KELAS by Pengajar Belajar

KELAS provides teachers with ready-made material that can be immediately used in their class. Although we are helping to upskill the teachers, the end beneficiary will ultimately be the students who learn the relevant skills to become top applicants for future jobs. KELAS is a low-tech platform that provides free, ready-to-use materials to High School and Vocational High School teachers in Indonesia. All curricula are approved by industry leaders and align with national requirements for their respective majors.

“By 2030, Indonesia will need 113 million digital talents. However it is projected that we will only have around 104 million talents by 2030.

Indonesia will lack 9 million digital talents, both in quantity and in quality.”

- Ministry of Communication and Informatics, Indonesia.

Pengajar Belajar equips teachers with industry-relevant skills in STEM and empowers them with relevant technologies for the modern classroom. Our key programs helped teachers transition to an online learning environment and create industry-focused curriculums. Until now there have been approximately 2000 participants and 100 - 150 participants who take part in this program every month. Our solution will help teachers in adjusting to these online teaching methods with an engaging class. We will propagate KELAS so that teachers from rural areas can also access this platform and will have an impact on quality engineers in the future

We believe that teachers are the essence of quality education. Pengajar Belajar equips teachers in Indonesia with industry-relevant skills and empowers them with relevant technologies for the modern classroom. In this demanding industry, 60% of teachers in Indonesia have very limited abilities in the use of information technology when teaching. We are working to make access to industry-relevant curriculums and resources are scarce especially in remote areas of the country.

60% of teachers in Indonesia have very limited abilities in the use of information technology when teaching. Access to industry-relevant curriculums and resources are scarce especially in remote areas of the country. With this problem we can't create quality engineers for the future. Pengajar Belajar equips teachers with industry-relevant skills in STEM and empowers them with relevant technologies for the modern classroom. WIth this it will effectively affect for the country.

Tania Soerianto

Since the pandemic, many teachers in Indonesia have had difficulty adapting to online teaching methods. This can affect students in becoming "quality engineers" in the future. Access to industry-relevant curriculums and resources are scarce especially in remote areas of the country. There are not many platforms and sources that teachers can use for free. KELAS is here for teachers with industry-relevant curriculums and can also be accessed free of charge. We aim to create more accessible pathways for our curriculums, as it has the potential to change the trajectory of STEM education in Indonesia by upskilling teachers from 8,000 Vocational High Schools that focus on IT, in turn adding 400,000 employable engineers into the workforce per year.

We built a low-tech, web-based platform that is mobile friendly which contains unplugged and offline-ready curriculum to teach IT with minimal technology. For every video, we create an engaging text alternative to help save on bandwidth. We create offline activities to accompany learning experience to ensure that the curriculum can be used even in rural areas.

The Pengajar Belajar team was formed in January 2020 with the aim of improving STEM education in Indonesia. We started by creating workshops in both technical and soft skills, which helped to upskill IT High School and Vocational High School teachers throughout Indonesia and guide them to creating better class material for their students.

Our Theory of Change is the following:

If we can provide free workshops and resources in STEM for teachers in Indonesia, then they will improve how they educate their students, so that Indonesia will have a better quality employable talent pool.

Our workshops, run by our team and by our operational partners, have been done through live (virtual) classes, led by an expert in the subject. When needed, we created a ToT (Training of Trainers), where we selected and trained Mentors to teach our curriculums. We have reached over 2,000 teachers through these synchronous trainings.

To scale our impact and reach teachers who are not able to join the synchronous workshops, we decided to create a platform to provide industry relevant, ready-to-use STEM curriculums to teachers.

We aim to create more accessible pathways for our curriculums, as it has the potential to change the trajectory of STEM education in Indonesia by adding 400,000 employable engineers into the workforce per year.

Our education team is working to develop more classes for IT-focused majors, but we aim to expand our platform to other subjects as well. One of our biggest goals is to make the curriculum on our platform open-source, so both teachers and industry professionals can contribute to improving and updating the material. We aim for 160,000 teachers to be given access to industry-relevant lesson materials, 8,000 Vocational High schools with a focus on IT will be directly impacted and 400,000 employable quality engineers will be added to the workforce each year.

Our organization has developed an impact evaluation framework that's used in all our programs and products that helps to assess impact to our beneficiaries. We also measure MVP Success Metrics for KELAS. Our target is to translate current Pengajar Belajar curriculums into videos and activities with low-tech alternatives, create leaderboards and assessment frameworks.

In product, financing and market entry.

Our solutions to overcome this, is to look and strive for more grants, to help us build an even more effective and reachable platform for teachers to learn for.  For the market entry, we are trying to make a new approach, and interactive engagement on social media, so teachers all around Indonesia will know about our KELAS platform.

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Our leadership team has various management and engineering roles in unicorn tech companies in Indonesia, making our team to adopt an agile ways of working while maintaining high level of innovation. Our CEO also held a role in Social Entrepreneurship from the London School of Economics, and helps us with impact assessment. Our CPO and Team Lead for Pengajar Belajar, Tania, is currently pursuing a Master of Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education to develop more understanding on the pedagogy of teaching and bring back these knowledge to implement in our organization and in Indonesia. There are curriculum development team to develop our KELAS platform. Our curriculum team always ensures whether the curriculum is in line with the lessons and needs that are needed in the future. The background of our curriculum team is professional teachers who teach STEM in schools throughout Indonesia. There are also working professionals who are working in the industry, as well as industry partners who help us ensure that the curriculum are up to standard. There's also marketing team, their background is people who have skills in the field of graphic design, marketing and branding who can plan strategies, to introduce and attract teachers to use our platform and get to know our community. And we also have event operation team. Their background is people who have the skills to design events and manage projects. They are tasked with designing and managing every workshop, bootcamps, and project that we run to promote our KELAS platform or our other brands.

Throughout our ideation to implementation process, we have been adopting the design thinking process and sprint methodology in the development process. We put out users as the center of the development process and constantly asked for their feedback throughout the process. Our initial program of synchronous webinar sessions slowly allows us to think of ways to scale through our own low-tech platform within 5 months of operations because we see the need for an asynchronous tool for teachers throughout Indonesia. Additionally, Tania is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, with the hope of implementing her learning from the classroom directly into action.

Universitas Pelita Harapan, Universitas Pembangunan Jaya, YABB, YCAB, Sekolahmu, Skilvul, and Google

We are a non-profit organization that provides free trainings and resources to teachers around Indonesia, especially those in rural areas. We operate through funding's provided by our donors which includes industry leaders in Indonesia such as Gojek Foundation, as well as YCAB.

Other than the funding that will help empower our growth as an organization, we would love to be a part of the MIT Solve community as we believe that through the support and guidance from the MIT community, we will be able to scale our impact throughout Indonesia and beyond. The strong innovative mindset that MIT Solve’s past companies and organizations have resonated with our organization, and we hope to gain inspiration from our peers and mentors throughout this challenge, and innovate our approach to solve this education problem in Indonesia.

The network that we can gain through MIT Solve will be really beneficial for us to achieve our ambitious growth. Through the community, we hope to gain insights on effective partnerships and social business models that other organizations have adopted that work well for their model, and potentially implement it to our own organization. Furthermore, we hope to receive feedback and help for our monitoring and evaluation to measure our long term success and ensure that we are achieving our goal through our programs and projects.