Progracademy: making computer science education universal

The educational system is struggling to develop students' 21st-century competencies (the "6Cs"); however, for unprivileged schools already lagging behind in basic education, the task of developing students' 6Cs seems unachievable.  

Progracademy (PRG) provides a cost-effective, scalable, self-sustaining solution that crowdsources resources to allow students and schools to develop 21st-century competencies -with emphasis on the digital ones, regardless of their economic and social background. 

The solution has two key components: 

i) extra-supported online Computer Science courses ("MaxiMOOCs")

ii) a social platform that crowdsources and coordinates Facilitators, mainly in the form of online coaches, working along with school teachers and parents to support students' learning. 

PRG seeks a quadruple social impact: i) develop students' 6Cs, ii) build 6Cs-Ed’s capacity in schools' teachers and administrators iii) develop 6Cs in the Facilitators that support the students, and iv) mobilize sustainable support from the for-profit sector and civil society to support 6Cs education.

For less affluent educational systems already facing an acute learning crisis in the basic competencies (the 3Rs), the daunting task of developing the 21st-century competencies -including the digital ones- (the 6Cs) is likely to bring poor results, thus widening the existing educational gap. As Professor Paulo Blikstein has said: "Computer Science education has the potential to deepen educational inequalities if it is only properly implemented in affluent schools". This prospect is particularly worrisome for Latin America, where the UNDP considers that 74% of the population is vulnerable. 

Having a system to develop the 6Cs among unprivileged students is especially challenging in Latin America for two reasons:

First, unprivileged schools face a scarcity of digitally competent teachers, as well as budget and implementation capability restrictions. All this creates a scalability issue. 

Second, unprivileged students usually have limited access to educational solutions outside of the formal school system. 

The challenge that we are tackling is to devise and deploy a solution for developing unprivileged students' 6Cs that is: (i) ready-to-deploy with the available human resources existing in the region, (ii) highly cost-effective, (iii) very scalable, and (iv) universal (i.e., accessible to all students regardless of their economic and social background).

We have two goals for our primary beneficiaries -unprivileged K-12 students: (a) Ensuring that they can develop the 6Cs fundamentals regardless of their economic or social background, something that we achieve with our PRG-Lab service. (b) Providing the means to achieve excellence for those willing to go beyond the fundamentals, something that we meet with our PRG-Club service. We also have two secondary beneficiaries, namely:

• Schools teachers and administrators. Our goal is to build their capacity to develop the students’ 6Cs. We do that through an intervention based on an online preparation course and continuous two-way communication and support. 

• Online coaches. They are university students or companies’ employees who connect from their work/study place to support students on a time-flexible basis. Our goal is to develop their Collaborative Leadership and Lifelong Learner attributes. To do that we deliver to them an online preparation course (pre-service), followed by constant feedback and support from the Central Office’s staff during their service period.     

PRG has a built-in feedback system to improve our ability to understand the needs of beneficiaries: online surveys after synchronous sessions, weekly coaching sessions for students, and weekly and monthly review sessions with online coaches and school staff, respectively.

We have two educational services:

PRG-Lab: students develop the fundamentals of the 6Cs during school time in the school lab. Students typically have two sessions per week (1 hour each), during which they do pair programming, regularly switching roles (driver and navigator) while overcoming programming challenges together. Students receive support from an online coach and socioemotional support from physically-present school teachers. PRG’s Central Office provides learning analytics, and general coordination and support.

PRG-Club: it aims to develop excellence among students that want and can go beyond computer science fundamentals. Students connect to the Progracademy platform beyond school time (typically from home) and follow an individualized development plan facilitated by an online coach. Progracademy actively involves parents in the process, sending weekly progress reports and specific suggestions for supporting their children's learning experience. We also strongly encourage students to actively use the forum by posting or answering questions from other Club members.

These two services use Progracademy’s student-centered model, which crowdsources the different educational functions with a mix of resources, including (a) Online platform that provides subject matter content and automated feedback, (b) Students, who facilitate the peer learning process by interacting among themselves, (c) Online coaches, who facilitate students' development and provide feedback, (d) School teachers (in PRG-Lab) who provide class management and students' socioemotional support, (e) Parents, who provide students additional socioemotional support. The model is also supported by a Central Office, which provides the learning analytics derived from the vast amount of data generated in the online ecosystem, and acts as a general coordinator.  

