The Web for Classrooms

Helping students at schools, in libraries and at home to find readable, relevant and reliable content online

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing educators in delivering accessible, personalized, and creative learning experiences is that over 115 million young people globally are still illiterate (UNICEF 2018). Even greater numbers have difficulty reading and understanding the online content which underpins the increasing majority of global educational delivery. Research from Wizenoze found that nearly 75% of online content is not understood by over 60% of the  population. We call this the Readability Gap.

Wizenoze’s research identified two further problems for students and teachers in accessing and understanding such material.

• Neither audience is consistently able to carry out accurate query searches.

• The search results that come from general search engines are often not relevant for education use. They are too difficult to read, driven by advertisement, or come from unreliable sources.

The Web for Classrooms (WfC) has therefore been developed by Wizenoze to address this readability gap and to support teachers / students to find and use online content that supports their education.

WfC is a unique technological solution that provides children worldwide with access to an internet that they can read and fully understand. It therefore helps to ensure that accessible, personalized and creative learning experiences are available for all.

Based upon proprietary AI and machine learning technology, WfC allows users to discover relevant and readable content on the internet, which is matched to their reading level. As part of the development process, we have used AI (and a large training corpus) to expand current readability classifications and establish a new 5-point reading level scale, reflecting the learning level and appropriate complexity. Our Machine Learning technology is then used to estimate the readability of any online text.

Currently, WfC contains links to over 6.5 million English pages of web content from trusted sources, all of which has been mapped to our reading level scale. Furthermore, all of the unique domains / URLs within it are hand-checked by teachers for educational quality.

Teachers are therefore able to use WfC to deliver truly personalised learning experiences for all students – students in the same classroom can be directed towards different online content at different reading levels. Students conducting independent study can also adjust reading levels to find the most accessible and understandable content. Most importantly, 84% of students sampled progressed further towards their learning goals by using WfC than other internet sources.

Our technology is currently being used in India, Kenya, the Netherlands, UK, USA and UAE. We are working with global governments, NGO's, diplomatic missions, charitable foundations and leading content providers to ensure that this unique solution is as widely accessible as possible to improve children's literacy levels.

Further funding to support the continued global roll-out of this technology would enable Wizenoze to broaden access to WfCl, as well as equipping young people with key reading and (digital) literacy skills for employment and whole life. As noted across Development literature, these skills help young people to fulfill their potential and lead to better health outcomes, gender equality, increased incomes and reduced poverty.

The Web for Classrooms (WfC) uses a unique combination of human and machine intelligence. Content from carefully selected websites is automatically collected, kept up to date and classified by reading level. This content is then made available through WfC where students can get access to recent, readable, relevant and reliable online content. The classification algorithms that we have developed for our solution are based on rich linguistic knowledge of the texts and go well beyond traditional reading formulas. We are the only global solution that offer students such a wide selection of reliable information at their own reading level.

The technology we develop analyses natural language texts and classifies their readability; our crawlers continuously update our collections and our full text indexing technology makes sure we can quickly find the relevant information for a student. Machine learning, natural language processing and information retrieval come together in our solution.

Our solution’s goals for the 12 months are clearly identified in our organisation’s theory of change which underpins our work globally. This states that our mission is to Increase access to online information by closing the ‘readability gap’. Over the next 12 months, we will therefore seek to develop more effective ways to provide students with access to a readable web that improves learning outcomes from learning tasks. In so doing, we aim to increase students’ confidence in reading and in sourcing relevant and reliable online information, which will lead to an improvement in educational attainment.

If we are to realise the internet's potential to democratise education, then it must be accessible for all citizens. We believe that a key part of this accessibility is an individual's ability to source reliable content at a reading level they can fully comprehend.

Building on current pilot programmes in India and Kenya, Solve’s investment will support further expansion into Asia and Africa. Our intention is develop multi-language versions of The Web for Classrooms (WfC) featuring global languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Hindi. This sits alongside an ongoing expansion programme into new European and English language territories.

The Web for Classrooms (WfC) is a SaaS solution, currently delivered to its educational customers via the cloud. It is highly scalable for multinational use and can be deployed at short notice. The technology has the potential to reach large audiences and deliver large-scale global impacts. We are also developing distribution partnership deals with global education publishers to integrate WfC within their learning environments and resources.

Students and educators access WfC through their preferred browser on any device with web access. From our experience, the vast majority of site usage is either in school, in a library or at home.

The Web for Classrooms (WfC) is currently used by nearly 1m primary school/vocational students across The Netherlands. We are in the final stages of closing two significant distribution deals in the UK, which would give access to 3m - 5m school age students. Smaller scale pilots are currently being delivered in India, Kenya and USA.

Students benefit from access to readable, reliable and relevant search results. They develop improved reading skills and understanding of key texts/concepts. Our research shows that WfC improves reading and online search confidence which leads to better learning outcomes e.g. improved grades.

Within 12 months, we anticipate reaching approximately 3m students in The Netherlands and the UK. These users will stretch from primary to vocational ages. Our forecasts also predict 1 million + users in India following a  successful pilot phase. In three years, we envisage usage in 75% of UK schools, reaching nearly 7 million student users with a further 10 million regular global school age student users.

The impacts generated by our solution are outlined in response to Q14 above. Our research found that students and teachers reported improved confidence and learning outcomes within two months of using our solution.

It is clearly vital that we continue to attract the very best talent so that we can continue to innovate and lead the field. Importantly, our in-house software development team have become leaders in machine learning software for readability classification, alongside our PhD specialists in natural language processing.

Our educational expertise (two PhDs and two ex-teachers) enables us to develop propositions which engage practitioners and are grounded in a clear theory of change and strong evidence of impact.

Our highly-experienced sales team are already generating sizable partnership deals. This revenue is essential to building a profitable and sustainable business.

Our revenue model is focused on B2B and is targeted at the following organisations.

• Education publishers

• EdTech businesses, developing student or virtual learning environments

• Technology providers for public libraries

By closing partnership distribution models and by integrating our API into their tech ecosystems, we are able to leverage our partners’ customer bases to reach thousands of schools and millions of students globally.  A single potential deal with Pearson in the UK/US could reach 9 million students and can be easily replicated without increasing sales headcount.

Similarly, the issues we are trying to address (global illiteracy and an internet that divides rather than including) are the same worldwide and can be addressed by an easily replicable solution like The Web for Classrooms (WfC). As a SaaS proposition, WfC is highly scalable for multinational use and can be deployed across the globe at short notice. It therefore has the potential to reach large audiences and deliver global impact.

Importantly, this approach enables our business to scale quickly without needing a sizable increase in organisational cost or headcount. Moreover, the vast majority of significant technology spending is now complete and we are now in a scale-up phase driving fast revenue growth.

Wizenoze is applying to Solve because we wholeheartedly support the premise of the challenge - providing accessible, personalized, and creative learning experiences for all. We also believe that access to readable, reliable and relevant online content is an essential precursor to delivering the same.

Solve can also advance our work by giving independent endorsement of our technology and social impact and by offering access to an established network (particularly with key academic institutions such as MIT). We are already part of the worldwide Pearson Project Literacy network and have found huge value in playing a full and active role within it.

The biggest barrier to our success is tackling the pervasive use of the phrase “Just Google it!” in education settings. This instruction pushes students towards an unsuitable environment for education use, where they have difficulty finding relevant and readable search results for their query.

Raising awareness of these problems and of the existence of a powerful and more appropriate alternative such as The Web for Classrooms (WfC) would therefore be hugely helpful. Solve funding and support carries a high branding and PR value, which Wizenoze would be looking to leverage to address the above.