CholPori

Cholpori is a digital education platform that improves student achievement and well-being. Three-quarters of the 20 million primary students do not achieve their terminal competencies in Bangladesh (World Bank, 2018). High student-teacher ratio, shortage of class time, learning resources, and rote pedagogy contribute to limiting student potential.

Our solution is an affordable, personalized digital learning tool geared to boost academic achievement and socio-emotional development. CholPori empowers students to learn at their own pace and provides additional learning models to cater to multiple intelligences. 

Cholpori also caters to teachers, as it encourages them to create holistic, original lessons through our integrated, easy-to-use lesson builder and vast asset library. 

Our content is 'glocal'- deeply rooted in Bangladeshi culture but with an international audience in mind. Our teaching philosophy, agile software architecture and visual storytelling methods are highly scalable. CholPori has the potential to educate and motivate millions of children around the globe.

Despite almost 98% primary school attendance, only 25% of students in Bangladesh are able to read at grade-level (USAID, 2018). Moreover, only 50% of boys and 30% of girls are functionally literate after graduating from Bangladeshi primary schools. Millions of children are going to school but falling through the learning gap. 

This is mainly due to the lack of quality materials and methodologies in the school system. Differentiated instruction does not exist due to resource constraints. Problems such as lack of levelled learning materials, low levels of access to books and high student-teacher ratio not only hinder student growth but also demotivate teacher instruction which further contributes to the problem. A majority of students are limited to the use of nationalized textbooks from the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB). 

Additionally, leveled reading systems do not exist in Bangla, the language most students are versed in, further making reading fluency at grade level difficult. Added to that, the NCTB prioritizes rote learning which disadvantages students as the focus shifts from skill attainment to attaining test scores. This teaching and learning to the test hinders quality delivery and acquisition for both teachers and students.

CholPori is a bilingual, subscription-based, early-learning web and mobile application. Our two-part solution to creating equitable classrooms is quality levelled learning materials for students, and tools that empower teachers. 

The CholPori team produces levelled learning materials for multiple intelligences. The materials scaffold on the national curriculum, enabling students to keep up with the classwork, while encouraging deeper engagement with the lessons. 

The second part of the solution is an easy-to-use integrated multimedia lesson builder which teachers can master independently to create their very own digital learning materials. 

The app offers tiered family and classroom accounts, each of which comes with guardian or educator profiles, and additional profiles for each student. Students receive access to levelled multimedia lessons and exercises, as well as a vast library of original interactive books and digitized NCTB books. Teachers are able to track student progress, and create original learning materials.

The platform is highly elastic, seamlessly scaling up and down based on engagement, with the learning experience as the highest priority. Oriented to serve every child and teacher in Bangladesh, the fundamental architecture of our software is being built from the ground up with scalability as a core principle.

Cholpori aims to serve primary school children from class 1-5 in Bangladesh. Research suggests that Bangladeshi schools, and especially primary schools, currently produce significantly subpar educational outcomes. The gap between schooling and learning is one of the main contributing factors to Bangladesh's high dropout rate, particularly in primary school. This in turn contributes to poverty and other negative socioeconomic consequences.

Currently the government school system is not able to adequately address this problem. A critical reason for this is that the system suffers from a high student-to-teacher ratio and consequent lack of personalised learning. This problem has been exacerbated in Bangladesh, as elsewhere, by the onset of Covid-19. Poor, resource-constrained areas of Bangladesh have suffered particularly extensively, especially because of their lack of technological access. Therefore, the more specific problem is the need for better personalised education for Bangladeshi students.

Educational technology is a potential solution to offering students from understaffed classrooms the individualised attention they need to succeed. A significant body of research links the use of educational technology to improved student outcomes around the world. Of note, these outcomes are not always strictly academic achievement but also affect socio-emotional factors. CholPori, an early-learning technology innovation, which is designed specifically for students of the Bangladesh National Curriculum, could help provide personalised education and support primary students' need to achieve academic success and personal growth. 

Millions of primary school students were disconnected from their teachers and school during the pandemic and are at risk of dropping out or falling behind. The individualised support they require to catch up and acquire the core competencies and learnings is not met, as teachers are struggling to keep up and move ahead. Now more than ever, there is a need for greater motivation to stay in school and to keep learning, which at the primary level is best done through play and storytelling. And teachers too need technical and personal support to redefine how they teach. 

Social cognitive theory is one of many key educational theories that supports the benefits of educational technology, specifically in that such technology can vastly expand students’ access to learning models and improve their access to individualised teacher attention.

CholPori creates emotional bonds to learning through various peer-aged, animated characters who guide student literacy and model good learning habits. CholPori’s animated teachers are empathetic and quirky, enabling students to keep up with the classwork, while encouraging deeper engagement with the lessons. 