To deploy this model, Progracademy has developed a MaxiMOOC Platform, i.e., an extra-supported Computer Science MOOC that enables the interaction among students and between them and the Facilitators. The MaxiMooc uses a variety of tools and materials which include (not exhaustively): 

• For content: Code.org for Computer Science content, and EdPuzzle for interactive videos

• For Virtual classrooms: Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams 

• For Communication: Microsoft Teams 

Progracademy mainly relies on three pedagogical strategies:

i) Peer learning. We propitiate it by extensively using pair programming and student forums.

ii) Project-based learning. After completing the courses in Code.org, students master computer science skills through projects, which include animations, video games, and websites, which are then socialized. 

iii) Virtual Community of Practice. Students at different levels of expertise build a sense of belonging and community while they learn from each other and from their coaches.

Progracademy's main innovation is to leverage crowdsourcing into a student-centered educational model so as to produce a cost-efficient, scalable, and self-sustaining solution. Online content, facilitators, and volunteers have existed for several years, but nobody else is coordinating them via a self-sustaining crowdsourcing model. 

In order to apply the crowdsourcing model to education, we ease the integration and coordination of volunteers into the student learning process by:

• Disaggregating the educational role (previously assigned to teachers only) into several components (content, evaluation & coaching, facilitation, socioemotional support, classroom management).    

• Assigning those educational components to Facilitators (online coaches, schools teachers, and parents) and to a Central Office.

• Empowering students to lead their own learning experience and to learn from each other, becoming themselves a key part of the crowdsourcing ecosystem.

• Developing online platforms where all these elements can work together, coordinated and empowered via algorithms and the Central Office.  

Our model has several advantages: 

• Cost-efficient, by being attractive to volunteers. They appreciate how easy they integrate into PRG (via structured, ongoing training, coaching and support), how flexible is their work (in terms of time and place, so they can keep other work/study commitments), and how impactful it is on unprivileged students. 

• Scalable, by bringing external, untapped resources, to the educational system, and by easing the schools' transition into 6Cs education.

• Self-sustaining, by “recycling” PRG alumni into volunteers that can later give back to their own communities, schools (advantage still to be validated as it requires alumni to be high school seniors or beyond).     

Our objective is that any student, regardless of their economic and social background, has the opportunity to develop the 21st-century competencies, personified by our three Graduate Profile attributes: Computational Creators, Collaborative Leaders, Lifelong Learners.  

To achieve those attributes, the Progracademy model propitiates three instrumental learnings that creates five habits, which can be summarized as follows. 

(a) To be Computational Creators, students learn computer science (instrumental learning), to develop the habits of computational thinking and design thinking. 

(b) To be Collaborative Leaders, students learn to learn by collaborating (instrumental learning), to develop the habits of change agency and collaborative problem solving. 

(c) To be Lifelong Learners, students learn to learn (instrumental learning), to develop the habits of deliberate practice and growth mindset. 

Results show that students from our pilot projects in Venezuela and Ecuador have developed those three attributes. 

(a) The attribute of Computational Creators is groomed during the courses’ Computational Challenges. In Ecuador, 95% of the students solved 80% or more of the course’s 156 Computational Challenges. A similar successful performance was achieved in Venezuela earlier (94%). 

(b) The Collaborative Leaders attribute was reflected by many testimonials given by teachers about students evolving from being aggressive or passive, to working collaboratively and proactively helping their classmates, even in other classes. 

(c) The Permanent Learners attribute’s development was reflected in a 20% improvement in growth mindset, as self-reported through Before & After questionnaires. Anecdotal evidence also reflected many students that started to enjoy task difficulties and accept their own mistakes constructively. 

We are currently serving 156 students with PRG-Lab in 4 educational centers in Spain and 1 school in Ecuador. 

Our growth plan for PRG-Lab is based on three assumptions: 

• We plan to enter the Dominican Republic during the academic year 2020-21, and Mexico a for the academic year 2021-22, with one pilot school in each.

