M-Shule

M-Shule is Africa’s first adaptive SMS revision platform for primary schoolers - sharing insights on performance with educators and parents.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, only 7% of primary school students are proficient in English and only 14% in Mathematics. The student to teacher ratio in Africa is on average 40:1. Teachers are often passionate but lack the support and tools they need to cater to their students’ individual learning needs in numeracy, literacy and 21st century skills. Teachers lack training on student-driven learning; lack time to focus on 21st century skills due to overcrowded classrooms and curriculum-driven instruction; and lack of 21st century skill resources and data.

These challenges allow students to fall behind easily, unnoticed.

Adaptive learning technologies have proven to help teachers in supporting every child and increase education outcomes. But these tools aren’t accessible to most communities in Africa, where fewer than 20% of the population has access to internet or smartphones. That’s why we created Africa’s first adaptive learning platform available on SMS - to fill this critical gap.

M-Shule is the first learning platform in Africa to make AI-driven personalised learning technology accessible to low-income primary school students through SMS. M-Shule is also the first data management platform to provide educators with powerful, real-time data analytics on student performance - even those at the bottom of the pyramid. M-Shule uses a series of SMS interactions to analyze what a student knows and deliver what they need to practice next. The AI backend personalizes not only Math or English content for students, but tracks and rewards skills like perseverance, grit, and motivation to encourage higher self-efficacy. As students learn individually through the platform, the system collects and analyzes their learning data to share insights in real-time with their teachers. Teachers can then use these insights to power better instruction and understand personalised needs of their students

If educators in Sub-Saharan Africa had the tools to give learners personalized support and better data, student’s performance will grow within the classroom and beyond. M-Shule empowers teachers to improve education outcomes through:

1. Guiding a greater number of African primary students to graduate from primary to secondary school, with the skills they need to move forward in their academic careers (ie. proficiency in numeracy and literacy)

2. Incorporating 21st century skills-building into their classrooms, allowing students to thrive in digital literacy, self-efficacy, resilience, collaboration - preparing them for our growing digital age

3. Developing well-rounded learners who can carry these skills beyond secondary, and reach tertiary education - enabling stronger economic opportunities in their professional careers.

By making 21st century learning possible to teachers and students with the simplest feature phone, M-Shule unlocks new opportunities for millions of students across Sub-Saharan Africa and the world.

M-Shule is the first to make adaptive AI-learning technology accessible to primary students in Africa.

SMS Interface: Existing adaptive learning platforms are web or app-based but inaccessible to most Africans. But with mobile penetration growing rapidly across Africa, SMS is the most accessible digital interface available. We channeled powerful AI technology into SMS, ensuring quality learning for everyone.

Data Analytics: We’re the first to deliver instant data to teachers and parents on students’ learning, who otherwise need to wait for exam period or report cards. Implicit and explicit data on performance is generated from students’ interactions with the platform.

M-Shule’s platform leverages artificial intelligence to deliver tailored content to primary school learners based on their specific grade, performance, and needs through a chatbot-like interface. The AI engine is built on item response theory, which continuously updates each student’s learning profile to deliver the most useful content for them. Using past data to select the most useful pieces of content, the system ensures students receive harder questions as they gain mastery, and easier content if they need to build foundational skills. M-Shule continuously updates learner’s proficiency, performance, and areas of strengths and weakness, to deliver reports to teachers, and schools.

Our overarching goal for the next 12 months is to impact over 20,000 learners and 1000 teachers, improving their literacy, numeracy and 21st century skills.

We will:

• Build and develop our platform to enhance our product and user experience. This involves refining our AI engine, data analytics, dashboards, gamification.

• Develop more and better Math and English content, building knowledge maps, core content, and expanding into other academic and 21st century subjects.

• Increase internal operations and talent to better our product and services.

• Scale across Kenya and prepare for expansion to Rwanda and Uganda.

Over the next three to five years, we will scale to improve the lives of more learners and teachers.

We will see significant impacts on teacher performance; literacy rates will improve and in-classroom performance will increase.

