Ashley Koens
I’m already building something and want to take it further
I’ve been teaching English as a second language (ESL) for about a year now, and a few months in, I noticed a problem. Because my students range from young children to adults in different professions, it was taking a long time to prepare each class. I needed a faster way to create tailored, high-quality lessons without spending so much time on prep, so I built a system to do it in under five minutes. At the beginning of each week, I use Canva to create a themed PDF, one for kids and one for adults. It includes a welcome, review of the last lesson, a warmup, and a section for questions. Then I pull premade lessons from sites like ESL Pals or SuperEnglish to teach general or business English. For adults, the premade lessons are okay, but I’ve noticed most curriculums don’t include natural dialogue. When they do, it’s usually short, rough, and not how an American actually speaks. There are also no personalized dialogues. For example, one of my students moved from China to Seattle and runs her own preschool. She struggled with real conversations, like talking to parents or her assistant teacher. She needed practice with things like parent/teacher conferences or discussing a child’s behavior with a parent while offering solutions. Curriculums don’t cover those kinds of real-life situations, so I use AI to quickly generate four vocabulary words and a realistic dialogue tailored to the student. I skim it, adjust the tone if needed, and the whole process takes less than a minute. Many ESL students learn how to read and write English as children, but don’t get much conversational practice. As adults, speaking is usually what they struggle with the most. These personalized dialogues help fill that gap by giving them realistic, real-life conversation practice. It brings the quality of their lessons to a completely different level. Overall, this approach has been effective at saving time and giving students real, practical speaking results they can actually use.
Tokli is an online subscription-based ESL platform helping non-native English speakers build real conversational fluency through unlimited live classes.
Tokli: Learn English. Unlock the World.
Hello! Sorry for the late submission! My progress this week has been good. Putting together an outline and creating a visual to explain how Tokli works was helpful. I hadn't thought through how long each segment of the lesson would be and by transferring the general idea in my head to a clear outline, I now have a better grasp on how to move forward with the vision I have for Tokli.
Tokli | Learn English. Unlock the World.
Hi, so sorry this marketing video is SO late! Making videos is not my expertise so it took me a while to get it to this point. Unfortunately, my voiceover is pretty poor quality, probably due to recording it on my phone so I will definitely invest in a mic as soon as I can. Thanks!
Tokli | Learn English. Unlock the World.
Hi! I'm so sorry my admission is so late, but I am excited to announce that Tokli will launch on July 6th! I am opening it up to 100 founding members for a discounted rate of $10 a month. I will be posting in as many groups as I can to get the word out!
Tokli | Learn English. Unlock the World.
This week, I have worked on catching up on my assignments. Sorry they are so late! I really enjoyed conducting an interview and learning more about how an English as a second language learner values different English learning platforms. I gained a lot of valuable information, and it will help me strategize Tokli's model more effectively.
Tokli | Learn English. Unlock the World.
For the week 6 analytics challenge, I learned a lot about which programs and systems I can use to track key metrics for Tokli. I started Tokli on Skool (since it is pretty popular right now) and will use their platform until I can build a website. While I was setting up an analytics system, I learned that the only system I can link to Skool is Meta Pixel (which I set up through Facebook) but I can't link it to Skool until I pay for the Pro version which is $100 a month. In the meantime, I learned that Skool has built-in analytics tracking system so I can see what sites brought users over to Skool. On the 29th, I had 13 visitors, likely because I posted about Tokli on my personal Facebook account and asked friends to like and share to help get Tokli some visibility. Although Skool's system isn't as advanced as PostHog's analytics platform, I will just use Skool for now until Tokli is bringing in enough income to invest in the Pro upgrade.
Tokli: An online English learning community that helps nonnative English speakers build confidence through unlimited live English classes for just $20 a month.
This week, I played catch up with the assignments! I got stuck at the marketing video so once I finished that, I moved onto the analytics and storytelling assignment. It has been exciting to see real progress and I'm looking forward to watching Tokli grow.
Tokli | An online, subscription-based English learning platform with unlimited classes for non-native English learners.
This week, I made edits to the original story video from last week. I invested in a better microphone because the audio has pretty bad in the original video. I needed to make this investment for providing better quality classes for Tokli. It will be put to good use for everything related to Tokli.