Education solutions for a post-COVID world

Challenge Overview

As COVID-19 has disrupted our lives and education systems, we will run our 2021 Jacobs Foundation Conference in a virtual format on April 21-23. Partnering with MIT Solve, we are organizing the event around a Solveathon, which will support our core goal of enabling learning systems globally to provide children between the ages of 2-12 with equitable opportunities, so that they can reach their full learning potential and thrive. We want to encourage the co-creation of effective, cross-sectoral and scalable solutions to the challenge of learning in a post-COVID-19 world. 

We invite educators, academics, investors, technologists, funders, practitioners, and other parties interested to join us in this event.

In the Solveathon, four challenges are run by Challenge Partners to develop education solutions for a post-COVID world: 

• Scalable Innovations for Blended Learning in partnership with Global Schools Forum: How can evidence-based blended learning solutions be scaled in low-resource contexts?

• Showcasing 1000 Solutions for Quality Learning in partnership with Schools2030: How can 1,000 actionable school-led solutions be codified, validated, and showcased through an online portal to help the world’s teachers and education policy-makers improve quality learning for all?

• Improving Learning Outcomes through Data in partnership with Global School Leaders: How can school leaders in low-resource settings effectively gather student data to improve learning outcomes?

• Equitable Classrooms in partnership with MIT Solve: How can all young learners have access to quality, safe, and equitable learning environments?

Showcasing 1,000 Solutions for Quality Learning

How can 1,000 actionable school-led solutions be codified, validated, and showcased through an online portal to help the world’s teachers and education policy-makers improve quality learning for all?

Education gaps for marginalized learners are increasing in the COVID-19 context, with experts predicting that if traditional reform efforts continue on their current trajectory, by 2030 an estimated 825 million children from low- and middle-income countries will fail to achieve basic learning proficiencies to thrive in work and life. On the one hand, teachers and school leaders consistently lack evidence-based, actionable, and contextually relevant strategies to improve learning outcomes, relying too often on external solutions and platforms that lack applicability to real-world classrooms in low-resource settings. On the other hand, innovations that already exist in real-world classrooms are seldomly codified and shared by teachers to inform local, national or global education decision-makers. 

Schools2030 proposes an alternative approach to improving the quality of lifelong learning that places school leaders, teachers, and students at the heart of education innovation. For the next ten years, Schools2030 will collaborate with 1,000 public schools across ten target countries to generate 1,000 solutions each year about how to improve quality education for all. Schools2030 is now seeking new innovators to help them design its inaugural online portal to best codify, validate and showcase the first set of 1,000 school-led solutions by the end of this year. Schools2030 hopes the new portal will:

• Inspire teachers to see themselves as education change-agents, policy entrepreneurs and the key contributor to improving quality education, worldwide;

• Empower teachers with an easy-to-use portal that invites them to learn, collaborate, and leverage solutions from one another in order to apply these solutions to their own classrooms;

• Overcome common shortcomings of “best practice” educational repositories that often lack contextual relevance, practicality, affordability, and evidence of effectiveness;

• Translate solutions into multiple languages, as most existing ‘best practices’ are only in English.

• Connect solutions with existing ‘best practice’ repositories through potential codification and/or standardization of solution archetypes to help foster a stronger global ecosystem of innovations;

• Strengthen the rigor and quality of evidence for these solutions by linking with local, national and global research partners to independently evaluate and/or validate these ‘best practices.’  

Schools2030 seeks to launch its inaugural portal of 1,000 school-led solutions at the RewirED global education summit in December 2021.  We hope that the portal, initially used by Schools2030, will then help foster a new global schools system of innovation and knowledge exchange for teachers and schools; one that that facilitates effective generation and dissemination of actionable and evidence-based school-led solutions about ‘what really works’ for the world’s teachers to collectively help to achieve inclusive and equitable quality education for all by 2030.  

About Schools2030 

Schools2030 is a ten-year participatory action research and learning improvement programme based in 1000 government schools across ten countries. Using the principles of human-centred design and focusing on the key transition years of learners aged 5, 10 and 15, Schools2030 seeks to catalyse locally-rooted education solutions that can inform systems-level approaches for improving holistic learning outcomes. 

The overall aim of the Schools2030 programme is to increase the levels of agency of educators and school-level stakeholders to reclaim the discourse about ‘what works’ to improve quality learning outcomes from the bottom-up, rather than the top-down. At the heart of the Schools2030 approach is the recognition that schools should be the centre of social change, not the target of change. Schools2030 is supported by a consortium of the following nine founding donors: Aga Khan Foundation, Dubai Cares, IKEA Foundation, Itau Social Foundation, Jacobs Foundation,  LEGO Foundation, Oak Foundation, Porticus, and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and operates across 10 countries.