In 2 years, our students will complete primary school and move on to secondary school. We will have launched in 2 new countries , impacting 82,000+ learners 8000+ teachers from 400 schools.

In 5 years, we will expand across 15 countries and impact 1 million students in Sub-Saharan Africa. We will begin to see our first users unlocking better economic opportunities in their communities.

The market opportunity for our SMS platform in Kenya and Africa is immense. Kenya has a 90% mobile penetration rate, where people use SMS everyday.

We acquire customers through:

1. Door to door marketing and school partnerships

2. Word of mouth

3. Traditional marketing (radio, newspaper)

Our customer retention program involves a blended automated/human high-touch strategy including rewards, referral programs, and learner support.  

To date, we currently have over 2100 students registered on our platform from over 80 schools, with an average of 20 teachers at each school. Our students, teachers and schools come are mostly based in low-income areas, such as slums and suburban areas. 

Our personalised learning pathways enabled student users to increase their scores by 23%, and boost their confidence to participate in class discussions and group work. 

We additionally support partner teachers and schools through our weekly student progress reports, including learner performance analysis and data. 

In 12 months, M-Shule will impact 1000 teachers from all income levels. We will provide teachers with real time reports, tailored recommendations and resources to help inform better instruction. Over 10, 000 students will improve their scores by at least 40% in 12 months.

In three years, M-Shule will impact 8000 teachers - where 100% of their students will graduate to the next level. We will have a resource sharing forum, whereby teachers can connect with others to share recommendations and tools. We will see late primary students graduate to secondary, proficient in Math, English and 21st century skills.

Our CEO Claire Mongeau, has 7+ years of experience working in accessible education and social enterprise in low-income areas including in India and Kenya. Our CTO, Julie Otieno, brings in 3+ years of experience working in tech for development across Africa. Our entire team’s combined expertise and local/global connections has enabled us to raise over $300,000 in seed funding, attract impact investor donors such as Engineers Without Borders Canada and win various competitions such as Nairobi Innovation Week, GESA, Cisco, and Seedstars Kenya. These resources provide funding to enhance product development and acquire more schools.

As a for-profit social enterprise, our revenue model is a blended B2C and B2B subscription model, targeting individual parents of student users as well as organization partnerships.

Individual student subscriptions: M-Shule’s direct consumer product charges parents ~$1 per child per month through a monthly subscription for 1.5 hours of learning a week, which falls below current supplementary learning costs. We landed on this price point based on our pilot revenues in 2017.

Organization subscriptions and Data analytics: We offer school and organization packages at tiered prices, based on the need and number of students. Organizations purchase packages for multiple students to learn at once. They are provided with additional data products and support to teachers, at a tiered pricing model.

Through these models, we project revenues of more than $150,000 by the end of 2018 (year 1) at 10,000+ monthly recurring customers and 200+ schools in our network. We aim to reach profitability and break even by the beginning of of 2020 (year 3). By 2022 (year 5), we expect to make $16 million,  where we will then expand across Sub-Saharan markets, reaching more than 1 million customers monthly, work with 5000 schools, and generate $3.8 m in profit.

To date, 90% of the African population is low-income. We believe that learning technology can build brighter economic and self-reliant futures for primary school teachers and students. Improving education outcomes can reduce poverty - and allow for stronger economic opportunities in the future.

Solve MIT can help us impact thousands of teachers and students by:

1. Providing us with the technical mentorship we need to develop our AI engine product even more robustly

2. Providing us exposure to the diverse network of highly skilled professionals

3. Potential opportunities of partnership and research.

A current barrier to our solution succeeding is finding the right local talent and expertise in AI (with at least 5 years experience), since the tech talent market in Kenya is still so novel. Another challenge is the lack of data on primary school performance of teachers and learners from low-income regions. This means we have to invest time in conducting all research, analysis and test new methods of personalised learning pathways ourselves.

Solve MIT can provide the expertise our team requires to develop our product robustly, better our technology, AI engine and mentor future research methods.