CommonAcademy: An Adaptive LMS Across Southeast Asia
Product management for an A*STAR spin-off's learning platform, spanning adaptive learning engines, speech technology, and the first AI writing features.
Context
CommonTown is a Singapore EdTech company spun out of A*STAR, with deep R&D capability in learning technology. Its flagship platform, CommonAcademy, is a full-featured learning management system deployed to schools across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, developed in collaboration with master educators.
I managed the product through a period when the platform's adaptive and language-learning capabilities were maturing and AI-assisted features were arriving for the first time.
What the platform does
CommonAcademy covers the full teaching loop. Multi-level course design with drag-and-drop course maps. More than twenty question types, from cloze and matching to image hotspots and audio and video responses. Learning games, collaborative canvases, mindmaps, and discussion forums.
Two engines set it apart. The Learning Flow Engine gives course designers a visual interface for conditional branching, so a student's path changes based on quiz performance. Deliberate Practice applies Item Response Theory for real-time adaptive quizzing and spaced repetition, reporting progress through radar charts and topic-level heatmaps.
The language-learning specialisation adds text-to-speech and speech evaluation in English, Chinese, and Arabic, plus speech-input games.
Adaptive learning is only as good as the content model underneath it. Most of the product work was making sure the branching rules, item banks, and reporting all described the same student.
AI features
Under my leadership the platform added its first AI features: a Writing Coach and Writing Feedback. They were the seeds of the AI work that followed in the next chapter. The lessons were practical ones: teachers trust feedback they can inspect, and an AI feature in a classroom has to fail gracefully in front of thirty students.
Also in the portfolio
Qoqolo, CommonTown's student management system, was deployed for Star Learners Preschools across roughly 45 branches in Singapore.
Reflection
EdTech at institutional scale is compliance-heavy, multilingual, and unforgiving of downtime. It taught me to treat a product as a system of policies, not a set of screens.