The interactive levelled learning materials are catered to multiple intelligences scaffold on the national curriculum and the easy-and-fun-to-use integrated multimedia lesson builder empowers teachers to create their own digital learning materials. A teacher can create, publish and share a lesson independently and without the added need to wait for scarce professional development.

Parental engagement in the learning process is also a key objective for CholPori. Parents in Bangladesh, particularly in low-income rural areas, have little involvement in their children’s education at school. They are underserved with respect to information about their children’s progress and learning interests. A 2016 research paper, titled "Parent-teacher meetings and student outcomes", finds that parental involvement in the learning process, especially when it came to receiving regular progress updates and being well-informed about the curriculum could significantly improve children’s learning outcomes, specifically in low-income rural areas in developing countries (Islam, 2016).

In CholPori, a student using a personal or an institutional account is always connected to their guardian’s account, sharing progress reports, reading lists, achievements and milestones through the Profile Page. Notifications based on the student’s use of the site are sent to the parent’s account, keeping them involved and well-informed. This has been found to be a particularly effective tool in improving student engagement.

At the start we aim to serve primary school students from households of a median salary of 600USD in urban and peri-urban government schools as well as the schools themselves. We provide diverse, friendly educational materials and the creator tools to make them. This serves the need of students and parents for information and the need of teachers to create materials for free (institutional accounts) and with ease. Our solution is applicable to all users who have access to the internet, personally or institutionally.

CholPori integrates strategies to improve literacy as well as socio-emotional skills, in addition to supporting self-directed, model-based learning through multimedia content. It broadens the scope for educators to engage with students through our original dynamic teaching materials, and empowers educators with the ability to create their own. Parental support is also encouraged through messaging, account alerts, and progress tracking features. The application has been designed with remote and hybrid learning in mind, while lending itself seamlessly to being used as an additive tool in physical classrooms as well.

We have selected the “prototype” stage for our solution because it is under development. The CholPori website is under construction and we will make it available to early-adopters on June 30, 2021. Afterwards,we will be incorporating organic user feedback to improve the platform, conducting A/B testing to identify popular features, improving site efficiency, and fixing bugs until we launch fully. 

With respect to our content,  we have developed educational materials for Grade 4 and 5 Math and Grade 4 English thus far. We will also have 40 e-books in Bangla and English by June 30, 2021. We have conducted testing of selected content with students, and will resume testing as soon as the Covid-19 lockdown eases in Bangladesh. Additionally, we are preparing our marketing campaign and launch plan set for January 2022.

Currently in Bangladesh, investment is focused on learning tools for secondary school, where test scores count more. Cheating is so endemic in the school system that in 2018 the government shut mobile data nationwide for the duration of the SSC exams. Primary learning is deprioritized, however, it is at this stage that the fundamental blocks of literacy and numeracy are secured, and love of learning established. Additionally, nearly 20% of students drop out at this stage (Directorate of Primary Education).

Our solution is innovative in its focus on socio-emotional development and visual storytelling for young learners. Our focus on primary students and holistic approach to learning, within an education system that is faithful to rote methods, is what establishes this solution as catalytic. We cover the official NCTB material in new ways and nurture good learning habits. An example animated video lesson that innovates on official NCTB material can be viewed here. By using elements of gamification, we motivate self-driven learning and challenge existing attitudes to schooling. For educators, CholPori decentralizes teaching, enabling them to create their own personalized lessons. 

Covid-19 saw a spike in demand for remote learning options at all levels. The number of broadband connections went up 50% in a single year in 2020, attributed particularly to an upsurge in rural areas (BTRC). The demand, and need, for a product such as CholPori has never been higher. That is the space we hope to fill.

We are in the development stage at the moment and have not onboarded any users yet. However, we aim to launch the web and Android apps in January 2022 with Grade 5 and 4 content. In year 1, we plan to serve 4000 students in the urban middle income population of 4th and 5th grade students. By year 5 we are expecting about 5 million students to be subscribing to our platform or approximately 25% of K-5 students. We are forecasting a CMGR of 20% in year 1 and 2, 17.5% in year 3 and 15% in year 4 and 12.5% in year 5.

In 2016 the Bangladesh Education Statistics counted approximately 7.5 million grade 5 and 4 students. We aim to reach 0.05% of that number in the first year. In five years we aim to have Maths, English, Science and Bangla content for grades K - 5, and serve 25% of enrolled primary students. We aim to be a supplementary teaching aid for Bangla-Medium National Curriculum and Textbook Board schools, and to serve the Bangla speaking diaspora as a Bangla and English learning tool and e-book resource. 

