Interactive at-home learning on WhatsApp

We are building an open-source solution that will be used by 2.5M middle-school students in India to learn effectively through teacher-moderated WhatsApp groups. 

We have compiled thousands of interactive lessons that layer quizzes over any open source YouTube videos. These lessons are consumable on any mobile browser. 

Teachers can choose from our lesson library or make their own. Students receive these lessons on WhatsApp and can attempt them at any time on the same day. Teachers then receive rich data on participation, which students need attention or a friendly nudge and class learning levels through a simple WhatsApp message.

Teachers can also use our platform to create and send assignments where students can click pictures of their notebooks and send them back for grading.

Automated nudges to both teachers and students to encourage regular participation and a sense of accomplishment and the creation of a thriving learning community.

Over 150M students in India’s government schools have been forced to learn online for the first time due to the COVID-19 necessitated school closures in mid-2020. These first-time online-learners have very specific needs. Most students use borrowed devices (a parent’s or sibling’s or friend’s). Their devices have a low storage making them unsuitable for external apps. Most have limited data packs limiting the amount of video content they can view. Both teachers and students have limited digital literacy making the use of a conventional LMS unviable. 

Through months of rapid iteration and user research with state governments in India, WhatsApp emerged as the most viable solution for at-home learning in 2020. Avanti helped over 2M students across multiple states learn on WhatsApp through YouTube video links, PDF assignments and audio recordings. While surface-level engagement was extremely high, our data showed that most students did not learn effectively. Three key needs emerged: the first was to give teachers more control over what lessons were sent to their students and visibility on how they performed; the second was making video lessons interactive and fun for students; and the third was enabling differentiated instruction. 

Avanti is building the world’s first open-source personalized online learning platform focused on helping low-income students learn at home, on low-fidelity devices, in their local language by:

• building a comprehensive technology stack with

  • Plio: A new web-based tool to assist teachers in layering questions over video content.

  • Subjective assessments: To aid students to submit detailed assignments online and receive feedback from teachers on a web-based platform.

  • Objective assessments: To test students with multiple choice questions on a web-based platform.

  • WhatsApp-based interaction for students to increase engagement and teachers to access performance reports.

  • Integration with existing live video class providers (e.g. Zoom) to allow teachers to easily launch and conduct live classes and receive data on attendance and in-class questions/polls.

• creating a WhatsApp-based delivery mechanism for interactive video lessons (Plios), remediation worksheets, and assignments

• developing a curated open source content library by leveraging prior open source content developed by Avanti, The Central Square Foundation, and state governments

• building an open data repository that stores student and teacher data available to governments, researchers, developers, and content creators 

• partnering with government systems to institutionalize the at-home learning program

The core program will focus on students from Grades 6 to 12 in 1,008 public schools in Delhi, India. As first time online-learners in a low-income setting, these students have specific challenges, including accessibility to devices, lack of access to high quality content, and reduced motivation for learning. 

These students are systematically shut out from learning during COVID-19. While students in private school still have access to some form of live online classes and adequate parental guidance at home, these students relied heavily on the structure of school, the safety of their classrooms and the guidance of their teachers (often the only college educated person they have access to) to learn. Perhaps most importantly, these students are shut out of their peer groups at school.

Starting June 2020, we helped the government of Haryana implement a WhatsApp based learning program for over 2M students. Students were sent youtube video links and pdf assignments and participated in a weekly quiz - all through WhatsApp groups. Unfortunately, our internal data and external research have found limited to no learning gains during this period. The cohort of students who have shown academic growth are also often those with the most economic privilege.

