Digital Learning for Africa

Physical textbooks, as the core learning material for millions of low-income students & teachers, need reimagination to enhance engagement, monitoring, and measurements; plus catalytic sustainable models to achieve impactful outcomes for basic education access and quality improvements.

Working with Learn Africa (Nigeria's largest publisher) & Ministries of Education in Lagos and Kaduna, HITCH is delivering digital learning that’s responsive to users’ infrastructural realities, living conditions, and cultural perspectives; via interactive multimedia-enhanced eBooks to 500,000 students/teachers in 12 months.

We train teachers to quickly find/create and save Open-Educational-Resources, for communal vetting, via a shared curriculum-aligned digital library. Teachers embed OERs into Learn Africa's digital textbooks, creating interactive multimedia-enhanced eBooks, delivered via affordable low-power devices to students/teachers, for in-school and out-of-school education.

Upskilled teachers train their peers and students, anchoring a sustainable community of practice driven by pervasive digital learning, and entrenching robust digital institutional monitoring and evaluation oversight mechanisms.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has ~264 million students. Nigeria has ~40 million students, with 75% being in low-income private schools & public schools. Nigeria’s educational system faces challenges: ~10 million children not in school, less than 50% of children able to read & write after 6 years of schooling, & a teacher-pupil national average ratio of over 1:100. Prevalent presentation of out-of-school children, poor learning achievement recorded among children in Nigerian schools & poor quality of teachers, & declining quality of learning leading to steady reductions in standards for pass rates; all constitute issues of immense concern. 

Simultaneously, research confirms that skills of African youth don’t match available jobs or sustainable self-employment requirements. Bridging current skills gap is at core of improving employment outcomes & increasing productivity & growth. International Labor Organization (ILO) says 58% of Africans are in low-skill jobs, with 85% informally employed (seasonal/temporary). SSA needs ~18 million new high-productivity jobs per year by 2050, since SSA’s informal sector is currently ~90% of 400 million low-income jobs. 

Demand for functionally-relevant & industry-driven learning across career, skills, vocational, & entrepreneurial pathways, creates room for our theoretical & applied learning contextual curriculum connections, enabling education-to-work transitions, via mass-market digital learning access.

We help textbook publishers transform their approved curriculum-aligned textbooks into exciting interactive eBooks (which can work without the need for the Internet), which give schools and community learning centers, world-class animated digital textbooks to provide a fun digital learning experience for in-school and out-of-school students and teachers. 

First, our Machine Learning system is able to identify the most relevant OER enhancements like videos, audio lessons, images, experiments, applied case studies, etc. from a digital learning resource library, given contextual parameters for any textbook, lesson plan, or curriculum. 

Next, we digitally upskill and certify teachers as Digital Education Specialists to create, save, & use OERs to enhance digital learning.

Then, using our web app, upskilled teachers embed OERs into textbooks creating interactive multimedia-enhanced eBooks delivered via mobile eReader apps (which work offline) on affordable low-power devices to students & teachers, for in-school & out-of-school education. 

Granular engagement and usage analytics are collected to improve standardized and personalized learning outcomes and performance objectives, with anonymized metrics and reports collated to guide learning support and sustainable successful impact.

Upskilled teachers also train their peers & support their students to use eBooks effectively, anchoring a sustainable community of practice driven by pervasive digital learning.

Due to COVID-19 education disruptions, Nigerian states commenced remote learning, especially for K-12 STEM subjects, by encouraging teachers to create educational lessons for dissemination on Radio, TV, and online, to support remote learning for millions of underserved public and low-income private school students.

Unfortunately, the majority of these underserved students and teachers were cut off from physical and digital education channels, due to a variety of infrastructural and systemic challenges, primarily digital literacy and access. 

As a result, we've tried including these lessons into our educational library (which we launched with UNICEF in Nigeria last year) by aligning them to local curricula, and embedding them into low-cost eBooks from Nigeria's largest textbook publisher, to enable pervasive access and engagement for these underserved students & teachers. 

