Edu-Wudi : Educational continuity with 360-degree profiling

Empowering educators and students with collective intelligence (AI) to transform their educational journey !

Industry 4.0 on one side opens doors to immense possibilities, but on the other hand is failing to prepare us to face a dynamic market space. The existing educational systems which was designed for the industrialisation era is finding it difficult to keep pace with the market and this has resulted in churning out unskilled graduates which has escalated suicide and depression rates among youngsters. As per Indian National Employability Studies in 2015, 94% of engineering graduates are unemployable with 50 -95% across other verticals. The root cause stems from the lack of orientation a students receives at school levels since all are measured with a single scale. A straight forward solution is to develop a dynamic curriculum framework, value based education and personalised attention. But, with over 80% of school teachers already spending an average of 12-15 hours working at as low as $ 0.30 per hour (in Indian private schools) , have we equipped our teachers / academics for a dynamic world? 

Also, the Indian school education system alone has 1.5 million schools, 260 million students, 50 diverse education boards and 1650 mother tongue languages. With this high complexity, lack of dynamic benchmark, absence of electronic data repositories, it is impossible for students and educators to obtain a normalized assessment. Though there are umpteen number of education ERP solutions, none of them have been designed with a data perspective or colloboration or usability or context specific actionable insights. The solution to all these problems is to have a centralised data repository and profiling system. 

Edu-Wudi is an easy-to-use, collaboration centred, process and curriculam agnostic 'Edu-Process Management System'. It has been designed from an educator's perspective and is backed with artificial intelligence driven skill discovery, mentoring and insights. 

Based on a study conducted on 150 school teachers from Kerala(India), Edu-Wudi will free a school teacher an average of ~300 hours of paperwork in an academic year .

India has ~300,000 NGOs in the education sector alone and this transalates to one NGO for every 870 students. Unfortunately, these NGOs are unable to scale their impact since most of them (will) exhaust their minimal resources reinventing the wheel in a dynamic market environment. Edu-Wudi is designed to help such NGOs, educational Trusts and Governments (with any complex organizational architecture) to seamlessly manage their custom processes with transparency, accountability and agility with system driven insights for proactive decisions. This will help educators and management to give personalised engagement to each student thus empowering them with continous, dynamic and multi-dimensional profiling irrespective of socio-economic background. With a 360 degree profiling and mentoring, students will be able to make informed decisions to build careers in areas of their talent and skills. Our system would thus augment teachers (irrespective of their demographics) to assist and mentor students in the best possible way.

Our solution is innovative in approach and deployment. 

Most ERPs in the market were developed either by adapting business solutions or were built for a specific context. The concept of educational continuity is lost in the process. Edu-Wudi has been developed from an educator's perspective, augmenting user with insights derived from collective intelligence, but at the same time awarding context specific customization capability.

When ERPs target with a sale focus vs user engagement, Edu-Wudi targets organizations with  volunteers to ensure continuous user engagement and feedback. Inclusivity will be achieved in a bottoms up approach starting with BoP.

Edu-Wudi has been developed with a focus on putting emerging technologies to best use. A SaaS based Edu Process Management application at its core with proprietory process-flow architecture and artificial intelligence modules . It also has an AI powered talent and skill discovery module backed by a smart mentor connect. 

Edu-Wudi is also integrating other third party service providers on board and is also in the process of developing a multi-lingual conversational BOTs to serve educators with ease.

We are targeting 2000 organizations, 10,000 educators, 1 million students and 200 mentors in the next 12 months. This would be attained by customer  acquisition of NGOs / Trust / Groups that serve a large beneficiary population.

We are in the process of developing a multi-lingual conversational BOT to easen educator's system interactions. This will enable our market penetration eliminating training requirements. Integration with various third party learning and skill development service providers are also underway(eg: financial literacy for students through simulation games). This will help smaller educational organizations to gain access to real life learning engagement for basic skills.

As our system relies on user interactions for developing intelligence, it is quintessential to have users with diverse demographics. Hence, by 2023, we are targeting to reach 500,000 organizations globally, impacting the lives of 100 million students and a million educators. We are also targeting to transform a million students into mentors which will have a direct impact on their overall development. In 5-7 years, our platform will have an exponential increase in non-organizational users who will be using the platform for personalised system insights, thus attaining inclusivity in a bottom- up approach. 

