About Ulearn

Updated: October 8, 2026

From the Developer — Features — How It Works — Our Promise to You — Recent Changes — Feature Details

From the Developer: About Ulearn and the Ulearn Team

Welcome to Ulearn at ulearnapp.com! We hope you enjoy using this program and that it is a real help to you in your school. We began developing Ulearn in 2020, and only a few months later we were using it at our school. It grew out of our personal experience in running a small school in Taipei with program features being added to address real educational problems.

My name is Todd Sherrill. My team is my eldest son, Andrew, and my wife, Bethany. The three of us have worked together to bring our school and Ulearn to life.

To explain how Ulearn came about, let me go back to the beginning.

In 2003, after moving the family back to Taipei, I began teaching English in our own home. Almost immediately my wife got involved, helping me communicate with parents about homework and the progress of the children I taught. Not long after, Bethany began teaching too. We took the work seriously and did our best; word got out, and our student numbers grew until we settled into a licensed six-classroom facility in Taipei's Daan District.

Over the next fifteen years or so, we experienced first-hand many problems in running a small school. While still in college, Andrew got involved, teaching and managing our conversation-focused teachers and classes and developing the school's website.

In the years prior to Ulearn, Andrew built his own tools for managing his classes, and his ideas became the starting point for Ulearn. Since 2020 he has been the main driver of the direction Ulearn has taken. He is now my project manager, but he does much more than that: he leads the sales/marketing effort, and does front-end program development, designing what Ulearn looks like and how it behaves.

None of this would have been possible without my wife, Bethany Sherrill. She kept our school running after I stepped away for other business opportunities, and since 2020 her support has let me focus almost exclusively on developing Ulearn.

If you would like to know more about my career and background, visit my very old consulting website, toolboxcoding.com.

Features

Each feature links to fuller details near the bottom of this page.

Data security: Every request is checked against the school, the signed-in user and that user's role. A school can keep its data in its own database, and its owners can make a complete, encrypted backup of the school at any time.
Class sessions: One page per class meeting, holding the agenda, attendance, quiz, homework, material, recording and links to the work students must complete. Attendance, homework turn-ins and quiz grades are saved on the spot.
Homework: Written homework and recording homework are assigned, submitted, reviewed and graded in one place, with the days allowed to submit set per student and adjustable per task.
Speaking analysis: Recording homework is transcribed, compared with the text and graded automatically, so a teacher can find where a student struggled without listening to everything twice.
Word learning: Each student's vocabulary is kept as known words, focus words and test words, with self-testing that shows an estimate of their next quiz grade.
Lexicon: English and Chinese dictionaries are built in, so definitions and translations come from the program rather than a separate tab.
Collections: Articles, stories and dialogues are stored once, with reference text, translation, audio and test words, and reused whenever they are taught.
English or Mandarin courses: A course teaches English to Chinese-speaking students or Mandarin to English-speaking students, and the reading text, test words, transcription and lexicon follow.
Quizzes and grades: Class quizzes and grade history, including monthly averages, so progress is visible over a term rather than a week.
Class recordings: A class can be recorded and kept with the session it belongs to, so a student who missed it can catch up.
Online classes: Classes can be held online through Zoom, so bad weather or illness need not mean cancelling. Zoom hosting is not included in any plan and is arranged with us separately.
Attendance: In-person and online attendance, with planned absences recorded before class.
Day care: Day care schedules and programs sit alongside classes and feed the family's invoice.
Billing: Invoices for families: course fees, day care fees and discounts, each line linked to the student, course or class behind it.
Accounts and roles: Student, guardian, teacher, assistant, manager, administrator and owner (OwnerAdmin) accounts, each shown only the pages and data of that role.
Dashboards: Each role lands on a page showing what needs attention today rather than a menu to hunt through.
Messages: Announcements and private messages to guardians and staff from inside the program, with notifications by web push and email.
Office tools: Bulk import, holidays, school settings, activity logs, help links and the other unglamorous work of running a school.
Plans and storage: A free Community plan for a one-teacher school, and paid plans sized by courses, students and storage, billed monthly or yearly.
Sign-in and interface language: Google sign-in or a Ulearn password, in English or Traditional Chinese.

How It Works

Each school has its own short URL. Choose "happy", and everyone at your school reaches it at https://ulearnapp.com/app/happy.

The sign-up page asks for that URL, the school's name and the owner's mobile number (each number can open only one school), then registers the school's first account, the OwnerAdmin, which holds every owner and administrator right. The OwnerAdmin adjusts the school settings, adds or imports students, guardians and teachers, and adds courses, classes, homework and billing rules. Everyone else is imported in bulk by the office, or registers from the school's own page once the school has opened registration to that role in its settings.

Community: free for one teacher

Every new school starts on the Community plan. It is free for as long as you like and is sized for a school run by one teacher: two staff logins (the owner's and the teacher's), one instructor record, one course at a time, up to twenty students in class, and up to fifty new students in any twelve months. A seat stays taken for two weeks after a student leaves, so the twenty-student limit cannot be stretched by rotating students in and out. Community includes 2 GB of storage and keeps class recordings for thirty days.