However, the content created has often been subpar, and teachers generally struggle with creating, finding, assessing, & using open education resources (OERs) online, because of time, connectivity, & digital literacy. They need practical skills to transition into digital education specialists, as well as a reliable and data-driven digital learning channel to guide and support student's hybrid learning. 

We've started upskilling these teachers to become digital education specialists so that once upskilled, these teachers can access and contribute to a digital library of world-class OER content organized to local curriculums, and embedded in approved digital textbooks to create enhanced eBooks that improve learning outcomes and performance objectives for underserved students.

These enhanced eBooks are interactive and engaging for students and teachers, and are delivered via our web and mobile eReader apps on low-power devices, and work both online and offline (negating the need for consistent internet connectivity). 

By tracking various engagement and usage analytics we can understand eBook effectiveness. This data is then fed back into our machine-learning algorithm to further improve our system, and shared with corresponding authorized school administrators and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) and Quality Assurance (QA) officers from the Ministry of Education.

As upskilled teachers also train their peers & support their students to use eBooks effectively, this project nurtures and anchors a sustainable community of practice driven by pervasive digital learning and a dedicated and responsive community-driven feedback loop.

And so, the project’s outcome is multi-pronged, impacting the education ecosystem via key stakeholders (teachers, students, admin/Monitoring & Evaluation [M&E] officials). 

Digital Education Specialist (DES) training/certification enables consistent engagement with (and feedback from) beneficiary educators in curating/producing curriculum-aligned multimedia open education resources (OER) to augment our library of digital educational content (with localized language translations, accents, context optimizations), embedded to enhance familiar and approved interactive eBooks, delivered via affordable devices to learners; and subsequently monitored, supported, sustained, and expanded to even more underserved communities. 

Components:

(1.) DES Training: Develops transferable digital skills and pedagogical capacity of underserved STEM teachers, motivates them to contribute to an engaging/immersive digital learning environment, thereby increasing their earning capacity, professional development, and improving student’s quality of education.

(2.) STEM OER Library: DES participants augment a catalog of OER multimedia resources (videos, audio recordings, images, experiments, etc.) to support digital teaching/learning. Resources are embedded in interactive e-Textbooks to be available to other teachers, students, parents/caregivers (for at-home learning), AND education NGOs (for out-of-school learning).

(3.) Interactive OER-Enhanced eBooks: We intelligently build textbooks of the future, today, by adding digital learning Open Educational Resource (OER) enhancements like explanations, translations, pictures, diagrams, videos, audio clips, quizzes, and applied case studies, into the textbooks students use every day; to gamify their standardized and personalized learning pathways via sustained adoption and engagement.

Short-term target: 100 teachers, 10,000 students, plus 50 M&E/admin officials, in public schools. 

Medium-term target: 10,000 teachers, 500,000 students. 

Long-term target: 100,000 teachers, 5 million students.

Launch and duration: Starting in Lagos and Kaduna States in Nigeria, expanded nationwide, and to 4 other West African countries (Ghana, Gambia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone) over the next 24 months.

In sum, we enable educational capacity via affordable devices + engaging content, digital literacy training & support for users, key content development roles for teachers in leading/supporting learning, and robust monitoring & evaluation (M&E) oversight mechanisms. 

Problem: African teachers & students face digital literacy & access barriers in emerging hybrid learning environments.

Solution: Digital education specialist upskilling for teachers, to guide/support/monitor digital learning for students, using approved interactive eBooks, enhanced with OER videos, audio lessons, images, experiments, applied case studies, etc., available offline on low-cost devices that increase their engagement in remote/hybrid/physical environments for improved outcomes. We nurture a community of practice and data-driven channel for multi-stakeholder impact in digital learning at scale.

Target: Low-income primary/secondary students & teachers in underserved schools, starting in Lagos & Kaduna, Nigeria, but expanding across West Africa and globally.

We are already upskilling teachers to become Digital Education Specialists and so far, have impacted 200 teachers and counting with our free webinars. 

As part of our current pilot deployments and beyond, we aim to expand the number of the teachers upskilled and the scope of the upskilling process, including the curriculum and its digital skills that are transferable to the gig creator economy.