• We expect to double the number of schools in each country every year for the next five years.

• In each school, we expect to cover at least three grades via PRG-Lab. 

In addition to this, we are launching PRG-Club this year (April). Our assumptions are as follows:

• We expect to enroll 100 students during the first year, doubling the number of students in the second and third years, and steadily growing by 30% per year after that. 

• In addition to this, we expect that 20% of students attending PRG-Lab will also enroll in PRG-Club.

 Under these assumptions, we expect that:

• Next year we will be serving 677 students with PRG-Lab, and 600 students with PRG-Club for a total of 1,277 students served. 

• In five years, we expect to serve approximately 35,000 students with PRG-Lab and around 4,000 students with PRG-Club, for a total of 39,000 students. 

Note that this number can be significantly higher if we manage to partner-up with the public school sector to implement Progracademy at scale. In this scenario the Progracademy model could have a direct impact on millions of students, thanks to its scalability.    

There are three reasons why our model can be transformational of the educational system in Latin America:

• Progracademy model is highly scalable. Our scalability leverages on replicability: we have successfully tried the model in Venezuela, and after that, we successfully exported it to Ecuador, obtaining similar results. Last year we were requested to initiate operations in Spain using the same model. We strongly believe that the model could be replicated across Latin America.  

• Progracademy model can redirect non-traditional resources to transform the educational system in each country. For instance, Mexico requires 480 service-learning hours from its 4.4 million of tertiary-education students. For a group of 35 primary school students, we require 144 hours from online coaches per academic year. This implies that using the Progracademy model these existing resources could in theory coach 92 million primary and secondary students, way above the number of actual K-12 students in the system. This is a theoretical example of the vast potential from untapped resources that Progracademy could activate to develop the 6Cs in primary and secondary students.

• Progracademy can create a self-sustaining model. As mentioned, over time PRG alumni could become online coaches themselves. Moreover, Progracademy can create a hub (PRG-Hub) for students and alumni who want to become freelance programmers, and/or computer science educators, both of which could provide a small fee to PRG when providing their paid services. As the pool of available human resources increases over the years, the system could progress towards becoming self-sustaining financially as well.             

There are at least six significant barriers/challenges to overcome: 

• First, the public education sector is quite resistant to implement innovations, especially 6Cs education. Therefore, they may be very slow in adopting this innovation; thus, delaying the full impact of Progracademy.  

• Second, we may face constraints in recruiting enough online coaches for making the system truly universal. We believe that mandatory University service-learning provides a deep pool of resources for Progracademy in countries such as Mexico, Ecuador, and Venezuela. In other countries, where the practice is not mandatory, we may face shortages when starting applying the scheme; however, we expect that over the long-run, this will be less of an issue as the system will become self-sustaining.    

• Third, internet connection quality may be an issue for certain regions, especially rural ones (20% of Latam population).

• Fourth, school computer labs may turn out to be a constraint to extend Progracademy formation beyond three grades per student. We have found that Latin American governments have made significant investments in schools' computer labs, but they have typically limited their size to one classroom (on average, around 34 students). Under these conditions, the computer lab will be able to serve three grades at the same time during the week. Going beyond it will require enhancing the infrastructure. 

• Fifth, strengthening our technological platform would allow us to reduce our delivery cost by at least 20% and will enable us to serve more students properly.

• Sixth, stable funding for our operations and for enhancing our platform.     

• Public sector slow adoption. We believe that: (a) current Coronovarius crisis can be a catalyst for adopting online solutions such as Progacademy, (b) we must pursue endorsement by recognized institutions, (c) we should show PRG's effectiveness via statistically relevant studies, (d) scale and depth of PRG interventions should grow gradually.

• Shortages of online coaches. We are undertaking four actions. a) Leveraging corporate social responsibility in corporations. b) Leveraging our successful agreements with PUCE and UCAB to engage with other Jesuit universities. c) Taking advantage of the increasing number of universities adopting the Service-Learning scheme. d) Incorporating high school seniors as online coaches of middle school students (many countries in the region have Mandatory Service-Learning in high school).

• Internet connection quality. This barrier may be limiting when we go outside large cities. We plan to partner up with internet service providers to offer a bundle (Progracademy + Internet) to those schools that have internet problems.

