Tilli

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) has answers to some of the world's toughest problems from declining rates of mental and emotional well-being among young people to rising rates of physical and sexual violence (One out of two children aged 2–17 years experience some form of violence each year)

Yet, current approaches to social-emotional learning rarely lead to sustainable, measured behavioral changes among learners due to three main reasons - we start SEL too late (13 years+) and miss a crucial cognitive growth window in early learners, most SEL experiences focus on passively consuming content and most SEL tools are designed well resourced learning environments.   

Tilli is a play-based, outcomes-driven learning tool designed to systematically build a comprehensive social-emotional learning skill-set in 5-10 years olds. Tilli leverages machine learning and the power of behavioral sciences to create personalized SEL experiences that are fun, measured, and affordable for classrooms across the world. 

The world is now in the midst of a pandemic recovery. Almost 1.5 billion young people across the world had their schooling disrupted. Early learners are at a uniquely disadvantaged position of missing out on some of the most crucial years of cognitive, social, and emotional growth, resulting from school closures, social isolation, and exacerbated income inequities. Classrooms and teachers across the world have had to shift to diverse models of instruction, with resource-poor classrooms been the worse hit. Social-Emotional Learning has the ability to bridge these gaps yet, current social-emotional learning tools have three main issues that prevent them from leading to sustained behavioral changes in learners:
1. Existing SEL tools are focused on the passive consumption of content hence, we are unable to track, measure, and improve SEL outcomes
2. More than 40% of the world's population lack Internet access yet most SEL tools are designed for well-resourced, digitally connected classrooms/homes.
3. SEL content still requires a significant time commitment from teachers to prep, curate, and plan the learning experience. 70% of principals believe that teachers are compelled to dedicate less time to SEL and that they don't have a measured plan for SEL implementation.

Tilli leverages three tools; behavioral sciences, case study-based learning, and AI to create SEL modules where learning outcomes can be measured from start to end. This ensures that when a child engages with a Tilli SEL module in their classroom, the teacher is able to monitor, track and improve the child's SEL growth.
Tilli is an end-to-end classroom experience that takes students through a tried and tested three-step learning framework called LEARN-APPLY-REFLECT this means that teachers need not spend any time on class-prep or curating lesson plans.
The tool comes in three different versions to match the resource availability and context of a given classroom. This means that we are able to provide a high quality SEL experience to eveyr child, and every classroom irrespective of internet and device access.

Tilli is targeted at 5- 10-year-old learners who get access to a fun and play-based learning experience that helps them build a comprehensive social-emotional skill-set to prepare them to recognize, manage and regulate their own social and emotional well-being while building sustainable habits and practices to sustain them through adolescence and adult life. 

Tilli is designed to be used by Primary School Teachers within their classrooms. Since Tilli is an end-to-end learning experience geared towards classrooms and customized to fit the resource availability of each learning environment, teachers can simply implement Tilli without having to spend more than 15 minutes on pre-class prep. 

Tilli went through a year of user-testing and co-creation where we ran a field study and a series of co-creation sessions in Sri Lanka, where we're currently launching our first development partnership targeting 4.5 million learners. We worked with parents, primary school teachers, psychologists, educators, and young learners to co-create their learning journey so that we create a learning tool that is relevant and delightful to our users and applicable to the local environments in which it will be used. 

Our co-creation and ethical design process is outlined in detail through this slide deck.

Tilli is a social-emotional learning tool are our prime focus is to build a comprehensive skill-set among early learners that help them stay safe, healthy, and happy. Our first three modules focus on trust, bodies, and boundaries, and feelings hence we prioritize the physical safety and social-emotional well-being, and mental health of learners. As empathy and critical thinking are two of our three core skillsets - Tilli is an ideal tool to build healthier and kinder relationships among kids, and tackle issues around bullying.

In addition to this, we also support teachers and low-resource classrooms.

