FastMoocs

We aim at truly democratizing education by enabling people from underserved communities to have access to online education. What if you could learn any online course through short SMS messages on your phone? Is that even possible?

We've set out to prove that it is! We built a platform where users could go, select a course they would like to complete and enter their phone numbers. We then have ours learning experts go through the user's selected course and summarize it into easy to learn concepts. These concepts are then sent to the user via SMS on his/her phone according to a specific schedule. 

So far we have been able to help more than a dozen learners complete courses online with this technology which we are still fine-tuning.

When optimized, this could be a game changer in the Education's industry as it would help train underserved people far cheaper than traditional solutions.

Despite progress over the last decade, 67 million children worldwide, of whom approximately 53% are girls do not currently have access to basic education. The Education Commission projects that if current trends continue, by 2030 only 4 in 10 children of school age in low and middle income countries will be on track to gain basic secondary level skills. Various global indices including the Social Progress Index and the Human Development Index, show that low educational attainment is most widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-Asia. Barriers to education in those regions are legion; ranging from direct/indirect costs of education to the lack of schools.

Solving Education for those underserved areas requires an innovative solution and we believe online education to be just that. That said, with more than half Africa still offline, even online education in its current format is inaccessible for these communities as they do not have access to a permanent or reliable internet connection.

Our goal is to bring the educational content online to not only children or girls, but anyone in an underserved community willing to learn but lacking the means to.

One key metric we track is the completion rate for courses taken via our platform.

How do we bring educational content from an online course to learners without a reliable internet connection?

We first summarize the entire course into easy to learn concepts which are then classified according to the order in which they are presented in the course. Those concepts are explained to the learner one after the other. The learner has to demonstrate understanding of a concept to move to the next concept.

We offer the option to receive the concepts via SMS or WhatsApp and are planning to add more channels in the future.

As an example, let's go through a use case scenario of Afi, a 16 years old girl from an underserved community who would like to learn Linear Algebra. She doesn't have the means to go to school or a reliable internet connection to take a Linear Algebra course online. Afi hears about FastMoocs and is able to subscribe for a Linear Algebra course through our platform. Our expert learners receive a notification about Afi's subscription and start going through the online course. Less than a day later, Afi starts receiving the concepts from her Linear Algebra course on her phone (which does not need to be a smartphone).

Our target customer does not have the means to go to school or a reliable internet connection to complete an online course. This can be anyone regardless of age or gender just as long as they have a phone capable of receiving an SMS message which is the case for most phones even the cheapest ones.

To better understand our customers' needs, we try and collect as much feedback from them as possible. We collect feedback on their motivations when they subscribe to a course on the platform, on their reasons when they prematurely unsubscribe to a course. We also collect feedback by asking them to rate our system when they complete a course.

Our solution will provide low-income, remote or even refugee communities, free access to online trainings. It will equip everyone regardless of age, gender, education, location or level of income, with relevant digital literacy skills to enable participation in the digital economy.

An educated workforce is essential for stimulating long term economic growth and reducing poverty in any underserved region. That's why we believe our current solution to solving Education for underserved communities, has the potential of drastically impacting and transforming those communities' lives.

We believe to  be in the pilot stage because our solution has already been tested on a dozen online learners.

Our SMS channel is only available in Ghana and Togo currently for SMS costs related reasons but as for our other channels like WhatsApp or our website, they are available for every user.

FastMoocs is the only existing solution that provides access to online courses to people without a reliable access to internet/electricity. It uses existing technologies like SMS, which is available on every phone smart or not, to deliver educational content from any course online. 

We believe many online courses hold the same educational value as courses from brick and mortar educational institutions. By providing access to those courses to people that cannot otherwise access any form of scientific education, we provide a credible solution to the problem of education.

