Taleemabad - Engaging Adaptive Learning

Girls in Pakistan face an increasingly challenging path to even complete their K-12 education, with a 53% Net Enrollment Rate at the Primary level, dropping down to 14% at the High School level. The combination of socio-cultural barriers and underdevelopment at all educational levels for girls has hindered progress towards their education, formally and informally.

Taleemabad is a digital platform that provides an online and offline solution to the multiple challenges faced in improving the status of education. It combines the Standard Learning Outcomes from the national curriculum of Pakistan with animation and storytelling to provide an engaging animated series, thousands of assessments that help users cement their learning and ultimately repair stunted learning levels by creating customized learning pathways. All of this is done through tablets and smartphones.

Women lift societies and economies, and to enable them to do that they first need education

The number of out-of-school girls in Pakistan (over 12 million) represents over 9% of the world's total population of out-of-school girls. More than 3 million girls - 37% of primary-school going aged girls - aren't enrolled in schools. This number almost doubles as we move into the secondary grades, and with the onset of COVID-19, 10 million girls are expected to not return to schools.

A deeper analysis of Pakistan’s education problems reveals an intersection of poverty and restrictive cultural elements that inhibit the progress of education. Over 29.5% of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, which often results in children working from an early age instead of going to school. Often, children--especially girls--are prevented from going to school because of the fear of abduction or abuse, and due to early marriages, often drop out at a young age. At higher ages when education comes at a cost, parents are more likely to send boys to school because of the higher likelihood of them becoming breadwinners for the family. More importantly, children who drop out are increasingly quoting a lack of interest in learning due to overpopulated classes where multi-grade teaching is conducted and there is a lack of contextualisation.

Our solution - the Taleemabad App - is the national curriculum of Pakistan broken down into Standard Learning Outcomes and converted into an engaging animated series that teaches through stories and strong female characters with different appearances and from diverse backgrounds. By contextualizing lessons and making them engaging and in the native language of the user, learning gains are quickly evident and more potent, with Taleemabad users acquiring literacy and numeracy skills far 31% quicker than their peers. The app also contains thousands of assessments, carefully designed to continuously test a user's knowledge and record their results in order to calculate actual learning levels. Test results 1) provide feedback to parents/teachers about the user's progress through a dashboard called the parent portal and 2) with the help of Machine Learning and AI, enable the platform to adapt to the learning level of each user and design a customized learning pathway according to each user's unique learning needs, sometimes even making them switch between grades to remedy a problem whose roots lie in an earlier grade and then slowly moves them forward.

In 2015 we started our careers as teachers who taught children living in the streets and the slums of Islamabad. After 2 years of teaching, we set out to find the problems with education and their solutions, going all across Pakistan, living and teaching in remote rural and semi-urban areas. That formative year took us out of reports and numbers and showed us the on-ground realities that were barriers to education and helped us identify children (especially girls) living outside of Tier 1 cities as the most at-risk population. These children do not have access to brick and mortar schools and start working very young to contribute to running the household. 

In 2018 we partnered with the Malala Fund and returned to the field to assess the situation of girls’ education in Punjab, engaging with the front-line workers - District and Area Education Officers - and members of the community. We identified 200 girls who had dropped out after 5th grade due to a lack of secondary schools in the area and provided them with an offline version of Taleemabad. A field team is permanently stationed there that engages the community and these girls, regularly providing us with feedback.

The selected dimension captures what we're trying to achieve through our pilot in Punjab. By reintroducing these girls to education and simultaneously engaging the community to bring about a social restructuring where girls are given an equal opportunity in education, we want to remove one of the greatest barriers to girls education - socio-cultural norms - and help them reach key learning milestones. Moreover, we have built a strong female cast around Pinky - a strong-willed girl and our main protagonist - allowing us to tackle a host of issues faced by girls living in these areas.

Taleemabad has two foundational elements on which the digital platform is built, with content creation being the first element. It takes a carefully curated team of Learning Specialists, Graphics and Visual Learning Designers, Developers and Data Analysts to make the Taleemabad series into an engaging and effective learning tool. We treat teaching as a science, and content delivery through digital means an even rigorous application of that science. Each episode of ours goes through a meticulous engagement test called the Stallings Classroom Observation method. Children in focus groups are made to do pre and post-trial tests to measure learning gains. From 2015-2016 our company made and discarded over 4000 minutes of animation - simply because they did not perform.

We are also the only platform that has a comprehensive Urdu (national language of Pakistan) curriculum.

Making characters and storylines relatable helps us develop a close bond with our users. This bond allows us to engage children for longer and ensure deep-rooted learning. However, it also has a much larger role in shaping the future of the next generation by instilling acceptability and tolerance for people with different appearances and from all kinds of backgrounds. 