While most ERPs target individual organizations with a sale focus over a post sale user engagement, Edu-Wudi targets NGOs, Governments and Govt agencies with active ground soldiers to ensure continuous user engagement and feedback. Our primary focus is to create value for all stakeholders in any given system so as to maximise user engagement. Edu-Wudi is a SaaS solution and can be accessed using any device with an internet browser and a 2G connection. Organizations (hubs) can set up teaching centres (spokes) from reusable templates making go live time to be as low as 5 - 10 minutes.

Our platform is currently in its beta phase and we are working closely with some selected organizations. To serve BoP, we have NGOs working in the field of education and imparting either FREE or subsidised education to students from marginal communities. 40 educators and 3,000 students are being served through these NGOs and a measurable impact is the operational efficiency saving an average of ~10 hours of total administrative work daily. Our paying clients include education counsellors, consultants and for- profit private schools and higher education organizations adding another 400 educators and 10,000 students.

Edu-Wudi is targeting to reach 2000 organizations, 10,000 educators, 1 million students and 200 mentors in the next 12 months. This goal will be attained by customer acquisition of NGOs / Trust / Groups that serve a large beneficiary population. Initial  measurable impact would be in process efficiency creating value for managerial and academic stakeholders further increasing user engagement. This user engagement will improve collective intelligence of the system thus bringing more users aboard. With this causal framework, we are targeting an exponential growth in organizational base (~200,000) in subsequent years by simplifying user interactions with conversational bots and third party services.

Our team have different and complementary skill sets.

Our CEO holds an engineering (NIT) and management degree (IIM) with work experience in product development. He brings in expertise in business development, fund raising, strategic development, marketing and designing corporate identity.

Our COO is a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Univ of Cambridge and is also the co-founder of another social start-up Favalley. As a top 50 women in engineering in UK, Forbes under 30 & Hult prize finalist, she brings in expertise in liaising our operations, managing projects and stakeholders , media interactions and oversees our R & D activities.

Wudi works on a Freemium model and targets educational organizations (Schools, Colleges and other Edu Service providers) to acquire users. To  ensure user engagement, we are primarily focusing on NGOs and Government agencies with volunteers or ground soldiers. Pricing will be as follows:

Schools: Base application and educational analytics absolutely FREE. Premium services starting at a monthly subscription fee as low as £5

Higher educational institutions / other edu service providers:  Base application at Yearly subscription fee starting at £120. Premium services starting at a monthly subscription fee as low as £5

Enterprise editions (For Groups / Trusts): Yearly subscription starting at  £150

User account: FREE. Premium services starting at less than £1 monthly

Customization, data handling & legacy integrations: Charged on a case basis

Fairground: 50% discount for organizations in sub-urban / rural and women-led initiatives, NGOs, non-profits etc. Based on Wudi’s internal rating system, premium features will be unlocked for FREE for deserving users.

In the first two years, we are targeting a paid user base of 2-3 % and grow to 15% two years hence with an average monthly revenue per user of £2.

Organization revenues with 10% paid organizations and a monthly revenue of £50.

Wudi's vision is to empower teachers by providing them with a 360 profile of the students with insights into their skills, talents, aptitude and mental well-being. Our aims perfectly aligns with SOLVE's mission of supporting educators in fostering innovation, creativity, critical thinking, social and emotional learning, and skills-building in diverse learners . Thus, besides competing for funding for piloting and global expansion, this competition unfolds immense opportunities for partnerships, networking, access to MIT’s resources and learning, helping us to advance by customising our platform for educators globally as well as opportunities to scale-up. 

• Communicating the need for using and interacting with such a system
• Managing ground soldiers / volunteers to ensure that teachers at Government schools use the system effectively since they do not have incentives or KPIs
• Rural areas with less or poor network connectivity (though this should not be concern in the future)
• Access to Smartphones / computers / other devices at rural and underprivileged schools
• Content translation to regional languages
• Experienced team to ensure syllabus and curriculum maintenance for various Boards / Universities / Courses
• Communicating the USP of our ERP