Teleporting Teachers

Teleporting Teachers' Professional Development with Virtual Reality (VR)

We at 360ed would like to improve the quality of teacher training programs on a nationwide scale. Public teacher training programs have been relatively unchanged since the 1980s and available ‘contemporary’ training seminars are costly and taught in English. Therefore, teachers throughout Myanmar lack access to modern pedagogical principles, which also means that teachers are not trained to deliver experiential, inquiry-based lessons to their students. Furthermore, teachers may know their subject material, but they need additional training on content delivery so that students can relate to the teachers’ field of experience and feel inspired to learn further independently. And as a result, students in Myanmar are denied an education that focuses on critical thinking, empathy building, and problem solving. As Myanmar develops, without the changes in quality of education, we worry that the general public will be swept over, pushed aside, and left behind by the rapid pace of development in Myanmar and will be increasingly unable to navigate the complex fabric of modern life.    

We plan to build a mobile app platform to connect teachers and share cutting-edge methodology in modern education. The platform will train teachers with high-quality, contemporary classroom practices including Virtual Reality (VR). We will also leverage VR to film renowned teachers in their classrooms in Myanmar. This platform will also collate all of the recordings to build a digital library of education content for the professional development of Myanmar teachers. In doing so, the VR solution will overcome the lack of the most pivotal aspects of teacher training programs: classroom observation, coaching, and expert mentoring. This will enable us to build an active, scalable network for training teachers by virtually experiencing classroom environments. In addition, Myanmar teachers can also share their current practices on a national scale with this platform. Therefore, teachers across the country will develop engaging and interactive classrooms and students will take a critical and active stance in their own learning. To initiate this mobile platform, we will focus on delivering Teacher’s Training for Elementary English and will scale later.

Classrooms in Myanmar remain monotonous, dull, and deadening. With this platform, 360ed intends to ignite the conversation of teacher training to ensure students have access to education which is engaging, accessible, and fun. We hope with our teacher training platform, students will view classrooms not only as a place to learn, but also a place to play. 

Solving old global challenge with a new application of existing technology. 360°gives feeling of presence. Fully immersed in the surrounding aspects. Viewer not only can see what the teacher is teaching and students are responding to the teacher but also can feel what it is like to be in that particular class.

This is beyond pedagogy. The teaching instructions have been there since the beginning of time. Now is the time, as a traditional teacher, to empathize what it is like to be a 21st-century learner, a generation Z learner, getting lost in an outdated centuries old classroom.

We will create our own Virtual Reality videos to create immersive classroom experiences for teacher training and to create a platform where users can not only access our content, but also upload and share their own resources among each other with ease and convenience. 

At the moment, because our VR videos would take up considerable space and bandwidth on our servers, we are uploading these VR videos on Raspberry Pi servers (operating via LAMP Stack) with LAN access in multiple communities and businesses. All our content will be accessible via a mobile app. 

We’ve decided to focus on Elementary English first as we develop our VR portal. We’ve divided our project timeline into four Quarters as follows:

Quarter 1: Mobile App & Raspberry Pi Server Development and Testing, Content Curation, Pilot Studies Begin

Quarter 2: Migrate Content to Raspberry Pi Servers, Develop Internet Facing Platform, Establish Facebook Presence

Quarter 3: Migrate Non-VR Content to Internet Facing Platform, Develop User Generated Content Function on IFP

Quarter 4: Test app compatibility with phones and interaction with IFP, Finalize content and design, Product launch available as B2B Solution. 

There are four options we can consider to grow and scale:

1) Content Expansion: We are starting with Elementary English so our content can widen its scope, such as STEM education.

2) Accessibility: We can expand access coverage across all of Myanmar and/or other countries via partnerships.

3) Platform: We currently intend our platform to share User Generated Content (UGC) for teachers. We can expand this platform to include student access.

4) Business Model: Because we use Raspberry Pi servers, we propose a B2B solution. If our internet facing platform supports VR Videos, we can move to a B2C model.

Within 12 months, we’ll provide beta keys to give teachers access to the platform across all school types (private, public, monastic, international) to ensure that we have a representative sample. So we expect around 20 Elementary English teachers to be on the platform from our initial pilot test, and up to 80 teachers for the next two pilot tests (repeated sampling). We expect this platform to be accessible to all teachers to share their own content and therefore, our VR videos and teacher training should only be the spark of the life of the platform.  

So far, we are still prototyping our VR Solution, but we have established a strong company presence in the Myanmar public. We have started sales of our Dat Thin Pone series, an AR flashcard set and companion learning app for public school subjects (for the Alphabet, Biology, and Chemistry). As of now, we have sold around 15,000 sets in schools and supermarkets. The teacher base among our customers will prove immensely helpful in outreach, once we begin piloting the VR Solution. 

We expect approximately 80 teachers to be on our platform across all school types in Yangon (private, public, international, monastic) as we transition from prototype to pilot. Yet in 3 years, we expect the platform to be fully functional across all of Myanmar, and we will expand our subject matter to include STEM education and ensure that for every subject, we fully adhere to the Teacher Competency Standards Framework (TCSF) drafted by the Ministry of Education in 2016. As for impact, we hope that through teachers, at least 200,000 students will receive quality education through our teacher training initiative. 

360ed was established in January 2017 and over time, we have grown to 60 full-time staff with various departments as follows:

EduTech: Content Creation, Focusing on the Intersection and Interaction of Technology and Pedagogy

Business Development: Marketing & Sales, Securing Distributorships, Social Media Presence

Media: Production and Processing of Audio + Video, Creation and Stitching of VR Videos

Techie: App Development and Compression, Server Maintenance, Setup of Raspberry Pi LAN Servers

Graphics: Design and Printing of Promotional Material, Box Design, UI/UX Design

Our collaborative work across all departments allows us to leap to unprecedented heights!

During our first stage of the VR Platform, we intend to offer our solution as a B2B partnership, where we will set up Raspberry Pi servers at local schools and communities, and provide beta keys for teachers to access the mobile app and eventually, the internet facing platform. As we fully develop our internet facing platform, we plan to transition to a B2C model, where we offer subscription plans directly to teachers. This subscription will range from 10-15USD monthly, a convenient price range for every teacher in our country, in contrast to training workshops. Because our pricing is accessible and our technology architecture is cost-effective, we are certain we will generate revenue and profit. Furthermore, once we have our technology firmly in place, we can adapt our platform to include additional subject fields or introduce our solution internationally, so we have plenty of room to expand as well.

With recent developments in technology and MOOC’s, students have first-hand access to content. This means teachers in Myanmar need retraining to adapt to the shifting learning environment. Therefore, our VR Solution will ensure that teachers remain pivotal and relevant in 21st Century education. 

We at 360ed are constantly looking for new ideas to prototype, test, and scale. We leverage AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) technologies in our solutions, yet because we are the only EdTech company as of now, and because we were established only in 2017, we still have a lot to learn from Solve, either by expanding more applications of these technologies or by increasing efficiency of our current resources. In addition, gamification forms a core principle in our products, and we believe Solve can provide mentorship in this exciting field of education. 

In Myanmar, teachers resist any form of change in their teaching practice and see any adjustment as an affront to their current practices; in their opinion, change implies that their ‘time-honored’ methodology is not good enough. Moreover, Myanmar was under a military dictatorship for 50 years, which has stifled our creativity and our collective change-making capacities. As we see that the Solve team is primarily composed of leaders in innovation and change-making, we believe we will learn about how to facilitate dialogue to foster change in education, both in terms of pedagogy and technology.