AOT's Proprietary Technology Platform

When AOT looks across the tech education sector, there is a tremendous disconnect in the cultural relevance of most workforce and job readiness platforms that engage BIPOC students.  

High-poverty schools with large enrollments of BIPOC youth offer computer science courses at a rate 12x lower than low-poverty and low-minority schools – resulting in lower participation rates among these students in computer science.  

Plainly stated: digital equity is a social justice issue.  Until the tech sector is more representative of BIPOC and the needs of their communities, social injustices will persist.

AOT seeks to change the face of the tech sector.

In response, we propose a Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP] to enable AOT to operationalize and democratize the way BIPOC youth access program content and resources.  

We know that when BIPOC students participate in computer science they are 8x more likely to major in technology in college.  

Of 110 AOT students recently surveyed, 95% shared that in-person/virtual programming is what they need from AOT. Further, they shared that they seek a platform that is accessible to them and their peers – one that speaks to their cultural relevance within the tech sector and that is not fee-based so that the largest numbers of young people can benefit.

Additionally, in the wake of COVID-19 there is significant evidence that online job readiness learning will continue with a surge in technology replacing in-person learning – language apps, virtual tutoring, and video conferencing tools [1].  For those who do have access to the right technology, there is evidence that learning online can be more effective in a number of ways. Some research shows that on average, students retain 25-60% more material when learning online compared to only 8-10% in a classroom [2]. 

Immediate beneficiaries of the Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP] are AOT’s 3,500+ students/alumni.  Upon scaling to students beyond our physical regions, we will reach 1,000 BIPOC youth in one year; 1,000,000 in five years.

[1] https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2020/03/23/covid-19-online-tutors-boosting-incomes-as-demand-surges-due-to-coronavirus-lockdowns

[2] World Economic Forum; COVID-19 Pandemic Has Changed Education Forever: This Is How; Cathy Li and Farah Lalani; April 29, 2020.

AOT's Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP] will put all of the pieces of our job readiness program model, curricula, teaching guides and resources, and virtual learning tools in one platform.  The PTP will increase the learning reach, internship and job placement, and capacity unencumbered by physical distance for any reason.

Connecting communities to scalable solutions such as AOT’s proposed PTP has the ability to build an online community of future technologists prepared with critical employment skills and ready to step into the workplace. Further, the development of this platform addresses financial security to ensure young people have the necessary tools and resources to succeed in economically mobile careers like technology. 

AOT’s PTP will incorporate Repl>it and Google Classroom. Repl>it is the best coding technology for quickly starting, sharing, and developing projects in any programming language on any platform. Google Classroom is a free and easy tool helping educators efficiently manage and assess tech skills development and proficiency, while enhancing connections with learners from school, from home, or on the go.  

AOT’s target population for the Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP] is primarily BIPOC “Opportunity Youth” at risk of falling beyond the curve in technology skills development.

The most immediate beneficiaries of the PTP are our 1,000+ students/alumni in NYC and LA.  AOT youth: (1) Identify with an under-represented racial/ethnic background, (2) Are between ages 16-24 and (3) Live at/below the poverty line. Of AOT students, 42% are African American and 38% are Latinx. 42% are female and/or gender non-conforming.

As PTP scales it will open our workforce development curriculum to students beyond our physical regions. Within one year of implementation, the PTP will reach 1,000 BIPOC youth; within five years the reach will increase to 1,000,000. 

The impact will be providing BIPOC young people with a workforce readiness technology platform that speaks to their cultural relevance within the tech sector and that is not fee-based so that the largest numbers of young people can benefit.

Youth voice and input will be integral to the overall efficacy and impact of the PTP.  Those who access the PTP will be directly involved in the platform’s evaluation to determine strengths and weaknesses and to address the needed enhancements moving forward.

Since 2014, AOT’s tuition free program model has introduced BIPOC young people in NYC and LA to paid summer internship programs and jobs in our employer partner network. AOT students are amazingly talented and represent the future of innovation in our country.

COVID-19 has had a disproportionate effect on our students and their communities – including higher numbers of COVID-19 cases and economic stress due to reduced hours and lost wages. 

As this application demonstrates, AOT’s Proprietary Technology Platform will foster access to high-quality, no-cost learning, skill-building, and training opportunities regardless of in-person learning for those entering the workforce.

With the Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP], AOT has identified the solution it seeks to scale to support more robust virtual learning.  We have begun to design a prototype (building off Repl.it and Google Classroom) for the PTP, have a group of active users and are poised – with funding – to move forward with full development, testing and implementation.