Furthermore, working with Learn Africa - the largest textbook publisher in Nigeria, and the Lagos State Ministry of Education, we are piloting to 5,000 students in Lagos by July 2021. 

We have already closed a deal to expand to 150,000 students in Lagos by August/September 2021.

Our strategic engagement is targeting to serve 500,000 students in 12 months, starting with an expansion from Lagos to Kaduna, and other parts of Nigeria and West Africa subsequently.

For sustainability, the project catalyzes a new cross-subsidized education market opportunity that incorporates an innovative model for multi-stakeholder private sector participation, not just Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) driven, but embracing value-creating returns on investment (ROI) across key strategic corporate priorities, which can target 3 main “stacks”. DES participants are also rewarded for contributions/support to peers and learners in the ecosystem.

Device Stack: 
Enabled by an innovative corporate-cross-subsidized financing model to unlock access to millions of affordable end-user devices (e.g. Android Tablets, M&E field devices, etc.) at scale, which is beneficially promoted by Learn Africa securitizing multi-year low monthly financing payments (including installment sales cost-plus [non-interest-bearing] financing model) for educational devices for public/low-cost-private education students/teachers. 

Content Stack: 

Partially corporate-subsidized DES capacity building for digital content development via a teacher-produced OER library. Enabled by discovery, usage, and tracking of digital learning scaffolding (structure of arranging learning outcomes/performance objectives) and content (locally-relevant and curriculum-aligned text/images/experiments/audio/videos/assessments) for maximized student engagement, teacher support, & learning impact; embedded to enhance interactive Learn Africa eBooks, derived from existing physical textbooks. 

Partnership Stack: 

Enabled by an affordable pay-to-play Education Application Programming Interface (API) economy, driven by Learn Africa aggregating a suite of intersecting education content publishing, distribution, and support Education APIs/microservices (e.g. digital content, school information directory, distribution agent network, evaluations/assessments, remedial/tutoring services), coherently leveraged as digital infrastructure “rails” for 3rd-party EdTech startups and educational organizations to benefit from (and integrate with) a harmonized digital learning ecosystem.

Current: We have 27 school customers, or approximately 9,000 students and another 120 teachers for our hardware and online enterprise version. In addition, in collaboration with UNICEF, we launched a free version of our online platform in response to COVID 19 last school term and have approximately 1,200 active users in Nigeria. We have also completed projects and established strategic partnerships with a number of local and international organizations ranging from deploying our solution to 500 internally displaced youth from the LifeBuilders IDP camp school, to expanding our content offerings by partnering with Teach for Nigeria.

With Learn Africa - the largest textbook publisher in Nigeria, and Lagos State Ministry of Education, we're piloting to 5,000 students and teachers in Lagos. We've already closed a deal to expand to 150,000 students and teachers by August/September 2021.

1 Year: Expand to at least 2 million students and teachers.

5 Years: Grow to at least 15 million students and teachers.

To demonstrate project impact, we'll emphasize data collection, monitoring&evaluation of qualitative & quantitative metrics.

Quantitative: 

Basic metric collected will be the number of students with access to eBooks. For initial deployment our target is 150,000 students, scaling to 2M students in 12-months. One of our main impact indicators is taken directly from SDG 4; Goal 5: Proportion of Women to Men with access to ICT educational resources, and can be easily tracked through the access codes issued and user data collected to feed directly into our inclusivity goals. We'll also track students' knowledge attainment via performance on embedded eBook assessments with a focus on comparing students' performance on sample questions from a chapter, and performance when answering review questions. Working with school+admins, we'll isolate which students have enhanced eBooks for certain subjects, but not others, and track progress in classes that have eBook access. 

Engagement Metrics: We'll be able to report exactly how much time each student is spending in their enhanced eBook, which videos are being watched and activities completed giving unrivaled insights into the at-home study habits of young men & women in off-grid and last-mile communities. 

Qualitative: Utilizing Surveys and User Testing we'll collect feedback on the experience of the enhanced eBook. User Testing is scheduled for 2 points during the 12-month project during which usability metrics such as time taken to complete a task in the eBook to ensure user-friendliness and discover further use-cases.