The second foundational element is the assessments and quizzes - disguised as fun games to eliminate the stress associated with taking a test. The assessments are also an integral part of making the platform adaptive and helping to repair stunted learning levels.

We use multiple types of technology to power the foundational elements of our solution. Content production is done through Vyond - a cloud-based video creation software. Visual Learning Designers, responsible for transforming the scripts created by educational specialists into animated videos, need to be proficient in the software to create our distinct style animation.

We also collect copious amounts of data regarding user interaction with the platform and relentlessly tag every minute of content, following Netflix's model of content creation and applying it to educational content production. Data analysts pinpoint which specific parts of an episode need to be tweaked or even thrown out completely and relay the information to the Visual Learning Designers and Education Specialists to make appropriate changes, outputting the most effective content.

AI has a pivotal role in making the platform adaptive. Using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing the platform adapts to each user's learning level and provides a customized learning pathway in the native language.

To make the Taleemabad app ubiquitous, the overall growth of the telecommunication sector is crucial. In recent years, Pakistan is experiencing a smartphone revolution with smartphone penetration reaching 51% in 2020, projected to accelerate after the introduction of low-cost smartphones by mobile operators, such as the Jazz Digit Phone offered with bundled access to 4G internet (another growing sector with over 76 million subscribers) at a cost of just $18. We are now working towards leveraging these developments and having Taleemabad pre-installed as a value-added service on these phones.

Early childhood education lays the foundation of all future educational endeavours and we have grown up with multiple examples of educational shows that caught our attention with their characters and delivery of content while simultaneously building a strong learning base. A couple of the earliest examples of these shows are Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, classic examples of how academic teaching can be done in a more effective manner.

The Recontact Study conducted in 1994 was designed to explain the long-term correlates between early television viewing and high school achievement, motivation, creativity and attitudes about a variety of topics. 655 children’s television viewing habits were observed at the age of 5, with 84% of them watching Sesame Street for an average of 2.2 hours per week. When these children reached high-school, 570 of them were interviewed and their academics analyzed. In conclusion, there was a direct relationship between grades and the time spent watching Sesame Street - the more time they had spent watching the show, the better their grades were especially in core subjects such as Maths, English and Science, with girls performing better than boys in most cases. These adolescents also spent more time reading books outside of school and displayed less aggressive behaviour.

Byju’s - the largest EdTech company in the world - is a modern interpretation of Sesame Street's model that combines technology, media and content. Following their example, we can emulate their success in Pakistan.

Product Demo: https://drive.google.com/file/...

As teachers turned tech entrepreneurs we have conducted extensive research, in theory and through our own findings as well. We treat teaching as a science to ensure that learning gains are efficient, leading to Taleemabad students gaining functional literacy and numeracy 31% quicker as compared to their peers who do not use Taleemabad. Teaching through Taleemabad has also led to a 70% decrease in dropouts in our partner schools and an average session length (the time a user opens the app and closes it) of 9 minutes, longer than that of YouTube in Pakistan. 

The story of one of the girls in our Rajanpur project epitomizes our theory of change. Zeenat Asghar Bibi was initially not allowed to continue her education beyond Primary Grades because the family preferred her brother due to financial constraints. However, with her brother’s failure to pass his exams, she was allowed to take part in Taleemabad’s project, after much convincing by our team, the teachers of the school and the education administration of the area. Zeenat, who developed a particular liking for Maths, was soon applying her newly acquired knowledge to help out her father with handling the household finances by quantifying their income and expenses, and creating a budget which they had to adhere to in order to start saving money. As word got out, she began helping her neighbors with their household budgeting as well, which ultimately resulted in her gaining the respect of her family and of the community.

This instance is a great example of how we want to impact lives, and not just those of the girls who are a part of the program but of the community around them as well. Just as Zeenat Bibi was able to bring about change in a historically rigid community with something as simple as Grade 6 Maths, girls equipped with proper education will lead the campaign for social restructuring, where girls play an important role in the social, political and economical uplifting of their communities, their country, and the world.

It took us nearly 2 years to get to 150,000 users on the Taleemabad platform however, in just the last 2 months we have doubled our users, reaching nearly 300,000. Millions more watch through our multiple broadcasts on television, in partnership with the Ministry of Federal Education, the National Broadcaster and the Ministry of Education in Punjab. It is also available to 20,000 low-cost private schools in collaboration with a content aggregator called Ilm Exchange run by the LEAPS study faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School.

By the end of this year we are poised to reach 1.3 million users on the app and 7 million+ users in 5 years time. These are just the number of people we can reach through the app in Pakistan. We plan on expanding to other countries in the subcontinent which will multiply the number of people reached and the impact achieved.

We don’t mandate gender selection in the app, but one of the most reliable ways in which we collect this data is by asking people to fill in surveys. So far, among our survey respondents, 30.3% said they used the app for their daughters only, 37.7% said both their sons and daughters used the app, and 32% said they used it for their sons only. This helps us get to a healthy estimate of 68% of users giving their daughters access to the app.