Scalable Innovations for Blended Learning

How can evidence-based blended learning solutions be scaled in low-resource contexts?

During COVID-19, many school networks were able to nimbly and innovatively develop low-tech and blended-learning solutions to ensure continuity of learning in the short-term. However, given the uncertainty in school reopening, the possibility of intermittent closures, and the pressing need to remediate for learning loss, it is of vital importance that school operators and supporting organizations develop blended learning tools that can serve as an effective medium- to long-term teaching approach. 

Along with the delivery of multimodal learning it is critical to track learning outcomes to ensure the effectiveness of solutions and support organizations in scaling their blended learning methods. Currently, tools and methods that can meet this more long-term need have only been developed as stop-gap measures, and little is known about the effectiveness of these blended learning solutions, both factors that prevent their adoption at scale. To that end, Global Schools Forum seeks low-tech solutions for blending learning that:

• Use data-driven approaches to align to existing curriculum standards yet allow for self-paced learning

• Allow for periodic and rigorous measurement of student learning 

• Allow teachers to easily upload, modify and review learning material

• Provide for continuous learning in low-data or offline scenarios and limit the number of hours of device learning per day

• Contain security features to account for multiple device users or possible loss/theft of device

• Are cost-efficient and can be easily deployed in low-resource contexts

• Set forth a clear process for evaluation of the solution itself and benchmarks against which its effectiveness can be monitored over time

About Global Schools Forum

Global Schools Forum (GSF) aims to strengthen the education sector by working with non-state organisations in developing countries who are serving children from low income backgrounds. GSF is the only international membership network to work with and advocate for the non-state education sector. Our 60 members operate in 46 countries from India to Uganda to Colombia, collectively running or supporting 18,000 schools that provide quality education to over 2.5 million children. 

Improving Learning Outcomes through Data

How can school leaders in low-resource settings effectively gather student data to improve learning outcomes?

Learners, especially those from vulnerable backgrounds, benefit from a school environment that is supportive and responsive to their individual learner needs. Fostering teaching methods that are both inclusive and adaptive to individual student needs has the potential to improve the effectiveness of instruction as teachers strive to mitigate learning gaps, and school leaders are critical to this effort.

Emerging evidence suggests that providing school leaders with even basic data on student learning outcomes can lead to improvements in school quality and inform new approaches to instruction. However, with COVID-related school closures, hybrid programs, and various reopening stages, school leaders face challenges in collecting high-quality data on student learning and a lack of support to turn insights into effective practices.  

To that end, Global School Leaders seek solutions that will support school leaders from disadvantaged contexts to cost-effectively gather meaningful student data and use it to improve outcomes for learners.  Solutions to this Challenge should:

• Ensure that data collected is complementary to school data already being tracked by governments, with minimal overlap and disruption to current government collection processes.

• Provide school leaders with a comprehensive plan for identifying key stakeholders responsible for a child’s learning, determining the student achievement data they need, and facilitating the transfer of data to each group.

• Enable real-time tracking of student learning outcomes based on data-driven interventions.

• Create a repository of best practices and impact data that can inform educational policy decision-making at local and regional levels.

About Global School Leaders

Global School Leaders is an international non-profit organization focused on mobilizing key stakeholders to invest and participate in school leadership training. We work with funders, governments, and NGOs in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) to strengthen their education systems. We currently work with partners in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria. Cumulatively, we have trained over 4,000 school leaders and impacted the lives of over 910,000 learners.

Equitable Classrooms

How can all young learners have access to quality, safe, and equitable learning environments?

The pandemic has upended entire education systems, with an estimated 1.5 billion primary and secondary learners’ (ages 5-18) education disrupted. Some schools have shifted to distance learning, while others shut down completely. Many have had limited operations for months. These disruptions exacerbate pre-existing education inequalities along wealth, gender, ethnicity, linguistic, and geographical lines. Primary and secondary school students have shown incredible resilience in the face of these challenges, yet if not addressed, unfinished learning could represent a $10 trillion loss in lifetime earnings.

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, learning environments—whether physical classrooms or remote and hybrid settings—were in need of significant reimagining to support young learners to develop the skills and competencies they need to thrive in the 21st century. Proven interventions, including early career exploration and self-directed, experiential, and social-emotional learning show promise, but will need to be adapted and scaled to benefit the most underserved and to ensure equality of opportunity for all. 

