Chungdahm Learning

History

The company was founded in 1998 by current CEO Young Hwa Kim, incorporating in 2002. At present it has over 40,000 students across 200 branches in South Korea, more than half under the CDI program, with additional branches in China, Canada and the United States.

In April 2014, Chungdahm announced plans to partner with Knewton to incorporate Adaptive learning into its curriculum.

Subsidiaries and programs

Programs under Chungdahm Learning include Chungdahm Institute (CDI), April Institute, LetMeFly, CMS (a subsidiary), LetMeFly (operated by subsidiary Futurebook), Chungdahm Philippines, and Loudclass.

CDI is the flagship program of the company. It focuses exclusively on ESL instruction, with a broad range of courses striped by focus (literature, debate, test prep, etc.) and by skill level. There over 90 CDI branch and franchise locations, totaling approximately 28,000 students.

In 2013 CDI launched its "Chungdahm 3.0" curriculum, overhauled to run entirely on the Android Samsung Galaxy Note tablet and LG G tablets. Each class is taught by a single Native English-speaking Teacher (NET).

There are approximately 90 CDI branches, 13 of which are owned and managed by Chungdahm itself, the remainder are franchises.

April Institute, launched in 2007, is geared towards younger grade school students. Like CDI, its focus is strictly on English language. Each class is jointly taught by 2 co-instructors: one NET and one native Korean.

Unlike CDI, the curriculum is not tablet based but uses interactive touch-screen televisions.

The CDI and April institutes tend to collocate their branches in the same building, with franchises generally run by the same manager.

Futurebooks is a publishing subsidiary of the LetMeFly series of English language learning textbooks.

Chungdahm Philippines (CDP) is a subsidiary based in Manila that focuses on grading and assessment. Approximately 90% of the 28,000 CDI students enroll in optional i-Learning (or "independent learning") homework assignments. While the grading of reading and listening exercises can be automated, the majority of speaking and writing assignments require human interpretation. These assignments are sent to CDP for assessment and scoring.

CMS is a subsidiary acquired in 2012. It is the only program that explicitly eschews English language education, focusing on mathematics instruction. A high proportion of CMS students participate in math competitions.

Clueville is an English language educational game targeted at pre-K and elementary school students. Games are played at dedicated centers with proctors to assist students learn and progress.

Loudclass, launched in 2014, is the name of the Android tablet-based classroom management system. It was evolved from the Chungdahm Smart Learning Platform (CSLP) used in-house at CDI to run the Chungdahm 3.o curriculum.

Instruction

CDI and April Institute combine native English speaking instructors with rigorous on-line and mobile homework assignments to prepare students for the Internet Based TOEFL exam.

The CDI program consists of 5 modules, each with a different focus: literature, test preparation, creative writing, etc.. Each module is further divided into levels based on difficulty and language proficiency. The levels are standardized across modules, so that students may take courses from different modules concurrently or sequentially.

Classes are taught by Native English Teachers (NETs) from English-speaking countries.

Lessons are delivered on Android tablet devices using software proprietary software developed at Chungdahm and licensed commercially under the name Loudclass.