Students discuss with each other during a class break. [Photo by Wu Kaixiang/China Daily]

Kou Xuan, from Guangdong, decided when her son was born to take a different path. She wrote to ETU and asked if it could open a school in Guangzhou.

Kou was not the first to inquire. When ETU announced plans to launch branches, dozens of teams from more than 10 major cities applied to run them.

On the interview day, 11 candidate teams presented their ideas about personalized education and how they planned to practice it. If selected, ETU will provide them with support in terms of teaching, administration, teacher development, IT training and community resources.

Li and her husband Shen Huazhang, an IT entrepreneur, both bring their expertise to ETU. "We have three groups of people building the school: educators, business managers, and IT product managers/engineers. Good education philosophy and practices are its core, but we run this school as a modern business and mobilize social resources in an effective way via a tech platform that supports online communities," says Li.

"The ETU lifelong learners community and ETU follower community currently have 6,000 members who are practitioners, followers and volunteers of innovative education. We are not only building a school. We hope to innovate in the education ecosystem by putting schools back in the center of communities."

ETU has an app for parents and teachers, but it's more than a tool for notifications and assignments. "Teachers will record their classroom observations and individual performances, while parents show how their children behave at home and write about their ideas and reflections," says Guo.

In future, the app will collect enough data to draw a "portrait" of each student as a learner, both academically and emotionally, creating a portfolio of curriculum, activities and projects that suits each individual student to help them learn faster and better.