Our long-term goal is to expand the product to Nepal and Vietnam, customising the content to be culturally appropriate and aligned to the core competencies of their curriculum.

Our goal is to provide quality education (SDG 4) for primary students through our technology enhanced platform, CholPori. We use the results of assessments of academic performance, frequent reading, and SEL to measure student progress. The success of teachers in creating and using lesson plans is another key measure of the product's success in empowering educators. 

Progress for the student user is measured in star-points earned on the platform. Multiple choice questions are designed to test comprehension, application, and socio-emotional development. We study the number and level of books read to measure improvement in reading. We study where a student needs support and can recommend relevant materials.

Progress for teachers is measured by the number of teachers using the platform and the number of lessons being created. We plan for routine product and content testing as well as a detailed data collection and analytics strategy to track progress. 

A measure of product progress would be the growth of accounts, retention rates and return users. We have already implemented basic Google Analytics on our site to track the number of users, the locales they originate from, and certain other usage metrics. Institutional accounts in rural and peri-urban areas will indicate that the content and tools are effective and applicable in diverse contexts.

We have twenty-one full-time employees, one part-time employee, one guest editor, and three freelance illustrators working on CholPori. They make up our six teams- Operations, Education, Marketing, Tech, Creative and Animation. 

Full-time: 20

Part-Time: 1

Guest Editor: 1

Freelance Illustrators: 3

We started working on CholPori at the beginning of Bangladesh’s nationwide lockdown in March 2020, when we were cut-off from the students and schools we served through HerStory Foundation. Realizing the safety concerns and limitations of physical books and classrooms, we began to create a way to make and distribute quality, digital, educational content. 

For the past 14 months, our team of educators, product developers, software engineers, illustrators, animators and writers have been working on CholPori. Our teachers have recent experience in public primary schools, and many of them faced the challenge of teaching during the Covid-19 school shutdown. We also have a youth editor who provides us with feedback, and is a direct representative of our target demographic. 

Our illustrators and animators are raised and trained in Bangladesh and have a good sense of local and international references and visual styles. Many members of our software and UI design team have professional experience teaching. Their insight into what children of that age group respond to directly shapes the development of CholPori’s UI, UX and content. 

As an organization we have developed a culture of sharing and play. We embrace opportunities to grow and love to learn. We approach challenges from a critical and holistic point of view, prioritize emotional and mental well-being, and share a common dream of building a safe and friendly digital space for kids who are denied it in real life. 

At CholPori, we are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment where team members can discover and grow their potential. We are successful in reaching gender parity, in the organization as a whole and in individual teams. Our leadership team is female-led, and we seek to involve people of different backgrounds and experiences to ensure that our materials represent a wide range of voices, genders and views. Additionally, we welcome constructive criticism from everyone irrespective of their position in the company hierarchy.

Our technology is developed with the principles of accessibility at heart. Our content is made with a firm commitment to, and love of, diversity. Through our stories and lessons we continuously plant the seeds of religious and cultural tolerance. Our characters include a non-binary student, a single-parent, a slow-learner and an differently abled robot.

In hiring new team members, we go through cycles of interviews where we consider the empathy levels and open-mindedness of candidates. It is important to us to ensure that CholPori is created by people who never waiver in their commitment to serving all people with equal attention and care. 

We involve young editors in the digital library to ensure that our content is levelled and relevant. This is a fantastic opportunity for students to participate in the creative process and to learn to give constructive feedback.

Applying to Solve presents a multitude of advantages for CholPori. The Solve platform presents us with the opportunity to have our solution reviewed by a wide range of field experts and Solver peers, and receive mentorship and strategic advice. The global network that Solve brings to its selected solutions could aid us immensely in seeking funds and partnerships, especially later down the line when we want to expand internationally. 

Solve’s evaluation support in building an impact measurement practice and the access it provides to legal services are also attractive to us. CholPori is interested in receiving expert guidance in conducting large scale impact measurement. We would also like to explore what Solve has to offer in terms of software licences in our content production process 

The media exposure that Solve provides is another significant incentive. An association with MIT Solve would aid in our endeavours to establish the CholPori brand in Bangladesh's education sector, as well as in households across the country. It would be enormously helpful in our marketing and sales campaign to attract B2C customers, where, as previously mentioned, we expect cultural barriers of mistrust in and resistance to technology.

We need support in ensuring that CholPori is legally sound and compliant with international child protection policies and regulations. Further, we are seeking to protect our original content and software with copyrights and trademarks.

Likewise we need to develop partnerships for research based user experience studies to collect and analyse data to drive product development and content creation. This can be done locally and internationally.

After the launch of CholPori we will seek distribution support from government and independent agencies and telecoms to achieve the kind of reach we envision.

