high-quality South African tutors and sell their services overseas in the UK and US at a more affordable rate.
We quickly learned the harsh truth that, in education, low cost is perceived as low quality. Our unique selling point wasn’t as attractive to customers as we’d hoped, and our cost-per-acquisition vs. life-time-value was not breaking even.
We decided to reduce our high advertising spend and focus instead on building a better internal online lesson tool. We had initially used some off-the-shelf software but it wasn’t reliable enough for us in a South African context with poor connectivity.
So, we actually only planned on building Lessonspace for our own company SkillUp. This proved a powerful learning experience as we essentially became our own first customer, and for a year, we went back to the basics of product development: build, release, get feedback from customers, iterate.
In 2017 we were fortunate enough to trigger a Google Alert and two American and one Canadian company reached out and asked us if they could use our tool.
We then had this big “Aha!” moment and realized we could sell our software to all of our old competitors. We were a team of four engineers at the time, and we’d finally found a product and market where we could leverage our skills in software development rather than being forced to become experts in operations, marketing, and raising capital.
And that’s how Lessonspace was founded — those first three customers who found us organically are still with us today!
What is Lessonspace’s mission and what is your vision for the company?
Quite simply, the purpose of Lessonspace is to Make Teaching Easier.
It used to be ‘make learning easier’, but throughout our decade-long journey into EdTech, we have become acutely aware that effective learning necessarily requires a level of difficulty, and that making learning easier isn’t actually what we aim to do. Instead, we’ve realised that it’s far more important to support teachers and to make their jobs easier, so they can make learning more effective.
The best technology in the world is not enough. The best content in the world is not enough. The key is to put technology and content into the hands of teachers and enable them to do the rest.
What strategic milestones have you achieved so far and what are your ambitions for the next 5–10 years?
Our Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is to Make Teaching Easier for 200 million lessons every year, with a specific focus on the small-group tutoring market. That includes growing our market share, as well as constantly improving the efficacy of our platform.
Lessonspace started long before the Covid pandemic and, fortunately, we were well positioned to support hundreds of organisations as they rapidly transitioned to online learning. That trend has not slowed down and now millions of lessons are conducted through Lessonspace every year.
Though founded in South Africa, we have a global presence. Our team is spread across four continents, and we have customers in almost one hundred countries, with Europe and North America being our biggest markets.
Last year we sold (exited) SkillUp Tutors, our tutoring marketplace, and as a result we have a sizeable “war chest” that has allowed us to accelerate our growth in a sustainable way without relying on external capital.
While we’re keeping an eye on global trends, we’re focused on getting the basics right without too much distraction. That said, a big product focus for us at the moment is leveraging new AI and analytics tools to provide actionable insights to our enterprise clients.
In your view, what makes online education effective?
We’re driven by Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem and the fact that 1-on-1 tutoring is still one of the most effective interventions in education.
Online education attempts to solve Bloom’s Two Sigma in two ways: improve access (both financially and geographically), and improve outcomes.
Quick access to any expert in the world; creative tools for engaging and drawing out students’ knowledge; and more accountability and safeguarding — these are all inherent benefits of online education which Lessonspace aims to exemplify.
What we believe makes us stand out, however, is still the fundamental focus on the teacher.
From lesson preparation, to content-specific tools, to post-lesson insights, online education is made more effective by supporting what teachers already do well.
What differentiates Lessonspace from other digital platforms working in the same space?
We are focused. We define our expertise in what we don’t do, not only what we do do. Lessonspace is the best way to conduct small-group tutoring, i.e. 1–1 to 1–10.
If you want to do larger classes (i.e. 10 or more), then you need to use another tool. If you want a whole suite of tools to manage students, such as payments and scheduling, then you need to use another platform (or one of our Integration Partners)
Many of our competitors will do a couple things well, but we aim to be the absolute best at one thing. That one thing is: ‘small-group teaching’
From your perspective, what trends will shape the future of education and what role will technology play?
There is an age old anecdote that if you travelled back in time 500 years, the only thing that would look the same in society is the school classroom. I think education is extremely difficult to change on a macro level, and trends will be simply that — a trend, not a major change.
The purpose of education is to prepare students for the future. The world of technology changes every hour, yet school curricula change every decade. ChatGPT got their first million users in less than a week, Threads in just two hours, yet the last time the UK curriculum was updated was 2014. I’d like to believe that technology can further bridge the gap between the world and the classroom.
I do think AI will play a big role in solving Blooms Two Sigma Problem, by improving access to quality, personalised tuition.
What do you think you know about the education space that you don’t believe most people know?
In education, there are three false paradigms. While they might be true from a behavioural economics perspective, they are not based in truth and I believe there is success in fighting against these false beliefs.
- Low cost is perceived as low quality.
- Prestige is worth more than knowledge.
- Knowledge is what you put in, not what you take out.
(1) We have experienced first hand that there is little correlation in education between the cost of a resource and the quality of it. The best resources are there at our fingertips, for free. We pay for hand-holding or guidance through content, which in itself is a detriment to learning.
(2) Again, we have seen that the school you went to, the companies you worked at are as, if not more, important than the actual true measure of your skill. Fighting and working to get into a prestigious company or a strong reference is important, it shows willingness to work hard. Finding a new way to measure ability is more important.
(3) The Latin root to the word for education is ‘educere’ which means “to draw out”. Knowledge is built when it is drawn out of a student, used in the real world and built upon. We shouldn’t simply be trying to talk at students. This can be summed up in a simple theory known as the Socratic method of teaching.