While the technology is not one we own, AOT believes it serves as an MVP for the work we are seeking to accomplish with the PTP.

The guiding principle behind AOT’s Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP] is that digital equity is a social justice issue.  Until the tech sector is more representative of BIPOC and the needs of their communities, social injustices will persist.

For AOT to create a diverse, equitable and inclusive tech industry, we must stand against social and racial injustice.  AOT is committed to consistently assessing and addressing systems that affect our students, our communities and our team members. We acknowledge that this is a consistent point of growth and we will not stop until we get it right. This means developing our programming, hiring staff, creating pathways for our students, and engaging corporate partners and other stakeholders through a social and racial justice lens that envisions Black and Latinx people having roles of influence within America’s tech sector. 

AOT also continues to revisit our internal systems to ensure they are built on anti-racist practices. This means doing an assessment of our values, revisiting our employee handbooks, re-thinking our hiring practices and developing professional training plans for staff and contractors.

We believe that AOT’s PTP goal to operationalize, democratize and accelerate learning among BIPOC youth for whom tech skills education is often out of reach due to class, gender, income, racial disparity aligns with our stance for social and racial justice.

AOT's Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP] will increase student accessibility to tech learning and skills advancement, internship efficacy and create a new population of highly trained diverse tech professionals in today’s workforce.  The PTP will also be made available to the broader youth and learning community to support workforce development as well as scale AOT's reach. 

As noted previously, connecting communities of color to drivers of change, scalable solutions such as AOT’s proposed PTP, has the ability to build an online community of future technologists of color who are prepared with critical employment skills and are ready to step into the workplace. Further, we believe that the development of this technology also promotes individual financial security and independence for individuals of color who have historically lived in low-income households, as all of the program content and resources living on the PTP is geared toward ensuring that young people have the necessary tools and resources to be successful in economically mobile careers like technology. 

As noted previously, AOT’s Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP] will incorporate Repl.it and Google Classroom to support user interaction. 

Repl.it’s mission is to make programming more accessible.  It is the best coding technology for quickly starting, sharing, and developing projects in any programming language and on any platform, right from one’s browser. The technology allows for real time virtual collaboration – enabling coding with others with Google-doc like editing.  Repl.it included a vast learning resource where users can interact and learn coding best practices from 3+ million programmers, technologists and learners at all stages of development.

Google Classroom is a free and easy tool helping educators efficiently manage and assess tech skills development and proficiency, while enhancing connections with learners from school, from home, or on the go.  Teaching and learning are simplified by being able to add students or share a code or link so the whole class can join.  A class can be set up and running in minutes.  Google Classroom connects students from anywhere with a hybrid approach for in-class and virtual classes.  The technology enables face-to-face connections with students using the Meet app.  

Cloud Guru – the industry standard for virtual cloud skills training and certifications – has created a virtual learning platform specifically focused on cloud computing for workers that AOT would like to follow as a blueprint for the development of the PTP for students. 

[see: https://acloudguru.com/blog/news/a-cloud-guru-unveils-state-of-cloud-learning-report

Some of the benefits of the platform include:

• 52% of individuals say cloud certifications expanded their career opportunities, with more than 80% of those respondents identifying a higher salary as a direct result of cloud certification.

• 82% of hiring managers say cloud certifications make a candidate more attractive.

• 87% of hiring managers value cloud expertise over a university degree.

With the evidence that A Cloud Guru’s platform works for cloud education specifically, AOT knows that likewise, its PTP will work to engage students in technology workforce training.  AOT expects similar results for our PTP which will lead to better preparedness and hiring for young BIPOC people in the tech industry. 

The technology does not introduce any foreseeable risks. 

Current number of students served - 0

Students served after one year of platform launch - 1,000

Students served after 5 years of platform launched – 1,000,000

Key organizational goals over the next year/to five years include:

• Innovating on our programs and curriculums.

  • Operationalizing and growing our alumni program 

  • Expanding our peer mentor program 

  • Establishing a social enterprise model 

  • Expand on curriculum offerings 

• Being agile in adapting post COVID-19.

• Developing organizational capacity for programs, inclusive of:

  • Addressing social/racial justice in our programming and internal organization 

  • Data streamlining and salesforce implementation

  • Building out HR, finance and operational functions 

  • Developing a proprietary technology platform 

Specific to the Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP], AOT envisions the following key learnings aligned to determine that the virtual platform is successful and working: 

• Are students accessing AOT workforce and job readiness course content and are program staff able to track course completion/internship placements for students in a self-paced manner –regardless of physical presence and social distancing protocols? 

