Kengine-StarTeacher: Empowering teachers and students

Making quality education accessible and affordable to all. So it can do what it's meant to. 

What's the problem? 

One of the biggest challenges for a country like India is providing high quality, affordable education to enable its rural and semi-urban students to have futures on par with their urban counterparts. A majority of the Indian population lives in the rural sector where the economic conditions do not allow for expensive educational facilities. Most of the rural populace depends on schools run by the Government, or sometimes smaller private schools, for educating their children. The quality of education in these schools largely depends on the quality of teachers. The quality of the teachers in these schools is most often less than ideal. This leads to a sad spiral of weak foundational concepts, low grades, lack of parental motivation to invest in schools, dropouts, and ultimately intelligent children moving into blue-collar jobs.

There are about 8.5 million teachers in India. About 80% of these teachers are employed in rural schools. These teachers have very little to no access to any professional development programmes that can help raise the quality of their teaching. While teachers in urban India have a plethora of such opportunities and resources available to them, their rural counterparts have not progressed much beyond the chalk-and-talk method.

What's our solution? 

Provide teachers with a strong professional development programme and pair it with an easy-to-use digital tool that will enable them to bring high-quality education to their students. Kengine - StarTeacher is our solution that will impact the quality of education in rural and semi-urban India. Kengine is a cloud-based platform that houses content curated from reliable sources and is bundled with features such as audio summaries in vernacular languages. Being cloud-based, Kengine is easy to implement, update and quick to access. The vernacular aspect makes it instantly usable by teachers and students in rural and semi-urban locations. StarTeacher, our professional development programme for teachers, is a skillful mix of in-class training and training over video conference sessions. The solution, therefore, provides a low-cost, high-quality digital tool to the teachers and up-skills them, year-round, with comprehensive professional development programmes customised to their unique needs. By teaching them them simple yet innovative teaching methods relevant to their environment, we help them bring concepts to life in their classrooms. The solution has been priced very affordably, giving these schools an opportunity to bring technology into their classrooms and to up-skill their teachers... something that was just a dream for them thus far.

How will it change the world? 

Kengine - StarTeacher will help improve the quality of education for over 160 million students in rural and semi urban India. These intelligent, committed, and hard-working children deserve a fair chance to get well educated. And when they do, they will begin to eradicate the cycle of poverty in the country. This can have far-reaching consequences on large-scale issues such as women entering the workforce, the GDP of the country, and ultimately impact the economies in the region.

The combination of professional development for teachers along with a simple-to-use digital tool is what makes our solution innovative. There is no player in the Indian education market with this unique combination.

High quality, low price. That's our mantra. And we achieve this by being intelligent with process improvements and high resource optimisation.

Technology plays a pivotal role in the success of our solutions. We strongly believe that using technology is the only way in which we can scale our services quickly and reach a large number of beneficiaries. Kengine and StarTeacher both require internet at the schools. Making Kengine cloud-based has allowed us to keep the implementation and maintenance of the solution really simple. The use of the internet and simple video conferencing tools (like Google Hangout) for the online sessions of the StarTeacher programme help us make the delivery of the solution highly flexible in addition to being affordable.

We aim to reach 70 schools, 1,000 teachers and 21,000 students through Kengine and StarTeacher by March 2019. Schools in rural and semi-urban India are our primary target. These are the schools that need the most support, guidance and hand-holding to be able to implement best practices in teaching and learning. And these are the schools that can least afford highly-priced solutions. We intend to address and fill skill gaps for teachers, and through that, enhance the quality of teaching and learning.

In 3 years from now, we will have a full-fledged, adaptive, assessment engine on Kengine for comprehensive assessment of teaching and learning. Kengine will also support experiential learning with virtual reality.

New features will allow teachers to share ideas and foster more colalboration within the teacher community. This type of vast, collaborative, online teacher community does not exist in India today.

StarTeacher will be expanded to include live streaming of programmes for teachers. We also plan to include programmes for principals and head teachers. A "teacher exchange programme" to facilitate sharing of knowledge and best practices is also on the cards.

We sell Kengine and StarTeacher directly to schools. We also work with sales partners. Customers can also subscribe to our products online.

All customers need is a device with a browser connected to the internet, to access Kengine and StarTeacher. Once a school signs up, we provide them with log-in credentials to Kengine. The StarTeacher programme is rolled out to schools based on a calendar that is drawn at the time of sign-up.

Our customer engagement team works closely with schools, on a personalised level, to ensure that Kengine and StarTeacher are addressing their needs. This enables customer retention. 

We currently service 7 schools, about 100 teachers, and about 3,000 students in rural and semi-urban locations through Kengine and StarTeacher. Most of these students are first-generation learners in their families. The teachers in these schools are predominantly young and inexperienced fresh graduates. Most of them have never had the opportunity to experience or explore new ideas in their profession.

Kengine has literally brought the world into their small classrooms. StarTeacher has introduced the teachers to best practices in pedagogy such as activity-based learning (rather than traditional chalk-and-talk methods), age-appropriate teaching strategies and best practices in classroom management.

1. 12 months: 1,000 teachers and 21,000 students across 80+ schools in India
2. Next 3 years: 4,000+ teachers and 50,000+ students across India and South and South East Asia

The students and teachers are from a rural and semi-urban population of a developing country. With Kengine and StarTeacher, we hope to provide them with tools and techniques for better teaching and learning. Along with a significant mindset change, we expect to see large-scale improvement in student performance in numeracy and literacy over the next three years. With visible improvement in students performance, drop-out ratios are expected to decline.

The founding team has rich experience and expertise in designing curriculum, designing and developing digital content products and solutions, working over large complex businesses and running profit centres. In addition to this, Learning Matters is a very people- friendly organisation and hence attracts the best of the talent in the industry. The team at Learning Matters comprises of technologists, academicians and educators who are passionate about education and share the same philosophy and ethos as the founding team.

We sell our products to schools. Schools subscribe to our products every year. Kengine and StarTeacher are available to a school at less than 100 USD per month.
The revenue from a school depends on the number of students in the school. On average, the revenue per school will be 3,900 USD per year. This is less than 5% of the revenue that the school generates through fees paid by students. This makes our products extremely affordable.

Our lean and highly-optimised processes for product development and maintenance allow us a clear 40% profit margin, after taxes.

There are about 1.5 million schools in India. Only about 0.1 million schools out of this have access to any form of professional development for teachers and digital tools. The remaining 1.4 million schools are untapped. This is our target market. As the product is priced low, the entry barrier is really low and everyone can afford it. Hence we will be able to tap a very large market. Even a tiny fraction of that large market itself would be enough to make us profitable.

Learning Matters is committed to making quality education accessible and affordable. We want to drastically amplify the quality of teaching and learning in the parts of the country that need it the most. With quality education, the lives of students, teachers, the society, and the country at large will greatly improve. We cannot achieve this as a small, bootstrapped organisation. We need partnerships and pathways to impacting communities and organisations across India and the globe. We believe Solve can enable these connections and partnerships for us.

• Barriers to implementing our solution include infrastructural challenges (power outages; low-to-no internet bandwidth) in parts of the country. Partnerships enabled by Solve can help us explore resolutions.

• Barriers to accepting our solution include unfamiliarity with technology, past demotivating experiences with digital tools, un-impactful teacher-training programmes, solution providers who did not understand school needs and challenges, and ignorance about the impact well-planned technology and teacher-training can have. A larger market presence will pave the way for greater understanding of, confidence in, and acceptance of our solution. Connections and partnerships enabled by Solve will help us reach out to more communities and schools.