Tilli has been used by 270 learners and 50+ educators having facilitated SEL experiences with Tilli. We are currently in a development partnership with Dialog; one of Asia's largest telcos that has agreed to white-list Tilli in Sri Lanka and host it on the government's official e-learning portal to give 4.5 learners and 150 smart schools access to use Tilli. We're also one of the three finalists at the LEGO Future of Play Design Challenge that picked the three most innovative ideas globally in the arena of social-digital play

Tilli has four major competitive advantages that uniquely positions Tilli within the social-emotional learning space. The first is our ability to track and measure learning outcomes through our use of machine learning models, and our focus on incorporating behavioral sciences into our learning journey. This helps teachers, and parents to be more attuned to their child’s cognitive growth and emotional well-being. This is a major gap in the social-emotional learning space that is still focused on the passive consumption of learning content as opposed to measured, outcomes-driven learning.

The second is our ability to create highly personalized learning experiences geared to each child's unique learning trajectory, cognitive growth, and local language and cultural practices. This is made possible through our capabilities in voice recognition and our evidence-based approach to narrative storytelling.

The third is our focus on inclusive design where we implement scalable content templates that allow rapid customization of learning content, stories, color palettes, and nomenclature to suit specific communities, countries, languages, and cultures.

The fourth is an extensive global network of 2000+ like-minded scholars, advocates, experts, and practitioners who work in roles and disciplines deeply interconnected to social and emotional learning. This network has been cultivated by our co-founders Vidya and Kavindya over the past 10 years as a central aspect of their work with grassroots advocacy, global women’s rights, global coalition, and capacity building. This network is a major catalyst for Tilli in ensuring that we remain affordable and accessible to every child, everywhere.

Currently, we have served 270+ young learners between the ages of 5-10 years and 150+ adult facilitators who have completed at least one learning module with Tilli.

Within one year: We hope to reach 4.5 Million learners through the integration of Tilli into Sri Lanka's national e-learning platform along with our development part Dialog (one of Asia's largest Telcos)

5 years: 15 Million learners through our expansion to two new target markets in India and Nigeria

We use three core indicators to measure success - learner success, reach, and visibility.

Learner Success is measured across our three key competencies; critical thinking, empathy, and metacognition through 6 broad metrics: engagement, confidence (self-report), grasp of learning, quality of conversation, application of learning, and completion.

Reach is measured through the number of learners who utilize Tilli, the number of adult facilitators who use Tilli, the number of development partnerships, and the number of parents who engage with our content.

Visibility is measured through our work in advocating for novel, accessible approaches to Social-Emotional Learning. We measure this through our impressions on local media, engagement on our thought leadership pieces, and our presence within the global learning space (panel discussions, product demos, and research publications)

Full-time: 3 

Part-time: 6 

Contractors: 12 

Tilli’s core team includes:

Kavindya Thennakoon, Co-Founder/CEO

Dean’s fellow, Stanford School of Education; Co-founded Without Borders; worked at the MIT Media Lab, Ogilvy/IBM, UN, Oxford Microfinance.

Vidya Sri, Co-Founder/Chief Strategy Officer 

Led the Initiative on VAW at Harvard, founded Gangashakti and co-founded Every Woman Treaty. 

Caitlin O’Quinn, Global Learning

Experienced in education and social emotional learning; certified, licensed secondary science teacher 

Ravi Madhusudhan, CTO

Aeronautical engineer; IT architect focused on responsible innovation. 

Kalani Bandara, Project Lead/Sri Lanka

Experienced in project management,sexual and reproductive health training; designing and scaling education-focused interventions; previously led Ideator.

Theja Jayasinghe, Counsellor in Residence

Graduate, Institute of Psychological Studies;one of Sri Lanka's leading child counselors; expertise in child counseling, suicide and sexual abuse prevention. 

Background & Capabilities

Vidya and Kavindya have a unique and highly competent skill set making them a powerful leadership team for the success of Tilli. They work with a highly skilled team of ten who bring over 70+ years of experience in Education, Ed-Tech, Organizational Behavior, Machine Learning and the Cognitive Sciences. Tilli was incubated and funded by the Stanford School of Education. 

Tilli was co-founded by an all-female, first-generation team from the global south. Our team is 95% female, and POC and comprises of individuals from North America and South Asia. 

We hope to maintain and exceed 50:50 gender parity throughout our core and local teams.