Within the next year we will complete our Primary Grades curriculum. With K-3 already made, we are on track to finish Grade 4 and Grade 5 curriculum by October/November 2020. Around the same time we will pass the 1 million users mark, making 7 years of quality education (K-6) available to these users on their fingertips for a one-time fee of just $12. Our goal is to focus our reach outside of Tier 1 cities and spread into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. This requires an on-ground presence and perfecting our school model over the year as we enter into key partnerships that enable us to engage with low-cost private schools spread across the country in Tier 2 and Tier 3  cities.

In the next 5 years, we aim to complete the entire K-12 curriculum and translate it into multiple regional languages such as Sindhi and Pashto. Translation of content into Pashto will also open the doorway into Afghanistan which shares the Pashto language with the KPK province of Pakistan and is also in need of a remote education intervention. By developing the necessary partnerships with Telcos, we aim to have Taleemabad pre-installed in low cost smartphones across the Subcontinent to make access easier and more affordable. Ultimately, we want to create enough case studies that enable us to run an advocacy campaign and bring about systemic change as well.

We started out as 3 people crammed into a tiny room in one of the founder’s parent’s house, trying to come up with more engaging ways to teach children at the school we had opened in the slums. Since then we have evolved into a multi-award winning social enterprise, employing 50 passionate people determined to bring about lasting change into a flawed education system. The growth of the company and its impact, and the acceleration of that growth is dependent on the amount of money we are able to inject into it, which has not always been available in abundance and acted as a barrier.

The financial barrier has a trickle down effect, as with limited financial resources 1) we are not able to hire and keep hold of talented individuals who cannot be paid as highly as they deserve to be paid, making it tough to hold onto them.
Market barriers such as ubiquity of smartphones and internet, and effective payment methods are still a constraint. Smartphone and internet use is still concentrated in urban areas due to the high cost associated with them and infrastructure for brick and mortar banks in rural areas does not yet exist,nor will it in the near future.

We started out as a not-for-profit organisation but soon realised that although there are extremely generous donors out there, we can not remain dependent on philanthropy for long. Since then we have shifted to a social enterprise structure and introduced paid features such as assessments, the parent portal and adaptivity. The video lessons remain freely accessible and even the cost to users is kept to a minimum amount to keep it affordable for everyone and enough to make us self-sustainable.

Employee growth remains one of our top priorities and is done through constant reskilling and upskilling opportunities such as fellowship engagements and  the freedom to get involved in multi departmental work.

To overcome availability we are engaged with the top mobile operators in the country to provide more competitive data packages and to onboard Taleemabad as part of their mobile e-services such e-agriculture, e-health and e-money.

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We have an ever-growing staff of 50+ people working full-time.

We are who we are today because of our formative experience as a group of individuals building schools in the slums of Islamabad in 2011, where we taught, fed and clothed children  to give them an opportunity to improve their lives. We have traveled across the country, living and teaching in small towns and villages. Here, we were able to identify the problems and eventually come up with their solutions. To this day, our constant presence in the field enables us to adapt to the ever-evolving problems and pivot accordingly.

We are teachers before being entrepreneurs or tech optimists. After our experience teaching across the country we knew that engagement could be done better - we’d done it in our classrooms. We also knew pedagogies could be structured better - we’d gotten children in our classrooms to read and write ahead of their peers. To take this impact to scale we have assembled a team of young individuals with teaching experience and fresh new ideas guided by experienced hands such as; Ms Asma Tughral who has been teaching children in disadvantaged situations for more than 30 years; Pedagogical Expert Thomas Cassidy of the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Business Advisor Niaz Malik who has served as deputy CEO of one of the largest mobile operators in Pakistan and led the introduction of 4G internet in Pakistan.

Our work has earned us many accolades such as the Queen's Young Leaders Award and being featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

We partner with multiple organisations that share our vision. Most of these organisations are fund partners that have enabled us to carry out the work that we do. They include Peery Foundation, Dalio Foundation, Malala Fund, Mulago Foundation, Telenor and Newton International Academy. Collectively, we have received more than half a million dollars from these organisations as grant money. Recently, we have also partnered with Facebook through which we have received $14,000 worth of Facebook ad credits.

To ensure that our content is effective in delivering the lesson in an engaging and ‘sticky’ manner, we partner with multiple schools where each episode goes through a meticulous engagement test called the Stallings Classroom Observation method.

Recently, we have been endorsed by and partnered with 1) the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training (MoFEPT) to broadcast the Taleemabad series on a free to air, purpose built education channel called TeleSchool, 2) the Ministry of Education Punjab, providing them with the Taleemabad series to air on their own educational channel called TaleemGhar. We are also part of Ilm Association, a collection of all EdTech companies in Pakistan, and are also supported by a content aggregator called Ilm Exchange, run by the LEAPS research faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP).