• School computer lab infrastructure. This problem may become limiting in three to four years. We believe that if this happens, schools could obtain funds from the school community to enhance the computer labs. For unprivileged schools, we expect that major donors and the government can fund the expansion provided that Progracademy success would be a good reason to justify such funding. 

• Strengthening Progracademy platform. We are currently working alongside volunteer university students in pre-professional assignments to enhance our platform. We expect, however, to raise funds from donors to accelerate the process.

• Funding: See Funding section.

We are currently working with Fe y Alegría (the largest educational NGO for unprivileged students in Latin America, serving 1.5 million students in more than 20 countries) in one School (Emaus) of an unprivileged area of Quito. The school is running the second year of our PRG-Lab, with 102 students aged 11-12 from the 8th grade.

We are also working with the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE) to source online coaches from its student body, looking for fulfilling their mandatory service-learning requirement for graduation.

Note that in 2017 we were forced to close operations in Venezuela due to the political and social turmoil in that country, and the sudden connectivity deterioration in its schools. We piloted there a project in one Fe y Alegría school in an unprivileged area (Guarenas, 50 Km away from the capital Caracas). We also worked with Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB), which provided the online coaches under the National mandatory service-learning scheme. The pilot was so successful that Fe y Alegría invited us to replicate PRG in its Ecuador schools.

Full-time staff: 2 

Volunteers: 6

School teachers: 4

(3 in Spain and 1 in Ecuador)

The core team comprises professionals with experience as a business consultant, executive of large firms, entrepreneur, IT specialist, and educational content specialist. This diverse mix of backgrounds provides us with the skills set required to implement Progracademy's innovative scheme. 

Javier Peraza. He is responsible for designing and leading Progracademy's growth strategy and its funding. He has extensive experience as a consultant (Bain and McKinsey). He holds a BSc in economics from UCAB, MA from Yale University, and MPA from Harvard University. 

Armando Sánchez. He is responsible for optimizing Progracademy's operational model. He has extensive experience in leading Fortune 500 companies in three continents. He holds a BSc in economics from UCAB, MBA and Educational Administration studies from Columbia University. 

Valeria León. She is responsible for optimizing Progracademy’s technological platform. She has been Consultant in Educational Technology for the Inter-American Development Bank, IT Professor at UCAB, manager and developer of ICT projects for various industries. She holds a BSc in Computer Engineer (USB), and MSc in Computer Science (ULA).

Germán Gil. He is responsible for ensuring the quality of Progracademy's educational services. He has an extensive career supporting social entrepreneurship efforts, being a consultant for popular entrepreneurship projects for Trabajo y Persona, director of business acceleration and social entrepreneurship at UCAB and mentor at IESA. Germán holds a degree in Business Administration.

Angélica Rodríguez. She is responsible for producing Progracademy's educational audio-visual materials. She has experience with technology companies, including Apple reseller chains. She has studied a BA in Human Behavior.

Up to this moment, we have signed five agreements with partners that are critical for achieving our growth and development plans. Our list of partners is as follows:

• Code.org. It is the leading online content system for teaching computer science. Our signed agreement makes us the code.org partner in Ecuador. 

• Fe y Alegría. It is Latin America's largest educational NGO, focused on unprivileged students, with 1.5 million of them. We have signed an agreement by which they provide us with schools for piloting and growing the concept in the region (so far Ecuador and Venezuela).  

• Fundación Tomillo. It is a leading educational NGO in Spain that provides non-formal educational support to unprivileged students. We have signed an agreement to pilot the concept in Spain using its educational centers, as well as its volunteers from for-profit corporations as online coaches. 

• Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB) in Venezuela and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE). We have signed an agreement to source online coaches from its students fulfilling their mandatory service-learning projects.  

We serve K-12 students (the main beneficiaries) with two services: 

PRG-Lab: 

With this service, we seek the universalization of 6Cs literacy. We charge a fee per student to schools (the customer); however, the fee is differentiated depending on the school background -unprivileged schools with significantly lower fees (more details about fees in the next question).  

