The Challenge
Evolve Online’s need was simple: provide mastery-based learning whilst helping educators and students stay at the cutting edge. Simple idea, granted. But how does one implement this? Colin Northmore, the Executive Principal, understood a fundamental truth about educational technology adoption: there's always a cognitive load, and teachers adopt at different paces and stages.
"It's very hard as a principal to manage a cohesive implementation," Colin explains. "The truth about interventions in education is that everything works a little bit. However, you're not going to have a change to the overall average in your school unless you can ensure that all the students are using it consistently and for a long period of time."
The school needed a solution that would work for teachers and students, consistently.
How Evolve Online partners with Mindjoy to enhance their mastery-based learning approach
Evolve Online's principle for using AI in education is what they call HAH!: Human-AI-Human.
Colin emphasised that they never use AI without humans in the equation. "It's the human who creates the prompt and decides how students use AI; then the AI does its magic, and after that it's the human who has to look at what the AI has come up with and guarantee that they are happy with the output."
Key implementations include:
Safeguarding with Control: Mindjoy puts guardrails in place, and schools can decide on the degree of control. This ensures responsible AI use across all year groups.
Time-Saving with Oversight: "If I get the AI to mark students' papers through Mindjoy, I'm still going to check if it got it right, but it's going to take me a fraction of the time than if I had to sit there and mark," Colin notes. Students receive instant feedback as they work.
Targeted Feedback for Exam Preparation: Evolve Online uses Mindjoy to help students prepare for exams in a revolutionary way. They give custom AI tutors content within the knowledge base and instruct them to use those specific resources to generate brand-new questions. The AI creates novel questions similar to what students would see in the final exam.
They break the paper up into its constituent sections and allow students to practice different parts of the exam but aren't restricted to whatever was asked in the past. Students receive immediate feedback and are required to try again based on the feedback given.
"This promotes better metacognitive thinking - they see what they did wrong and they try again. This is what's called a mastery-based approach," Colin explains. "We're not interested in the child's first attempt, we're interested in their best attempt."
Multilingual Support: The platform operates fully in Afrikaans and isiZulu. "My Afrikaans teachers are using it, fully in Afrikaans," Colin shares, ensuring no student is left behind due to language barriers.
The Impact
The transformation at Evolve Online centres on one crucial insight: "Doing past papers is not the best way... It's the feedback they get when they do past papers that makes the difference."
Through their HAH! approach and Mindjoy's platform, Evolve Online has created an environment where:
- Students receive instant, targeted feedback that promotes metacognitive thinking
- Teachers save significant marking time whilst maintaining quality oversight
- Every student can practice unlimited novel exam questions tailored to their curriculum
- Language is no longer a barrier, with full support in multiple languages
- The focus has shifted from first attempts to best attempts - true mastery-based learning
Colin's final observation captures why this partnership works: "It's about feedback." By ensuring human expertise guides AI capability at every step, Evolve Online has achieved what many schools struggle with - consistent, school-wide implementation that genuinely raises standards for all students.