We do not believe the traditional solution to education which is that of building more schools, to be enough to solve education for everyone, giving the demand or the number of people that need to have access to education. The traditional solution is just not scalable enough, it is too costly both for the people that will fund the school's construction and in terms of school tuition. In addition to that, the land surface that will be required to build enough classrooms to sustain the demand in Africa alone is too large to be feasible.

Finding a model of learning that is more sustainable for students from low and middle income families is probably the best way to solve education for everyone and this is what we have built. Our model of learning is based on a technology that is available to most people (SMS) and the value of the educational content we are sending through it gets better each passing day. 

We are currently serving 10 people who are taking computer science and literature courses online through our platform. 

In one year, we expect that number to grow to 5000 through targeted marketing.

In five years, we expect to be a fully matured platform helping at least one million of people learn online.

To measure our progress toward our impact goals we use two metrics each tracking one impact goal:

• We track the ratio of the number of courses completed to the number of courses' subscriptions
• We track the number of courses completed through our SMS channel 

5 full time staff

We have a very diverse group of experts in computer science. Most importantly, we have completed numerous online courses ourselves and know for that fact, our learning model to be efficient.

We believe we have the "unfair advantage" of being among the only ones working on such type of solution to truly democratize education.

Our team is very diverse in the fact that it is comprised of 3 women and two men. We intent to keep our staff very diverse in the future too.

We are applying to Solve so we can get access to mentorship on how to better expand our band and services to our customer population. We are also applying because we need funding to expand our operations and take our solution to the next level.

We will need to increase our marketing budget and improve on our marketing strategies in order to expand our client base.

• Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
• MIT Bootcamps
• We are open to meet with interested Solve Members that you might recommend.

Our solution is also suited to people with access to an internet connection but that lack the courage to go through a whole course. Most courses require learners to go to them, by sending out educational content through small messages, FastMoocs does not require its user to find the courage to open a textbook, he/she just needs to read a message on a phone when this one rings.

This can be used to help learners explore educational content with ease even when they lack the motivation to explore such contents. This can be very helpful for students to know themselves, their options and make informed decisions to achieve their education and career goals.

Funds from this program will be used towards supporting more courses on our platform.

Our solution provides access to online training to refugees and help equip them with a level of knowledge they can leverage to get a job or start a successful company. This will enable them to participate in the global economy and allow their full integration.

Funds from this grant will be used to market this solution to refugees and to provide them with scholarships so they can access our services for free.

FastMoocs truly democratizes education by providing means for even people without a laptop, electricity or an access to internet to access quality educational materials online. This has the potential to enable the inclusion of nearly 2 billion people across the globe into the global economy.

The best investment one can make is to invest in education and by helping people around the world get access to quality education, we are helping them invest in their education.

Funds from the HP Prize will be dedicated towards marketing and providing scholarships for people from underserved communities so they can access our services for free.

Women constitute the biggest portion of the population of people who do not have access to education. Our platform offers them an option where there is none other to access quality education for free.

We will dedicate funding from this prize towards our women and girls' scholarship program.

FastMoocs is planning on optimizing the efficiency of its learning model by sending out educational contents at the best time of the day for each user. 

We will be using AI to detect when a user is not moving or when he/she is in a train or some other public transportation. Those will be the best times to send out our educational contents as opposed to sending them out when users are busy doing some other things. Using AI, we will be able to detect users' activities and thus optimize our learning model. This functionality will only be available for users with a smartphone though (A lot of people with smartphones do not have access to internet).

We plan on using funds from this prize towards developing the previously described program, supporting more AI courses on our platform and providing scholarships to people without smartphones.  

Our solution provides all people from underserved communities with access to quality educational contents online. They get access to those contents even without having access to a stable internet connection, electricity, a laptop or even a smartphone. This is because we deliver the educational contents through SMS which is available on most phones smart or not.

We believe this to be a sustainable and scalable approach to tackling the issue of education in underserved communities.

We plan on using funds from this prize to provide access to more online blockchain courses on our platform. The rest of the prize will be used to provide scholarships to users subscribing to blockchain courses.