The MIT Solve community is looking for technology-based solutions that ensure all primary and secondary school learners have access to quality, safe, and equitable learning environments. To that end, Solve seeks solutions that:

• Increase the inclusive engagement of learners including strategies and tools for parental support, peer interaction, and guided independent work.

• Enable access to quality learning experiences in low-connectivity settings—including imaginative play, collaborative projects, and hands-on experiments.

• Ensure the physical safety and mental health of learners—for example, through tools for crisis support, reporting violence, and mitigating cyberbullying.

• Support teachers to adapt their pedagogy, facilitate personalized instruction, and communicate with students and their families in remote and hybrid settings

About MIT Solve

Solve is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a mission to solve world challenges. Solve is a marketplace for social impact innovation. Through open innovation Challenges, Solve finds incredible tech-based social entrepreneurs all around the world. Solve then brings together MIT’s innovation ecosystem and a community of Members to fund and support these entrepreneurs to help them drive lasting, transformational impact.

Program Agenda

Program Agenda can be found here

Eligibility Requirements & FAQs

What is a Solveathon?

The 2021 Jacobs Foundation Conference Solveathon will be hosted by MIT Solve and use a human-centered design thinking process focused on rapid ideation, refinement, and prototyping of solutions to four global education Challenges. And the solving goes beyond the event: every idea developed in a Solveathon is submitted to Solve's Open Innovation platform as a solution to one of Jacob Foundation Conference’s four global education Challenges run by Challenge Partners to develop education solutions for a post-COVID world: 

• Scalable Innovations for Blended Learning in partnership with Global Schools Forum: How can evidence-based blended learning solutions be scaled in low-resource contexts?

• Showcasing 1000 Solutions for Quality Learning in partnership with Schools2030: How can 1,000 actionable school-led solutions be codified, validated, and showcased through an online portal to help the world’s teachers and education policy-makers improve quality learning for all?

• Improving Learning Outcomes through Data in partnership with Global School Leaders: How can school leaders in low-resource settings effectively gather student data to improve learning outcomes?

• Equitable Classrooms in partnership with MIT Solve: How can all young learners have access to quality, safe, and equitable learning environments?

The best ideas from the Solveathon will be eligible for funding from a pool of 1,000,000 Swiss Francs and mentoring, coaching, and partnership opportunities to further implement their solutions.

A wide range of skills is critical to creating compelling, research-driven solutions—engineering, design, marketing, business planning, community engagement, teaching, policy, etc. 

The Solveathon is a space to form and reshape ideas, to evaluate and re-evaluate designs, to prototype and collaborate, and to make new friends. Participants will have access to subject matter experts, insight into the local manifestations of each problem, and experience developing and sharing human-centered responses to these global education Challenges. 

Will the Solveathon be virtual?

The 2021 Jacobs Foundation Conference Solveathon will be held virtually on Zoom. Solveathon participants will also utilize other virtual communication and collaboration platforms such as Slack and Google Jamboards throughout the workshop. 

Who can apply?

Anyone, anywhere around the world can register to attend the 2021 Jacobs Foundation Conference and participate in the Solveathon. You can be a team with an existing solution to one of the four Challenges, an individual with expertise to contribute to a team as a mentor, or an individual interested in joining a new team to build a solution from scratch.  

For full participation details, please see our Terms of Service.

Timeline

2021 Jacobs Foundation Conference Solveathon timeline

• April 20, 2021: Pre-Conference networking event

• April 21, 2021: 2021 Jacobs Foundation Conference Solveathon begins

• April 22, 2021 at 3:00pm ET: Deadline to submit solutions on the solve.mit.edu platform

• April 23, 2021: Challenge pitch sessions; finalists announced; finalist pitches; Audience Awards announced

• April 28, 2021: Winners announced

• May - August 2021: Three-month support program and solution implementation

• September 2021: Winner Interview Day to determine follow-on prize funding allocation

• Onward: Jacobs Foundation works with winners to advance their solutions

What type of solutions will Jacobs Foundation accept?

Jacobs Foundation seeks innovative, human-centered, research-based solutions to the four Conference Challenges that will contribute to positive learning outcomes for children ages 2-12. 

Through open innovation, Jacobs Foundation is looking for a diverse portfolio of solutions across geography, development stage, and team members’ gender and background. We encourage people of all backgrounds to submit applications and welcome submissions from all countries.

Solution applications must be written and pitched in English. We will consider solutions at all stages of development:

• Concept: An idea being explored for its feasibility to build a product, service, intervention, or business model based on that idea. If not a registered organization, the team must have a fiscal sponsor.