Students attend two sessions per week at the school lab, supported by online coaches and physically present teachers. For delivering this service, Progracademy provides the online coaches, and the Central Office support via the digital Platform (the MaxiMOOC) used by students, learning analytics and planning tools. Schools, on the other hand, provide the teachers, the computer lab and internet connectivity.  

PRG-Club: 

With this service, we aim to develop 6Cs excellence in students. For this service, parents purchase access to the Progracademy Platform. Students connect to the platform and follow an individualized development plan facilitated by an online coach. To deliver this service, Progracademy provides the online coaches, the digital platform (MaxiMOOC) and the learning analytics and planning tools. Parents provide the computer and the internet connection used by the student. 

For both services to unprivileged students, online coaches are typically volunteers. For better-resourced students, online coaches are the original volunteers that want to join our freelance tutor scheme, in which they receive payment.  

Progracademy is a social enterprise integrated into a non-profit organization which has three funding sources:

Fee-for-service to schools for PRG-Lab 

We charge a fee per student. Currently, the full cost of PRG-Lab per student/month is around $9, while in the model using volunteers and University students in service-learning (for schools attending non-privileged students), the current cost is approximately $6.5 per student/month. We expect that by applying a more automated process for learning analytics (e.g., artificial intelligence and more automation), we can reduce this cost in at least 22%. Furthermore, being PRG an online model, obviously the cost/student will drop significantly as the scale goes up.

Our fee for schools attending unprivileged students aims at covering our cost, while for better-resourced schools, we aim to achieve a margin of at least 20% over our costs.       

Fee-for-service to parents for PRG-Club 

We charge a fee per coaching session. We estimate that the cost of each session is $5.1. We aim to charge a price of $6.7 per session (a markup of 33%). Usually, parents purchase a bonus that is spent on these online coaching sessions in a discretionary way. 

Donations and grants

We actively seek donors to fund the fee-for-service of schools attending unprivileged students, and so far, we have been successful in funding the experiences in Ecuador and Spain. We also aim to obtain funds to develop our platform. 

Winning the TPrize would be a game-changer for Progracademy, accelerating its business plan because of four reasons:

• It expedites implementation in public sector schools. Creating trust in the public sector is core to implementing the Progracademy model. Being awarded the TPrize would strengthen our credibility within the public sector and catalyze our growth plan.  

• It would critically accelerate our partnership plan. Being awarded TPrize will give us access to TPrize’s acceleration program with an immediate effect on enhancing our ability to identify partners and sign agreements. This includes research institutions to perform validation studies, corporations and universities to provide online coaches, regional school networks to provide students, and potential donors to provide funds to accelerate our development plan. 

• It would provide us with resources to accelerate the development of our learning and technological platform. By further developing our platform, we aim to reduce the delivery cost, and enhance our ability to manage a much greater amount of students. TPrize could provide a direct source of funds, it could also ease the access to other sources of funds via endorsement, and could attract high-quality volunteers. 

• It would provide us with a potential springboard that would give us full access to institutions engaged in promoting service-learning and volunteer work in education. Involving these institutions is important to ensure we will have the human resources required to universalize this model in Latin America.    

We look for partnering up with organizations that can either reinforce or complement our capabilities, or can provide us with access to potential beneficiaries. They include:

• For developing our platform. We look for universities, research institutions, and software developers that can assist us in improving our platform. Our platform is not complex, but the more automated it is, the larger the operational scale that can manage with limited resources. 

• For studying the impact of Progracademy in schools and students. We seek to sign a multi-year agreement with a university or a research institution based on which they could certify the impact that Progracademy has on schools and students. 

• For providing online coaches. We seek Universities, private sector companies with corporate social responsibility programs, and institutions involved in volunteer work that may provide online coaches, including associations of universities engaged in service-learning. 

• For certification. We look for a tertiary educational institution that can provide a certification for the pre-service course that online coaches and teachers must take before engaging with Progracademy students. We expect the agreement to state that we will deliver the pre-service course in conjunction with the certifying institution. This could increase the attractiveness of PRG for volunteers.      

• For accessing schools. While the Progracademy concept is global, we believe that its commercialization is a local business. As such, we look for local foundations, governments, school networks, or associations that can provide us with access to schools.