BrainShare

The need to consider the teacher as a central pivot of our education system even during these hard times of the covid19 pandemic is undoubtedly pertinent. To be resilient in the coming times, it is imperative that we equip our teachers with the necessary access and training to be delivered in the face of changing technological and pedagogical landscape. BrainShare is taking a leading role in this  by offering teachers specialised training through its teacher training kit and also offering them a platform to create courses and collaborate with their students remotely. Teachers have the option to charge a small fee for their courses or offer them free of charge. This model favours low income students who are able to afford these courses as well as create income for teachers. If scaled globally, it will impact more students by improving their education outcomes and creating better livelihoods for teachers.
 

When the COVID-19 pandemic was announced in Uganda in March 2020, closure of schools followed. The education of 15 million children was disrupted. Children spend majority of their time at home playing, helping their parents with chores, engaged in agriculture but also spare some hours a day to study. The education of children has been impacted, in urban areas, some children are relying on lessons available online, televisions and radios, while those in faraway/rural areas, fall back on their notebooks and printed learning materials provided by the Government. Generally speaking, the covid19 pandemic has redefined the global contours of education. Alot has changed in the technological and pedagogical landscape of education.

However, one key thing to note is that, teachers are struggling to keep pace with technology advancements. Much as progress has been made in the areas of providing learning resources to the learners, very little effort has been made to support teachers adapt their pedagogy as well as foster teacher-student collaboration. This is an area we have identified and are working to close this gap.

BrainShare provides a digital platform equipped with a teacher training kit as well as a platform to enable teachers create courses and collaborate with learners remotely. The teacher training kit involves a series of tutorials meant to support teachers gain pedagogical skills relevant to support digital teaching initiatives. The teacher training kit is available online on the BrainShare website as well as offline via app. Once teachers have gained the right digital teaching pedagogical skills, they can then proceed to create their courses on the same BrainShare platform. Teachers can charge a fee for these courses and students are required to pay before enrolling. Payment is via mobile money. The charge for the course is deliberately kept low and affordable so that it can benefit many learners including those from low income families. Generally, we are making education more affordable, accessible and employable by cutting costs by over 80% as compared to standard school fees charged by schools. Ultimately, we are creating a good revenue source for teachers hence bettering their livelihoods as they create better learning outcomes for students.

We are targeting teachers of upper primary and secondary schools mainly. Most of the teachers in this domain have resorted to alternative means of earning rather than earning from their profession in order to survive in these hard times of the pandemic. By offering them our platform, we still want to enable them earn from their profession. Our platform also targets upper primary and secondary school learners who need to engage with their teachers for learning support as well as access their learning content. Learners in this domain have also been greatly affected by the pandemic. Our solution provides a range of courses from top professional teachers that they can enroll to and learn. Our platform also allows them to interact with the course creators by offering them a provision to ask questions and get responses from the course creators. We believe our platform will improve learning outcomes for the learners as well as improve livelihoods for the teachers.

Our solution directly supports teachers to adapt their pedagogy through our teacher training kit. It also facilitates personalised instruction through enabling creation of courses by teachers and enabling students to enroll to those courses. Communication and collaboration of teachers and students is also supported through the discussion forum feature of our solution.

We are currently piloting with 1500 students and 25 teachers picked from 3 districts of Uganda (Kampala, Wakiso and Kasese Districts). The 25 teachers were either teaching one or two subjects. Students were expected to enroll for the different courses of choice after paying for the courses an equivalent of $2 per course. Depending on the financial ability of the student, he/she could enroll to any number of courses of choice. The collected revenue was shared between BrainShare and the teachers in a 60:40 ratio in favour of the teacher.

Our solution is innovative in the sense that it appreciates the pivotal role played by teachers in education and therefore focuses on empowering them with the right training to better align their pedagogy to current trends in edtech and also enable them create courses and interact with learners. I believe if our solution can reach more teachers out there, it will give them the power to earn more from their profession while supporting many students realise better education outcomes.

We believe that, since we have positioned our platform as a source of income for teachers, this is big pull factor to let more teachers participate and in the long run, this will create a big diverse content pool that students can learn from. Ultimately, it is a win-win for both the teachers and the learners.

We are currently serving our pilot learners: 1500 learners and 25 teachers. In one year, we hope to scale this up to: 5000 learners and 100 teachers. In 5 years, we hope to serve 2 million students and 30,000 teachers.

We are measuring progress through tracking the number of teachers that successfully take our pedagogy course and there after go ahead to create courses on the platform. We also track the number of students enrolled for the courses as well as the assignment results for the different assignments undertaken by the learners.

Lastly, the revenue generated from the subscriptions also communicates alot about platform update and success.

5 full-time employees and 2 part time employees.

Our team has a combined experience of 15 years. On the team are professional software engineers, marketers and academicians. We use the inhouse team to develop all software that is needed to for our platfrom to run smoothly. This has helped eliminate dependency issues when it comes to making some changes or pivoting. This way, once we receive feedback from our users, we are flexible to make adjustments since we use our internal team for all the work and do not outsource any of our work to any external teams.

We are all enthusiastic about what the future holds for us and thus we all put in the best of out energy to ensure we succeed as a team. 

We are an organisation that embraces diversity, equity and inclusion on our team. We like to hire talent from a varied talent pool since we work in a multi-cultural environment. We hope to always work closely with HR organisations to help us identify such talents. 

We believe Solve offers a great networking opportunity for us. Also, we believe that the solve team will help us via mentorship on our growth path.

We hope to connect with many educators on the Solve platform for feedback and advice on how best we can continue to impact on global education.

We still believe that, as we scale, we may encounter some unforeseen circumstances. We can thus only rely on a trusted team like Solve to support with the next steps.

MIT Faculty

Since our solution can be used by teachers from any corner of the world, we believe teachers in US schools too can leverage our platform to offer career related support eg career guidance. We will use the prize to reach out to and train more teachers and ensure more courses are available to learners.

We believe that our platform can be used for general training and education purposes by trainers and educators in areas of economic, financial, and political inclusion based in refugee communities. We will use the prize to train more educators and show them how our platform can be best leveraged to train program beneficiaries.

We believe our platform can be used for STEM training by STEM educators in order to make impact to their learners. We will use the prize to train more STEM educators and learners on how best to leverage our platform for learning.

Our solution also targets girls and can be used by educators to reach out to many girls globally and pass on any form of education or training to them. If we get this award, we intend to use it to reach out to more educators that are focused on the girl child and train them on how best they can leverage our platform.

We do because we use AI in our solution and it is a very pivotal technology in our solution. We would like to use this award to incorporate and apply more AI technologies like data science and machine learning to back up the already existing artificial intelligence we use. 

We do because we use AI in our solution and it is a very pivotal technology in our solution. We would like to use this award to incorporate and apply more AI technologies like data science and machine learning to back up the already existing artificial intelligence we use. 

Our solution supports STEM training and hence STEM educators can use it to create courses and collaborate with learners globally. We would like to use this prize in training more teachers out there especially those in the fields of STEM.