Our story
I wanted to be closer
to my students.
So I built this.
I'm Noa Nishimura. I've taught Japanese online for more than five years — over 1,000 lessons. Lesson Studio wasn't designed in a boardroom; it came out of the job I was already doing every night after class.
The gap
The lesson was never
the problem.
I had been teaching Japanese online for years, and the hour itself was good — real conversation, real corrections, real progress.
It was everything around the hour that kept slipping. A student would finally land a grammar point on a Tuesday, and by Friday there was no way to show them it had happened. Someone would ask "am I actually getting better?" and the honest answer was a feeling, not a number.
The notes lived in my head, or in a document nobody opened twice. I wasn't missing a way to teach. I was missing everything that happens between lessons.
What I built
So I started
building it myself.
First as notes written by hand after every lesson. Then a spreadsheet. Then a system — a portal where each student could open their own vocabulary, their own progress, and a recap of the lesson they had just finished, written in their own language.
It took the hour of paperwork that came after the hour of teaching, and gave it back to me.
“I feel closer to my students now — and honestly, I feel like a better teacher.”
What changed
It changed the
relationship, not just
the admin.
Students started opening their portals between lessons. They could watch the words add up. They could hear themselves from three months ago and notice, without being told, how far they had come.
And I — who had quietly been dreading the evening writeups — found I actually wanted to open the thing. It turned the part of the job I liked least into the part I look forward to.
Along the way, more than 200,000 people started following my teaching on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
KOKU Labs
One teacher's workaround,
open to every teacher.
KOKU Labs is a small studio building the tools we wished existed when we were the ones teaching. Lesson Studio is the first — now in twenty-seven languages, for anyone who recognises the gap I was trying to close.
3 free recaps, no card needed.