In order to better understand the underlying issues we undertook a user research study in March 2021 (in a short window that schools re-opened in India) where we conducted home visits to both students and teachers. Additionally we conducted a large external telephonic survey (through J-PAL). The key findings were as follows

• Teacher involvement is key to long term student engagement and learning. Most state-wide interventions implemented in India during COVID-19 lockdowns were top down. Teachers felt disenfranchised and did little to encourage students to learn regularly. In WhatsApp groups where the teachers took active ownership - both the time on learning and student motivation were higher (based on qualitative conversations)
• There was no feedback to teachers of student-level performance - whether or not they were completing assignments, if they were learning or if they needed counselling
• Students did not feel connected to a learning community on the WhatsApp groups. They did not see their peers or team up with them on work

Like the students in Haryana, the students in Delhi are low-income, often have no real parental support at home for learning and are struggling with motivation.

The first phase of this implementation focuses on putting in place a technology platform and open source content and lesson plans to establish regular, teacher-led instruction on WhatsApp. Most importantly we are working with the state to capture student level data and share the same with teachers and students regularly. 

As we roll out the intervention, we aim to work closely with both students and teachers in a 20-school sandbox where we will observe live classes, regularly interview students and run rapid experiments (fortnightly) to evaluate the effect of academic and non-academic interventions on student engagement and learning. Successful interventions will be rolled-out across the state.

Avanti is working with the state government of Delhi to help them

1. Curate a library of interactive lessons - combining open source video content with overlaid quizzes
2. Curate and compile weekly assignments (both academic and non academic)
3. Deploy a number of web-based open-source tools to help teachers deliver interactive lessons, collect assignments
4. Integrate with state databases to provide student centric data to teachers
5. Automate student and teacher nudges based on realtime data collected through the WhatsApp based learning program.

We aim to reduce any friction to accessing the learning materials for students. They can join the WhatsApp group through multiple phones, learn asynchronously and even if they do not have access to large data-packs, learn through PDF worksheets. The most important aspect of expanding access is empowering teachers with students specific data. Teachers will be able to talk to parents and students directly to encourage them to complete assignments and participate. 

Lastly, by allowing teachers to create their own lessons and training them on how to create a thriving online learning community we aim to lead to dramatic improvements in time on learning and active engagement in online learning.

In 2020, Avanti collaborated with state governments in Haryana, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh in India to lead their response to COVID-19 school closures via the Ghar Pe School initiative. We coordinated online learning for over 800k students every day - the largest such implementation in India. We are currently running this WhatsApp based at-home learning program in 136 Sanskriti schools in Haryana and are now setting up a pilot in 20 public schools (~1,500 students) in Delhi with a focus on strengthening the depth of the intervention. We intend to scale it to all 1,008 public schools in Delhi and eventually to all the schools in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. 

WhatsApp groups continue to be the most engaging medium for sharing interactive lessons, worksheets, live class invites and engaging students (for e.g. through social-emotional learning activities). According to a survey conducted by JPAL, 57% of all students in our partner state of Haryana learned every day on these WhatsApp groups, in contrast with only 7% students, who accessed other EdTech apps.

Our solution aims to extend WhatsApp and google sheets to replicate and improve upon the capabilities of conventional learning management systems like Google Classroom and Canvas. Teachers will be able to access most features of such learning management systems (build a lesson plan, create and grade assignments, see student data) with very basic knowledge of the mobile web and WhatsApp.

The same ease of access applies to students. They will receive links on WhatsApp groups, individual prompts where necessary and always interact with the system by clicking on a web link.

Lastly we are integrating state student and teacher databases to link multiple datasets to provide a rich canvas of student specific data that can inform future interventions and nudges. This extension of a well understood communication medium (WhatsApp) with simple web-apps is at the core of our innovation coupled with a deep integration with state systems.

Our approach of using a simple web-based tool that can run on feature phones has been substantiated repeatedly by prior research (Kumar et al. 2012; Valderrama Baham´ondez et al. 2014; Porter et al. 2016; Rush et al. 2016).

Our solution has been directly reaching 235,000 students in Haryana. We are now aiming to reach over 700,000 students across 1,008 schools in the state of Delhi by 2022 and 8,000,000 students across all Hindi-speaking states and union territories (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and the union territory of Chandigarh and the National Capital Territory of Delhi) by 2026.

