About 20 schools in New Zealand offer one or more IB programmes; 93% of those students use Revision Village.
Vaughan said the company was increasingly focused on using artificial intelligence to personalise learning and reduce teachers’ administrative workloads.
His focus on education technology was shaped by years growing Education Perfect, which reached more than one million users before being sold in a deal valuing the company at up to $455 million.
Vaughan first connected with one of Education Perfect’s co-founders, Craig Smith, while studying at the University of Otago.
At the time, the company was known as Language Perfect, and Vaughan was developing his own financial literacy platform.
He was invited to return and join the company after spending several years working on his own projects overseas.
He agreed on the condition that he could help expand the platform beyond language learning.
Vaughan has spent more than a decade building education technology platforms used by students around the world.
Language Perfect evolved into Education Perfect, broadening its reach into other subjects through gamification, spaced repetition, and a focus on improving the user experience.
Vaughan attributed the company’s growth to listening closely to students and teachers and making constant improvements.
Revision Village was acquired by Crimson Education in 2023 and Vaughan was shoulder-tapped by chief executive Jamie Beaton to become Revision Village’s chief executive.
The platform provides IB students with question banks, practice material, worked solutions and videos from experienced educators and examiners.
Vaughan said the aim was to give students a way to work through the curriculum at their own pace.
“It’s really designed as a bespoke, one-stop sort of solution for an IB student.”
The company has developed its own AI marking tool, which has graded almost half a million questions and produced tens of thousands of hours of personalised feedback.
For teachers, the aim is to reduce repetitive marking so they can spend more time supporting students who need extra help.
“No teacher entered their profession to primarily deal with the plethora of administrative tasks demanding their time.
“It’s very, very powerful in terms of closing the loop there.”
Tim Vaughan helped grow Education Perfect before joining Revision Village.
Vaughan said he was cautious about presenting AI as an uncomplicated win for education, and said it could risk removing too much of the struggle that drives learning.
“Learning is about kind of wrestling with ideas,” he said. Hedescribed the “cognitive friction” needed to master something.
The challenge was using AI to support learning rather than simply produce an outcome, he said.
Vaughan said AI could make personalised education a reality, something the sector has long struggled to deliver at scale.
“Rather than a one-size-fits-all kind of way of learning, it has to be dynamic, it has to be personalised, it has to be at the appropriate level for every single student.
“And that’s never actually been possible before.”
Vaughan said schools would need to rethink how they taught and assessed students as AI became more widespread.
Banning the technology was unrealistic, he said, particularly as students entered workplaces where AI was increasingly embedded.
Instead, schools would need clear guidelines around when AI could be used, with oral and practical assessments likely to play a greater role in learning.
AI helped students build functioning robots during a recent Steam-Ed Tauranga workshop.
Steam-Ed Tauranga lead educator Barbara Cook said educators needed to think carefully about how AI was used in the classroom.
Steam-Ed Tauranga provides specialist science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics classes.
“You’ve got to ask the question of which parts do we want to outsource to AI and which parts are important for both ourselves and our students to sort of struggle with?”
Cook said an experiment using AI to write scripts for a holiday movie-making programme showed what could be lost when technology removed too much of the challenge.
Students had written their own scripts, but when AI was used to speed up the process, the resulting films were less creative and engaging, she said.
“We went, ‘Wow, never again will we do that.’”
Cook said AI also helped students in a recent robotics workshop generate code and build functioning robots without years of programming experience.
She said she wanted children to learn how to use AI, but not at the expense of learning how to think without it.
That ability to struggle through an imperfect first attempt, she said, was part of developing the skills children would need later in life.
Zoe Blake is a multimedia journalist at the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post.