Personalized Learning Platform: Teacher Student Development

Using data to drive in-service teacher professional development  & self paced learning for students in low cost schools. 

Every child learns differently and at their own pace. In our primary focus geography-India- the classrooms have extremely high teacher to student ratios (sometimes as high has 65:1). What makes even more challenging is that teachers in these schools don't receive adequate training to provide individualized support to students. Teachers act as instructors who teach to the median, leaving behind both those that cannot grasp concepts quickly enough and those that have understood are not being challenged. This learning crisis can seem impossible to overcome.

Zaya Learning Labs has developed a Personalised learning platform that can help tackle this issue by allowing students to learn at their own pace, in their own way, changing to role of  the teacher as a key facilitator for their learning. We have implemented this solution for the past 5 years, for grades 1 to 5 focusing on math and english , in affordable private schools of India. The teachers receive structured lesson plans through the platform that helps them customize the learning experience for their students. We have observed that even though children learn at different levels, by receiving an education that is personalised to their needs and abilities they can grasp ideas at their own pace, challenging those ahead and bringing those behind up to speed. With our experience of blended learning we have built the platform to provide teachers assistance at two levels- for the para-skilled teacher there are pre-designed customized playlists and cues that he/she can directly use for their classroom; for the more skilled teacher they can ignore the cues and curate the playlists according to needs of their perception of students needs. This platform provides the teachers with accurate and real-time data on the student performance that helps them alter their teaching according to the individual student needs. This solution is now being extended to provide prescriptive videos for teachers to improve their own professional skills based on the data we collect on student learning trends. 

The cost of the solution is under a dollar per month, the schools that we work with charge tuition of $10 per month. However they pay us less than a dollar per month for our service

Our innovation is to make it work with poor internet connectivity. We have tested this platform on our product ClassCloud which has won several international awards for seamless integration of online/offline content delivery. At the core of our product is Machine learning that is continuously getting trained by the thousands of students/teachers using the product. With data from over 200,000 students, are now integrating a curriculum for in-service teacher coaching using videos that have been created by trainers and experts, that has never been done before in any student learning platform.

Our solution/ platform is completely technology driven and runs on the cloud. However to make this accessible to populations with poor or limited internet connectivity,  we had to develop our own integrated Wireless device called ClassCloud that runs infrastructure software that can make this platform seamlessly available offline. Our solution is constantly collecting data on how students learn, with over million data points being generated everyday and process on the cloud to power our Machine Learning(ML) systems.  This ML system provides recommendations to both teachers and students to make their learning experience personalized.

• Map out Professional Development content for teachers tied to the curriculum and skills in those schools

• Validate the usability of the tools and data to make the student and teacher learning journey frictionless.

• Scale up this solution from 400 to 800 schools with a strong emphasis on personalised coaching for teachers.

• Create 2000 micro coaching video modules that will be available to teachers

In India, Zaya aims to reach about 2000+ low income (private or government) schools in the next 5 years. This will make our solution accessible to over 200,000 teachers and 10 million students.  In Order to achieve this, we plan to improve our technology backbone and content repository for students and teachers. Our vision is that our platform becomes the de-facto tool for teachers to upskill themselves on the job by getting the right feedback regularly.

In India, we work with schools who can pay us a nominal fee. We have a large network of Assessment partners, school financing & Government agencies that recommend our solution to low income schools that can implement the solution. This has led to a large pipeline of schools who are eligible for implementation.
For our US expansion using the O3Schools platform: we are working with network of School consultants who are helping Charter and Startup schools get setup with the right solutions.  

Till date we have impacted:
200000 + Students
400 + Classrooms
6 + Cities
We have delivered 2,000,000 + Hours of online personalized learning

In 12 months we hope to impact in India an additional
140 schools, 500 teachers & 140,000 students
In 3 years, we aim to reach 2000 new schools, 200,000 teachers and 10 million students.

Zaya Learning Labs has a team of technology experts with over 50 years of combined experience working for Cisco, etc in the US. This has helped develop and evolve the platform to be more diverse, robust, effective and adaptable; a team of educators/pedagogical experts that have helped design the personalized/blended learning methodology for 30 years through offline mechanisms and program implementation structure; monitoring and evaluation experts that help constantly monitor the programs for effectiveness and efficiency; partnership managers that build partnerships with collaborators, donors and funding agencies.

We charge recurring revenue from school: $10/year per student.  On average a school starts with 200 students and expands if the program is successful. This revenue stream currently covers over 50% of our OPEX. We believe if we can convert our other FREE customer into paying schools, we can achieve long term profitability and sustainability in 3 years purely from our schools business.To supplement the other 50% of our costs, we license our application to other solution provides who use our technology stack to customize it for their use cases. This model will lead us to profitability in 2018 itself.

• Financial support to customize the system and take it to scale
• Access to partners and schools that might be willing to work with us in co-developing, customizing this product.
• Connection to ed-tech tools/partners so many of these can be integrated into the O3 platform and offered to school leaders.

Our key challenges to scale are:

a) Access to funds: Solve can help us connect with donors/ individuals willing to fund these solutions and take them to scale

b) Access to Business Mentors : We want to scale and for that we need help in growing our team and capacity. 

c) Access to Partner networks: Solve's partner networks can help us get access to more schools and/or individuals willing to co-develop, implement or help scale our solutions in India and United States.