Engagement indicators that we will track on an ongoing basis:

• Number of students attending live classes

• Number of students submitting responses to worksheets

• Student-wise minutes of video watched daily

• Student-wise questions answered weekly

Learning indicators that we will track on an ongoing basis:

• Percentage of questions answered correctly

In addition, we will measure progress towards our impact goals based on:

• A comprehensive baseline test of a representative sample of students will be conducted to establish their current level on at-grade and below grade competencies.

• A similar comprehensive endline test will be conducted at the end of the year to gauge progress on competencies. 

• Biweekly tests containing questions on at-grade and below grade competencies (administered by the state government) that will be conducted to assess ongoing progress.

We currently have 7 members for on-ground operations, 6 for research and innovation, 5 for curriculum creation, 4 for technology development and 2 as advisors.

Core Team

Akshay Saxena (IIT Bombay, HBS), Co-Founder, Avanti Fellows leads this project.

Vandana Goyal (Claremont McKenna College), Executive Trustee at Avanti Fellows leads all operations and strategy for this project.

Panchali Dutta (Miranda House, Delhi University) leads the in-field operations.

Joanna Sundharam (Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Stanford University) leads the sandbox experimentation and program evaluation of student learning outcomes for this project.

Pritam Sukumar (IIT Bombay, IIT Bombay) is the technology lead, managing the tech infrastructure and roadmap.

Saksham Srivastava (IIT Kanpur, IIM Kozhikode) leads curriculum research and open content development.

Aman Dalmia (IIT Guwahati) leads tech strategy and implementation.

Deepansh Mathur (IIT Guwahati) leads the design and development.

Advisory Team 

Owen Henkel (University of Michigan, University of Oxford) serves as an advisor and external researcher for this project.

Dr. Andreas de Barros (Harvard PhD, MIT) serves as the advisor on the measurement of student learning outcomes for this project.

Avanti Fellows has a team of just over 60+ professionals led by Akshay Saxena and Vandana Goyal. The leadership team has a 50:50 gender split with professionals from diverse educational and professional backgrounds. Avanti Fellows pioneered self-directed “peer-learning” in public schools in India and we have been relying on it in our day-to-day workday as well. The team closely works with each other on execution and iteration of programs, while offering autonomy in decision making to help fuel each teammate's growth.

We understand that our goal of increasing the number of students who remain on track in secondary schools is herculean and aim to achieve it with the help of right collaborations and partnerships. We wish to leverage the Equitable Classrooms challenge to streamline our solution in line with our organizational goals through access to mentorship, coaching, and strategic advice. If selected, we intend to use USD 10,000 for product development. We will be excited to take our free and open online learning ecosystem to 8M more learners.

We moved quickly to adjust our offerings from in-person to online in 2020. These changes were made to meet immediate needs, but have not been thoroughly incorporated into our long-term strategic plan. We are currently grappling with a number of strategic choices that will determine our growth and trajectory. To address and respond to these strategic decision points, we need a partner to help us think through our long-term sustainability and scale plan.

We are looking forward to partnering with organizations with similar passion towards improving learning outcomes for students from low income families. We would like to partner with the following organizations:

• Paper Video (Africa) helps middle school students with step-by-step video lessons and a robust repository of past exam questions. We wish to leverage their content repository to strengthen our open source content library and assist them in interlinking their questions from past papers with videos to help make them more interactive.
• E-limu (Africa) conducts training to give teachers the skills and confidence to use technology effectively. We aim to learn from these training sessions to successfully build teacher’s capacity in an at-home learning setting.
• Newsela (USA) takes authentic, real world content from trusted sources and makes it instruction ready for K12 classrooms. We would like to leverage the technology for identifying quality content and enabling the students/teachers to create binders (lesson plans).

We have been working with 5 organizations to adapt our technology platform to their needs and feature requests. We would like to partner with additional ones to adapt our solution to their needs and provide them with a scale of 2.5M learners.