Paid plans

A school with more than one teacher uses a paid plan: Small School (5 active courses, 100 students in class, 20 GB), Growing School (15 courses, 300 students, 60 GB) or Campus (40 courses, 750 students, 200 GB), each with unlimited staff and no yearly limit on new students. Plans run monthly or yearly, twelve months for the price of ten. A school changes plan from its own Plan page, and the unused part of a running term is credited. The License Agreement has the terms.

Our Promise to You

Students' names, contact details, class history, grades, billing and family relationships are the lifeblood of a small school, and we will not abuse your trust with them. Running a school in Taiwan ourselves is why we have been careful about data separation, role-based access and the practical ways schools use software.

We do not sell your data, and we do not advertise to your families. We would not accept either at our own school.

Recent Changes

October 2026: Class Details and Sessions were reworked. Attendance, homework turn-ins, quiz grades and a teacher's comment on each student are saved without leaving the page, and planned absences are recorded before class. Students and guardians now see the teacher's comments. Every school has a storage quota set by its plan and a Storage page showing what is using it, and Community keeps class recordings for thirty days. The school's Plan page was built out for card payment, renewal with reminders before a term ends, and a change of plan mid-term with credit for the unused term.
September 2026: The free Community plan was settled as the plan for a one-teacher school, and the paid plans were given their prices, twelve months for the price of ten. School owners can make a complete, encrypted backup of their school on demand. A course can now teach Mandarin to English speakers as well as English to Chinese speakers, and when editing teaching material, each Chinese test word shows its pinyin and zhuyin above its definition. A course can meet on several weekdays, each with its own start time, and its future classes are retimed when the schedule changes. A class session can take a collection chapter as its content, and students see its text, translation and audio on the class page. The guardian dashboard shows which children are in a course and which are connected to the account but not yet placed in one, and the office is prompted about the waiting ones. A question mark in the navigation bar opens the help article for the current page, where one has been written.
August 2026: Ulearn moved to its own address at ulearnapp.com. A class can be recorded from the class page and kept with its session, without an online meeting. Personnel and account pages were redesigned, and the navigation was reorganised to work on a phone or tablet.
July 2026: A lexicon was built from many English and Chinese dictionaries, and recording homework is analysed and graded automatically. A Word Learning page lists each student's known, focus and test words, and self-testing estimates the next quiz grade from the student's study and review. Collections hold reusable lesson material: reference text, translation, audio and test words, plus teacher-recorded audio for single words and phrases.
May 2026: Articles, stories and other material can be added to a collection by reading them aloud. The recording is transcribed as it is paused or ended, and the text and audio can be used in recording homework. Google sign-in arrived, with self-service sign-up for teachers and schools and no manual approval, so a new school can start work at once.
April 2026: Dashboards for students and guardians.

Feature Details

Data security

A school cannot see another school's data, and a user cannot see pages or information outside their role: every request is resolved through the school's URL, the signed-in user and that user's role before any data is returned.

Standard setup: A school that signs up on its own starts in a shared database that keeps each school's records separate; a dedicated school database is set up by us on request. The access rules are the same in both.
Customer-provided database: Your database is hosted separately from Ulearn, on your own server or on a leased server under an account only you control, and you can download and back it up as often as you wish. It must be Microsoft SQL Server or MariaDB, and you give us a connection string so the program can reach it. This improves your data protection, but your data is not invisible to us; some trust is still required, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
Backups: Ulearn's databases are backed up every night. A school's owners can also make a complete, encrypted backup of everything the school owns, on demand and without interrupting the school, and download it to keep. Because the file is sealed with a key held only by Ulearn, it can safely hold everything a full restore needs, including sign-in credentials, but it cannot be opened outside Ulearn. Restoring a backup into Ulearn is not yet available.
Masked details for training and demonstrations: On request, we can switch on a display setting for a school that masks student and guardian names and contact details throughout the program, for training staff or showing the system.

Class sessions

Every meeting of every course has its own page: the agenda, who attended, the quiz given that day, the homework assigned, the material used, any recording, and links to the work students need to complete. A teacher preparing tomorrow's class, a parent asking what happened on Tuesday, and an office worker checking whether a make-up class is needed are all looking at the same page. Attendance, homework turn-ins, quiz grades and comments on individual students are saved as they are entered. A class can also take a collection chapter as its content, so students see its text, translation and audio on the class page.

Homework

Homework is assigned from the class session and can be written or recorded. Students submit it in the program and teachers review and grade it there. The days allowed to submit are set per student for each course (seven by default), a single homework task can fix or extend that, late work follows a school-wide rule rather than an argument, and grades roll up into the averages a parent sees. Teachers can see at a glance which submissions still need attention.

Speaking analysis

Each recorded submission is transcribed and matched against the text the student was asked to read; the grade is produced automatically and the teacher can adjust it. Unless a school switches it off, Ulearn also keeps a voice profile per student: a submission that does not match the voice that produced earlier ones gets no automatic score and is flagged for the teacher's review. This is the part of Ulearn we expect to develop furthest: hearing a language learner accurately, at a scale no teacher has the hours for, is where software can help a child learn faster.

