A team assembles:
As these things often go, and perhaps fittingly for an ed-tech venture, dot Learn was born in the classroom when MIT graduate students Tunde Alawode and Sam Bhattacharyya met in the Fall 2015 Development Ventures class at the MIT Media Lab. It just so happened that both spent years working in STEM education in emerging markets (Tunde on Impact Labs and the Bridge Initiative in Nigeria) and Sam as a Peace Corps Volunteer and for ELiTE Education in Mexico. We had a common goal of reducing global education inequality, and believed in the power of technology to transform lives, but from years of firsthand experience we both saw and knew that Online Education doesn’t work in Emerging Markets, so when Sam pitched the idea for dot Learn in class, they decided to go for it full force.
The Idea
Our idea was simple — can we make Online Education work for Emerging Markets? Sam had been thinking about the problem for some time, and had already come up with a way to make the full online education experience (videos, quizzes, games etc…) work offline on mobile phones — but it wasn’t until our -aha- moment in a late-night brainstorming session that we came up with our signature encoding technology — to reduce file sizes by over 10,000x. With our 10,000x, we could fit a full edX course into 1 MB, and deliver it to students over mobile networks for less than the cost of sending a single SMS. At that point, we knew we were onto something, and we had to take this project to the next level.
The deep dive
To figure out if this technology would work, we decided to create a prototype and pilot it in the field. One late night at the entrepreneurship center we literally drew up a map of the world, and crossed of countries and regions, one by one, until we got to Ghana. With that decision made, and with funding that we got from MIT, we both flew to Ghana for the first time, to do market research and test our prototype with students for the month of January.
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Our interviews with students in Ghana[/caption]
What we weren’t expecting
Our main fear coming to Ghana was that the purchasing power of students or parents would be too low for a social enterprise model to work. What we didn’t expect in a million years was that the problem would be the exact opposite — that most Ghanain students were spending far too much money on supplemental education. Here’s why:
One of the first things that was hard to notice when we got off the plane, was signs like this everywhere:
Well, it turns out the the WASSCE is the SATs of West Africa, and for many students in Ghana, a good score on the WASSCE is your ticket to a good university, and consequently your ticket to a stable well-paid job. About 400,000 students study for the WASSCE every year in Ghana alone, and they’re competing for about 50,000 open university slots a year in the country.
This huge discrepancy means that students spend several years studying for the WASSCE. The entire high school curriculum is dedicated to it, and many students pay a lot of money to study for it. How much is a lot of money?
We saw ads like this at the high schools we passed by. This is an ad for an android tablet, pre-loaded with quizzes and videos, entirely dedicated to studying for the WASSCE. How much does it cost?
$200. And enough students apparently by these tablets to feed a growing market. If you spend enough time here though, you’ll realize that it makes sense -
- It’s still cheaper than using Khan Academy when you have to pay for every MB of internet
- $200 is a bargain compared to more popular forms of test-prep
And that brings us back to these ads. These ads are for “Remedial schools” — which can best be described as mom-and-pop versions of Kaplan or Princeton Review test prep centers. The WASSCE is divided into 8 subjects, and these schools charge about $200 tuition per semester per subject , with the average student studying around 4 subjects — or over $800 USD on test prep. That’s literally more that what Americans pay for SAT test prep, in a country with 1/20th of the per-capita income.
Unlike mom-and-pop outfits, or Kaplan / Princeton review folks for that matter, these remedial schools are not very nice people. When we tried to interview the administration staff of one, they objected to us being there, to asking anyone any questions, prohibited us from taking any pictures, and tried to get us out of the door as quickly as possible. There’s so much money entrenched in the system that digitizing the market and providing a free educational platform may be a problem — because there are organizations with a lot of money who’s interest it is in maintaining the status quo.
Confronted with this dystopian and depressing situation, and not ones to shy away from the tough problems, we decided to pilot our technology with a free test-prep app for the WASSCE in Ghana, with the goal of testing/validating/refining our concept, but also with the hope of disrupting this brick-and-mortar market and making free test-prep accessible to Ghanain students.
An MVP
Over December and January we hammered out a prototype, which we’ve uploaded on the google play store. Because achieving our 10,000x videos would require writing our own library of content, we’re initially testing this with regular videos (which we’re using under Creative Commons from Khan Academy) as well as Practice content for the WASSCE exam.
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Our mvp / prototype[/caption]
The road ahead
The downside of being students at MIT is, well, students still need to take classes, so we’ll be returning to Boston for the spring semester. Our goal for the spring is to raise a seed round of funding in order to launch full time in the summer, when we can implement our algorithms and start to scale our solution among Ghanaian students.