Two organizations which inspire us with their philosophies and missions are the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre and The Fred Rogers Centre. We see scope to partner with the centers for research and knowledge exchange on early digital learning and literacy. This can help us in creating deeper connections and developing holistic, multi-faceted features and stories.

We would also like to partner with Gimlet Media Story Pirates to learn audio production for children, and Common Sense Media to design a comprehensive curriculum. For UX-data research we would like to partner with Nielsen Norman Group and MIT faculty of data science and machine learning.

In Bangladesh the pursuit of education in STEM fields is encouraged only for the students with the top grades. Furthermore, participation in the field is skewed disproportionately towards males, with females making up barely 20% of total STEM graduates.

In order to take STEM education forward, children need to be instilled with a love for science from a young age. In CholPori, the lessons are created with the need to improve STEM skills, as well as SEL skills, in mind. We are also working on creating a separate space in CholPori called Bottola which will host all kinds of science and crafts activities to get the child’s creativity flowing. We hope to spark the child’s interest in science through Bottola, while honing their skills in our lessons and practice sets.

CholPori is built to cater to the needs of children with multiple intelligences. It is a safe and inclusive environment where children learn at their own pace. We believe science is for everyone, and every curious child should have the opportunity to explore it.

CholPori is an initiative of HerStory Foundation which was founded with the aim of creating content to empower women. HerStory has been actively involved in creating storybooks for children highlighting the “Supergirls” of Bangladesh. Apart from creating storybooks, arranging read-alouds in schools, and hosting Sister Library sessions, HerStory has recently created a platform called “AMIOBOLI”, a digital platform that allows individuals to share their stories of abuse anonymously. “AMIOBOLI” was created with the goal of empowering the oppressed and amplifying unheard voices. Expansion of the digital space is in talks. 

These values of Herstory are reflected in CholPori. All our content is gender sensitive. The teacher in the CholPori universe is Ms. Pecha, and our math whiz student is a female robot. Stories such as “Supergirls on Top of the World” in the digital library, BoiGhor, celebrate the achievement of women. A 2021 study on “Female Leadership Represented in Animation for Children and the Sociocognitive Learning of 21st-Century Girls” finds that characters embodying female empowerment are positive behaviour models for young girls. That is what we hope to provide with our characters and content.

CholPori will incorporate AI into our site with multiple features. We plan to utilize it in our lessons and exercises when introducing voice recognition e.g. in language lessons that deal with phonics. We also plan to analyse usage data from students to create predictive models of content which interests our target demographic, and then create content in accordance with the generated models. 

Additionally we are invested in taking our personalized suggested content to the next level, by not only tailoring them to user interests, but also by identifying our user’s strengths and weaknesses, and catering to them. We wish to use AI and data science to track the impact that a lesson, or book, had on each individual student’s progress- whether the content boosted the student’s success, or had negligible effect on their performance. In identifying the type of content that is the most effective for each student, we gain extremely valuable insight into their precise needs. This data could enable us to suggest highly relevant content to our students and custom-tailor their entire CholPori experience to provide the ultimate learning tool for them. And that is only the beginning of what could be possible for CholPori with AI integration. 

CholPori will incorporate AI into our site with multiple features. We plan to utilize it in our lessons and exercises when introducing voice recognition e.g. in language lessons that deal with phonics. We also plan to analyse usage data from students to create predictive models of content which interests our target demographic, and then create content in accordance with the generated models. 

Additionally we are invested in taking our personalized suggested content to the next level, by not only tailoring them to user interests, but also by identifying our user’s strengths and weaknesses, and catering to them. We wish to use AI and data science to track the impact that a lesson, or book, had on each individual student’s progress- whether the content boosted the student’s success, or had negligible effect on their performance. In identifying the type of content that is the most effective for each student, we gain extremely valuable insight into their precise needs. This data could enable us to suggest highly relevant content to our students and custom-tailor their entire CholPori experience to provide the ultimate learning tool for them. And that is only the beginning of what could be possible for CholPori with AI integration. 

Lack of access to quality education is inversely affecting the potential of 15 million children in Bangladesh. The gap between schooling and learning is one of the main contributing factors to Bangladesh's high dropout rate, particularly in primary school. This in turn contributes to poverty and other negative socioeconomic consequences. 

CholPori, an online technology-based learning platform, developed together with expert educators, will enable children in remote areas to gain access to a much higher quality education than they would have had access to in their physical classrooms.

With strategic partnerships in place, CholPori plans to reach underserved and remote, rural schools. In that light, we have already signed agreements with Members of Parliament of two constituencies. We will pilot CholPori in their schools to see how they adapt to the platform and incorporate digital learning into their regular studies.