• Prototype: A team or organization building and testing its product, service, intervention, or business model. If for-profit, a new company getting off the ground that has raised little or no institutional capital (less than $500,000) in pre-seed fundraising. If not a registered organization, the team must have a fiscal sponsor.

• Pilot: A team or organization deploying a tested product, service, intervention, or business model in at least one community. If for-profit, a young company that is working to gain traction and that has raised less than $2 million in institutional capital in seed funding. If not a registered organization, the team must have a fiscal sponsor.

• Growth: An organization with an established product, service, intervention, or business model rolled out in one or, ideally, several communities, which is poised for further growth in multiple communities or countries. If for-profit, an early-stage company that has established a track record and is seeking to raise a round of roughly $2 million to $15 million in institutional capital in a Series A or potentially B round.

• Scale: A sustainable enterprise working in several communities or countries that is looking to scale significantly, focusing on increased efficiency. If for-profit, a successful company that is scaling its operations and seeks to raise a round of more than $15 million in institutional capital. 

Can my team submit multiple solutions to the same Challenge?

No, you will only be allowed to submit and pitch one solution on behalf of your team. The judges will select the solutions that are most aligned with the criteria and dimensions of the Challenges.

How does Solve's platform work?

Solve’s award-winning open innovation platform was designed based on 10 years of research conducted by the Climate CoLab, a project of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, which studies how people and computers can be connected so that collectively, they can act more intelligently than any one person, group, or computer has ever done before.   

Anyone, anywhere in the world can submit a solution to open innovation Challenges hosted on Solve’s platform. Users may also comment and vote on published solutions, which are visible on Solve's website. All judging is completed inside the platform, with solutions assigned to specific judges to review and evaluate.

How will my solution be evaluated?

Our judges are experts and leaders from across industries and sectors. The 2021 Jacobs Foundation Conference judging panel will review solutions to each of the four Challenges before selecting finalist solutions to move on to the Day 3 Closing Plenary pitch session. The judging panel will then select winners from the finalist pool. Judges will score solutions along the following criteria:

• Alignment: The solution addresses one of the four Challenges. 

• Potential for Impact: The planned solution implementation has the potential to impact the intended population. 

• Feasibility: Solution implementation is feasible, and the team has a plan for financial sustainability. 

• Innovative Approach: The solution includes a new technology or methodology, a new application of technology or methodology, a new business model, or a new process for solving the Challenge. 

• Research Component The solution is grounded in evidence and includes a research component.

• Scalability: The solution can be scaled to affect the lives of more people. 

• Technical Feasibility: The technology, business model, approach or process underlying the solution already exists, has been proven to work in other contexts, and is being appropriately applied to the solution; or, if the underlying technology, model, approach or process is novel, the applicant has provided convincing evidence of its potential function.  

What is the Audience Award?

The Audience Awards are CHF 20,000 awards provided to finalist solutions who receive the most votes on the Solve open innovation platform during the Day 3 pitch sessions.

What is a Finalist vs Winner?

Each Challenge will have 8 teams participating. Some teams will have existing solutions and others will be formed on the spot and create solutions from scratch. On Day 3 of the Conference, all 8 teams will pitch their solutions to their Challenge-specific judging panel, and judges will select 3-4 teams from each Challenge category to compete in a finalist pitch session to take place during the Closing Plenary. Judges will review finalists’ pitches and online solution submissions on the Solve platform before selecting the winners of the Solveathon. 

The teams with the winning solutions will be announced following the Conference and will join a three-month support program that will include mentorship, coaching, and partnerships to further implement their solutions.

What will I get if my solution is selected as a Solveathon winner?

If you are selected as a winner you will receive funding from a pool of CHF 1,000,000 from Jacobs Foundation as well as three months of mentoring, coaching, and partnership support. 

Funding for the Grand Innovation Prize and Promising Innovation Prizes will be allocated in tranches based on milestones met during the summer follow-on program. Audience Award prize funding of CHF 20,000 will be granted in one payment following the Conference. 

How will funding be awarded to teams?

New teams formed as a result of the Solveathon that are selected as prize winners will have funding granted to the team lead’s organization, if the lead has already established or is affiliated with an organization that can host the solution. Newly formed teams should decide amongst themselves who will be the team lead organization. In the rare situation where teams do not have an organization affiliation, Challenge Partner organizations may provide fiscal sponsorship.

Existing solution teams will have funding awarded to their organization. Any new team members who join the existing team as part of the Solveathon will act in advisory roles during the Solveathon, and may opt to continue their advisory role for the duration of the follow-on program, but will not be granted award funding.