• Are AOT instructors and program managers able to monitor student/intern progress and learning outside of live instructional sessions?  

• Is AOT able to reach students/prospective interns with its workforce and job readiness content and curriculum outside of its current regions to support the PTP adaptation and replication? 

AOT plans to retain an external evaluator in a consultative to help us fully develop an evaluation strategy for the Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP]. 

AOT intends to collect usage data that will better inform how students engage with technology education and how they retain content. 

Some of the data we plan to collect includes: 

• Number of students gaining access to the tech platform including demographic information 

• Hours students spend on modules 

• Assessments on student learning

• Number of projects completed by students 

• Pass/fail rates of course assessments and move to higher level modules

This data will be collected on an on-going basis, with reports being collected monthly. 

AOT has built a culture of innovation and failing fast. We frequently refer to lean start-up methodology when thinking about our program development and curriculum development. We plan to use this same approach, seeing improvements as lessons learned and opportunities to build this tool. 

Further, we believe that external researchers will be able to use the PTP to produce literature on technology education for students of color and how they engage with STEM curriculum, increase social consciousness and action in STEM and develop a body of work that schools, educators and practitioners could look to as they build equitable pathways for strong engagement in STEM for BIPOC youth. 

full-time staff - 11

part-time staff - 27

contractors - 2

Each individual on the Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP] development team has vast experience in technology development and youth-based skills development programming. 

Further, what makes AOT particularly prepared to deliver on its Proprietary Technology Platform is our organizational competency in the computer science and technology education sector.  AOT’s two co-founders [the CEO and President] are people of color from Brooklyn, NY; graduates of the public-school system K-12; and first-generation college grads who formerly worked in the technology industry (Accenture, Deloitte, and JP Morgan Chase).  Once they had gained tenure within the tech sector, they looked around and realized there were few people who looked like them.  They realized there were systemic barriers to young people of color seeking and achieving success in the tech sector.  With this they founded AOT and today they go by the mantra, “We were once the students we now serve.”

For AOT to create a diverse, equitable and inclusive tech industry, we must stand against social and racial injustice.  AOT is committed to consistently assessing and addressing systems that affect our students, our communities and our team members. We acknowledge that this is a consistent point of growth and we will not stop until we get it right. This means developing our programming, hiring staff, creating pathways for our students, and engaging corporate partners and other stakeholders through a social and racial justice lens that envisions black and brown people having roles of influence within America’s tech sector. 

AOT also continues to revisit our internal systems to ensure they are built on anti-racist practices. This means doing an assessment of our values, revisiting our employee handbooks, re-thinking our hiring practices and developing professional training plans for staff and contractors.

The MIT Solve Digital Inclusion Challenge seeks to answer the question: How can workers in the United States attain the knowledge and learn the skills needed to access sustainable jobs and livelihoods in the new economy – particularly in a post COVID-19 world?

AOT believes a post-pandemic workforce has to be prioritized and technology jobs and skills training are what we need to use to achieve it. Our organizational mission, theory of change and program model are dedicated to ensuring that low-income, young people of color have equal access to participate in the growing tech jobs sector. AOT has seen how students are not prepared to face the realities of the job market due to the pandemic and they have been disproportionately affected. If we believe that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not, then this is the time we need to create them so we can come back stronger!  For these reasons, AOT welcomes the opportunity to apply to MIT Solve’s Digital Inclusion Initiative.

As AOT pilots and grows the Proprietary Technology Platform [PTP], we would benefit greatly from MIT resources to identify additional funding opportunities. Additionally, as we build and test the platform, we would benefit from quality assurance resources to do this efficiently and effectively. As the reach of the platform expands, we will need additional resources to help market the platform to a larger audience.

As AOT develops and implements its Proprietary Technology Platform internally [PTP], we will rely on existing collaborations with schools, tech companies and internship partners to ensure the desired impact on our 1,000+ students in NYC and LA.

Once AOT is prepared to scale the PTP beyond our existing communities – particularly to urban and rural areas that have limited tech skills development opportunities for low-income youth, young women and young people of color, we will begin to establish relationships with additional schools, youth job readiness programs, and non- and for-profit youth service organizations to support the marketing, availability and access to the PTP. Examples of national partnership organizations that we would partner with include the Boys and Girls Club, Girl Scouts, and YMCA.