There has long been a need for a learning management system tailored towards educators, parents and students in the Thai education system. With this in mind, Starfish Education originally developed Starfish Labz first as an LMS that met the needs of Thai teachers and parents.
However, with time it became clear that the true potential of Starfish Labz was to serve as a larger learning community, rather than just a provider of online courses. This led to the development of online workshops, expert articles, and a collection of do-it-yourself videos on various education topics.
A set of 6 Key Learning Pillars were established to best address user interests and needs. Content is thus developed to fit in one or more of the following pillars:
- Education Innovation and EdTech Tools
- Future Skills
- Future of Work
- Future of Education Administration
- Self-Care and Personal Growth
- Parenting in the Digital Age
Since its introduction in 2018, Starfish Labz has proven to be a powerful tool for Thai teachers, parents and even students in regards to learning innovative ways to improve education, develop future skills in students, and how to prepare school administrators and teachers on focusing on whole-school transformation.
Starfish Labz provides diverse learning experiences across 6 key categories, including up-to-date online courses, blogs, videos, news, and workshops — all aimed at personal and professional development.
Users begin by registering for an account, free of charge. Once registered, they then can access learning resources from a broad selection of content. For example:
- Online Courses: These are designed to take a total of 2-3 hours to complete at a users’ own pace, which makes completion more realistic given the busy schedules of educators
- Workshops: Several types of online workshops are offered, including a series called Kru Club for teachers, a Parenting series, Future Youth Thailand for student innovators, and more
- Videos: Over 560 videos can be viewed by users, across a variety of topics. Some examples include do-it-yourself classroom ideas, modern learning techniques, teacher tools, parenting topics, parent and teacher stories, and more.
- Articles: Educational experts from a variety of fields are invited to share ideas, knowledge and training on various topics. This can be as simple as technical tips and tricks for using Google Sheets, and as nuanced as promoting social-emotional learning as a parent.
User progress is recorded as they complete various content types, with certificates of complete and gamified “coins” being awarded for each completed activity. These coins can then be redeemed for Starfish Labz Plus content, which otherwise would require paid access.
Starfish Labz user registration grew steadily in tandem to professional development projects with schools throughout Thailand, but really began to take off during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown across Thai society. Schools, teachers, parents and students needed something free, accessible and in the Thai language to help reduce learning loss regression and to stay focused on developing future skills.
To date, Labz has over 385,000 active users from over 23,000 schools and education institutions throughout Thailand who have completed 12.9 million learning activities on the platform, received more than 525,000 certificates of completion, and ultimately led to over 7.6 million positive impacts for students and learners.
Using our UPRISE (Useful, Problem-Solving, Real-World, Impactful, Self-Directed, Experiential) rubric for measuring meaningful learning, independent research shows that 94% of online course learners and 93% of workshop participants experienced meaningful learning. Additionally, our Facebook page reached a peak access rate of 3,140,221 people in April of 2024, reflecting a very high community engagement rate.
Starfish Education first developed Starfish Labz as an LMS, but later included additional categories of learning that fit the accessibility and interests of Thai educators. These methods include online workshops, do-it-yourself videos, and articles written by education experts.
You can go to www.starfishlabz.com and click Register to begin! (Note: Google Chrome and other browsers have built-in translation functionality that allow you to see the content in English.)