Word learning

The program keeps each student's vocabulary: words they know, words they are working on, and words that will appear on the next quiz. Students can test themselves as often as they like, and the program shows an estimate of their next quiz grade based on how much they have actually studied and reviewed. It turns "study for your quiz" into something a child can see the effect of before the quiz rather than after it.

Lexicon

The lexicon is built from many English and Chinese dictionaries, so definitions, translations and example usage are at hand inside the program for teachers preparing material and students working through it. Chinese entries show pronunciation in both tone-marked pinyin and zhuyin (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ).

Collections

A teacher can build a collection by reading the text aloud: the recording is transcribed as it is paused or ended. Once stored, the same material serves reading, recording homework and vocabulary, this term and every term after. Teachers can add their own audio for individual words and phrases. Good teaching material is expensive to make and cheap to reuse, and this is where a school's own material accumulates instead of being rebuilt each year.

English or Mandarin courses

Ulearn began as a program for teaching English to Chinese-speaking students. A course can now also teach Mandarin to English-speaking students: the reading text, test words, transcription and lexicon all follow the language of the course. A school can limit Chinese suggestions to Traditional characters, and an audit page finds any Simplified characters in its teaching material.

Quizzes and grades

A quiz is added to the class session with a name and a maximum score, and the teacher enters each student's score there. Grade history is kept per student and summarised by month, so a parent-teacher meeting can look at a term rather than last week. Homework and quiz averages appear together on the student's page.

Class recordings

A class can be recorded and kept with its session, so a student who was absent can watch what they missed. Recording is started from the class page, follows the scheduled class time and stops on its own at the end of class. Recording an in-person class uses the teacher's computer: the browser records the screen and the microphone, so no online meeting or Zoom licence is needed. Where a school holds classes online through Zoom, those meetings can be recorded as well. Paid plans keep recordings as long as their storage allows; Community keeps them for thirty days.

Online classes

Classes can be held online without leaving the program: teachers start the meeting from the class page and students join from theirs, so nobody circulates a link. Zoom licences are shared across the school and released when a class ends, so a school does not need one for every teacher. Bad weather, illness or travel need not mean cancelling and rescheduling, because a class can move online at short notice. Zoom hosting is not included in any plan; we supply the licences and arrange them with each school directly.

Attendance

Attendance is recorded for in-person and online classes and appears per student and per course. A planned absence can be recorded before class and shows on that class in advance. Holidays are recorded school-wide and marked on the billing calendar.

Day care

Day care is managed alongside classes rather than in a separate system, because for many schools the same children attend both on the same afternoon. A student in day care is assigned a schedule with weekday arrival times and a monthly fee; the schedule shows on the student's record, and its fee becomes the day care line on the family's invoice. Day care programs, each with a teacher and a student cap, sit beside the schedules.

Billing

The school billing system produces invoices for families: course fees, day care fees, discounts and adjustments, each line linked to the student, course or class that produced it. When a parent asks what a charge is for, the answer is a click away. This is your school billing your families, and is separate from what Ulearn charges you.

Accounts and roles

Students, guardians, teachers, assistants, managers, administrators and owners each have their own accounts and see only the pages and data of that role. A guardian sees their own children. A teacher sees their own courses. An assistant can do the office work without access to the school's settings. Managing the school's invoices takes the owner account or a separate billing role, which the school can give a bookkeeper without administrator rights. Roles are managed by the school, not by us.

Dashboards

Signing in puts each person on a page about their day rather than a menu. Students see what needs attention, join online classes and view class information. Guardians see their children and can tell which are in a course and which are connected to the account but not yet placed in one. Teachers and office staff see the classes and work in front of them.

Messages

Announcements and private messages are kept with the school's records, so a conversation does not live in one person's phone. Administrators and managers can send an announcement to many guardians at once. Office staff message guardians and teachers one to one; teachers, guardians and students can reply, and the school's owner decides on a policy page who else may start a conversation. Notifications go out by web push and email, while the message itself stays inside Ulearn.

Office tools

Students, guardians and teachers can be imported in bulk rather than typed in one at a time. Holidays, school settings, approving and disabling accounts, activity logs and school statistics are built in, and a help link in the navigation bar opens the article for the current page, where one has been set up. These are the features that decide whether a school can move to new software in the middle of a term.

Plans and storage

A plan sets a school's limits on active courses and students in class, and how much storage it gets, from 2 GB on Community to 200 GB on Campus. Storage is counted nightly, and the school's Storage page shows what is using it. When the quota is reached, new uploads and recordings are refused until space is freed or the school moves to a larger plan. Prices include business tax. Online card payment is coming; until it opens, a school sends a request from its Plan page and Ulearn support sets the plan up and arranges payment. A plan that is not renewed stays in force for two weeks after its term ends and then returns the school to Community, where it keeps what it has but cannot add beyond Community's limits.

Users sign in with a Ulearn password or a Google account, whichever each person prefers; a Google account can be connected to an existing login from Sign-in options. The program is available in English and Traditional Chinese, and each user chooses their own. A school can create itself and start working the same day, without waiting for us to approve or configure anything.