 There's
no denying that BGS lifetime members are very talented people.
Just earning invitation into the Society places members within
a select group. Beyond their commonality as the "Best
in Business," lifetime members are extremely diverse
with a wide array of talents, backgrounds and expertise.
A diverse set of nationalities and backgrounds
make up the Beta Gamma Sigma membership, and today I’m
highlighting my conversation with a member from the UK, Caroline
Moore. She earned her MBA from Cass Business School and was
one of the very first students inducted into BGS at Cass two
years ago this month! Moore’s startup, LearnAhead, evidences
her love for language and technology. I hope you enjoy reading
about the passion and ingenuity she puts into making the learning
process fun.
BGS
Member Profiles
Caroline Moore
Director and Co-Founder, LearnAhead
If you catch Caroline Moore unplugging from
work, you might find her playing the popular game “Angry
Birds Space” on her iPad. The popularity of smart phones
and tablets has turned everything into an application—or
to borrow from popular vernacular, an app—including
newspaper articles, ninja games, and nutrition calculators.
Moore and her company, LearnAhead, have created
an app for English language learning.
 Moore’s
app proves that turning on your iPhone doesn’t have
to mean you’re turning off your brain. While “Angry
Birds Space” is purely for fun, there are more and more
apps that have popped up to serve educational purposes.
“The way of the future is mobile,”
suggested Moore, director and co-founder of LearnAhead. “I’m
quite impressed with how useful mobile apps are for education.”
Formed in 2011 and based out of London, LearnAhead
creates mobile apps that promise to make English language
learning more similar to playing “Angry Birds Space”
than reading grammar-drilling books.
“Systematically learning language vocabulary
is helpful, but it’s also very boring, and most people
give up,” Moore explained. “Our little app ‘Word
Carrot’ makes that fun, so you don’t give up.”
Moore has always been one who considered learning
languages to be fun—even without an app.
“I was fascinated with learning French
when I was in my first degree,” Moore noted. “It
was quite easy for us to go to France, and from school exchanges,
I developed a fascination with France.”
Moore studied both English Literature and
French at the University of Liverpool and spent a year as
a language assistant teaching English in a secondary school
in the medieval town of Charlieu, France. After obtaining
her degree, she returned to France to teach English at the
University of Nancy II.
“It kind of flipped from being fascinated
in French to being interested in the whole business of language
learning, and that’s been my career pretty well since
then,” Moore said.
In 1986, she began her career with the British
Council, an organization focused on worldwide educational
connections. But it wasn’t long before Moore wanted
more education herself. She attended the University of London
for a part-time master’s degree in second language learning
and teaching.
“Linked to that first master’s degree, I developed
an interest in the use of technology and language learning,”
Moore said.
After receiving her master’s, Moore
transferred to the British Council’s English Language
Teaching Division and held various advisory and management
roles until 2010.
“I worked on a project called English
2000,” Moore recounted. “I was basically given
a blank sheet of paper and my brief was to create an intelligence
system to understand where English was going as a global language
and what the trends and drivers for that change would be.”
This task proved intimidating but exciting
as Moore uncovered startling information from her research
and discussions with futurologists, academics, and experts
on socio-demographics, resulting in a groundbreaking book
by David Graddol called “The Future of English?”
in 1997.
“We did predict a lot of things right,
actually. We certainly predicted the role of technology in
all of it,” Moore asserted.
Between 2000 and 2003, Moore founded two highly successful
websites for both students and professors of English, but
she still craved expertise in one field that she hadn’t
yet touched.
“When I was running the websites, I
wanted to do an MBA because I could see there were all sorts
of commercial possibilities, and I thought an MBA would help
me do that,” she explained.
In 2007, when she became director of business
processes, this desire developed further. “I was managing
people, resources, and was involved in strategy,” she
said. “I did that without formal preparation-- I decided
I needed my MBA.”
So Moore became the student yet again, graduating
in 2010 from the Cass Business School part-time executive
MBA program at City University, London, after which she left
the British Council to develop her own business ideas.
“I’m a lot more confident because
of the MBA,” Moore shared. “I studied all aspects--understanding
finances, entrepreneurship and organization, and marketing.
I tend to lead on the business side in my new business because
that’s where my skill set is. I pretty well use everything
I learned.”
Moore’s final MBA project tackled the
idea of using mobile technology to acquire a nonnative tongue
and the impact of mobile devices on the market for English
language teaching course books.
“I looked at this area really thoroughly
in a way that you rarely have time to do,” Moore shared.
A few former colleagues from the British Council and another
friend began plans to capitalize on what they were learning.
“We decided to do the app before we
decided to do the company,” Moore admitted. Either way,
the idea hit the backburner for several months as the team
members, based in London, South West England, Tuscany and
Cape Town, worked on other projects.
The mobile world was more challenging for
Moore and her development team than anything they’d
done.
“We’ve done lots of games in the
past for the web, but usually we tended to do it for more
medium-to-advanced-level students,” Moore explained.
Alternatively, LearnAhead focuses primarily
on beginning learners. “The idea is that you pick up
the game, you play it, and you’re just in English,”
Moore stated.
LearnAhead had to create a game simple and
straightforward enough that someone without any knowledge
of English could navigate the app without translation. The
model derives inspiration from one of their successful web
games in China.
“We found that [the game] was enormously
popular with young office workers, primarily female, who were
playing it during their lunch break on their computers,”
Moore explained.
She found this fascinating, given the game
was designed for children. Moore remembers thinking that if
they could create something with that level of fun, then they’d
be on to something.
Moore is also following another interesting
phenomenon concerning the growing popularity of mobile apps
all over the map.
Not all iPhone users are created equal.
“In some countries, like Thailand, if
you have an iPhone or iPad there’s a chance you’ll
really want to use it to learn English,” Moore explained.
“In other countries, say India, if you’ve got
an iPhone you don’t really need to learn English because
you’re likely to speak it very well already. It’s
very variable.”
Not only does LearnAhead want to master English
language learning apps, but the company’s goal is to
reinvest its profit into new games for other languages like
Spanish, French, or Italian. Moore said the language switch
would be simple because so much of the game involves simple,
easily interchangeable vocabulary.
So far, the young company has relied on persistent
work. “We find doing apps quite hard,” Moore said.
“It’s very labor intensive-- lots of testing.
You have to be very precise in what you’re doing. You
have to understand the medium that you’re putting out.”
Moore understands her field well enough to
own her own consulting company, called Constellata, which
she started in 2010. Her consulting projects are what actually
make her money, she mentioned lightheartedly.
She’s involved with all sorts of other
learning projects as well, including projects for the university
e-learning company, Epigeum, a spin-out company from Imperial
College London and various publishing and language school
chains. Moore has been published in the British publication
The Guardian and enjoys the chance to write whenever she can.
Her main energy goes into discovering what’s
in the future for LearnAhead. Moore can certainly hope that
their game will rank among “Angry Birds Spaces”
and “Words with Friends” for its fun factor.
“In our sector, a lot of games tend
to be either fun and a bit dubious on the education side or
really ugly,” Moore admitted. “We think there’s
potential for games that are actually educationally good,
fun, and attractive. Our niche is in high-quality, visually
fun games for English.”
Moore enjoys using her iPad or iPhone just
as much as anyone else, so she’s got a good handle on
the type of mobile apps that are most attractive. In fact,
she considers herself particularly savvy with the newest and
latest apps.
“I’m a terrible, terrible geek,”
she said facetiously. “Yes, I do naturally gravitate
toward this stuff. And I am horrified with how much my family
must have spent on Apple products.”
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