Primarily, we follow a B2C Freemium model, where users are given free access to the entire app and its features for one week. After the trial period they only have access to the video lessons and can choose from a variety of bundle options to either pay for only what they need or for the entire curriculum and features. Depending on what bundle customers choose, price varies from $7 to $12. There are multiple payment methods; credit card; direct bank transfer; mobile wallets and similar services such as EasyPaisa; cash on delivery. Sales is a new domain for us and to maximize its potential we recently hired a seasoned COO who has already led us to 1000+ subscriptions.

We’re able to bring one user to the platform at a very low cost of $0.04. This low user acquisition cost is down to our time in the field where we collected data about the people living in those areas; their habits; the products and services that they use; living conditions etc. Living in these areas helped us understand our target population and in turn taught us how to reach them most effectively - target women between the ages of 20 and 40, who are married and have recently had children.

Now, as our primary grades curriculum nears completion, we are also working on a B2B model where we provide schools our services, however this model is in the preliminary stages.

Our intentions are Non-Profit but our approach is sustainable, which will help us secure the future of the venture without dependency on external help. We provide video lessons for free, not just through the app but also through multiple other channels, however, other features of the app such as the assessments, game-based quizzes, video downloading for offline use and the parent portal that allows you to create a user profile and keep track of your learning, are all paid features. We offer all of these features in the app for a Lifetime Value (LTV) of $7 to $12 (depending on the bundle chosen), an amount that is affordable by the majority of the population but is also enough to take us to sustainability at scale.

By June 2021, we have estimated revenue to reach $92,000+.

We have also secured continued monetary support from 2 donors as a contingency, for the next ten years. This contingency is valued at nearly $350,000 USD per year. 

As kids, many of us didn’t wake up aching to go to school. We couldn't, however, wait to watch early morning cartoons while we were getting ready. But once we got to school, we looked forward to that one class with the teacher who made all the students fall in love with learning by making lessons interesting and fun, and being dedicated to each and every student and their individual needs. We dream of ultimately creating a platform that 1) provides children with a cartoon series that actually prepares kids for school and 2) emulate our favorite teachers who helped us learn and understand by never giving up and adapting to our needs. MIT and Solve can help us achieve this dream.

There is no denying that capital is essential for the growth of any initiative, and it is true for Taleemabad as well. More money means we are better-equipped to reach more people in underserved communities and have a larger and lasting impact. However, applying to Solve and MIT is especially appealing to us as a growing EdTech company because of the history of MIT in Tech and Engineering, and what it can bring to the table in terms of helping us develop adaptivity in our platform.

We are looking for partners that can help us develop a more sound business to make the impact sustainable.However, reaching millions of children around the globe would be meaningless until there are significant improvements in their learning, and to do that we want to partner with organisations that can help us on track by monitoring and evaluating learning gains through the platform. 

We would like to partner with:

1. Smartphone manufacturers, producing cheap smartphones or alternatives that can support the Taleemabad platform so that access to technology is no longer a barrier.
2. Mobile operators, to partner with us and provide exclusive deals on mobile internet for Taleemabad use so that access to internet isn’t a barrier
3. MIT study faculty or standardized testing organisations (such as PISA), to help us with monitoring learning gains.
4. Upskilling and Reskilling organisations, to help employees develop as professionals.

Our pilot project with the Malala Fund in Punjab has brought about a positive change in hundreds of girls' lives using basic technology to reintroduce them to education and provide them with an avenue to improve their living conditions. The larger impact has been on the community and how it perceives girls education. A historically rigid community, dominated by patriarchy, is now accepting the reality that girls are equally capable and deserve an equal opportunity. These girls have not only surpassed all expectations but they have also uplifted the community by helping everyone around them by applying their education. In the future, these girls will become the women that tear down restrictive socio-cultural norms and create a ripple effect that will echo throughout the world.

In most parts of Pakistan, brick and mortar schools for girls are scarce with only a few thousand schools built to cater to the 12 million female students. To build the necessary infrastructure requires time and money. Although efforts are increasing to make education more inclusive for girls by building schools and increasing enrollment, we risk losing an entire generation of girls in the interim.

Orenda has developed an extremely affordable solution to this problem by providing quality and engaging education in the native language to any child, anywhere through the Taleemabad Apps, available for online and offline use. The app not only provides educational content (videos and tests) but also assesses learning levels of students to provide personalised learning pathways to remedy stunted learning levels - a common problem among children living in vulnerable situations.

Taleemabad provides educational content through the app but also assesses each student's learning levels by constantly analyzing the data collected from tests taken by students. This data is then used to create custom learning pathways for each student in their native language, sometimes even making them switch between grades to remedy stunted learning levels. All of this is powered by AI - Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.