Skalo

In a classroom every student has their preferences, strengths, weaknesses, and their own way of learning. However, schools lack methods for managing diversity and different learning paces within a classroom. Skalo is a social LMS for schools, teachers, and families with children in K-12 education that personalizes and monitors optimal accommodations for any student according to their characteristics and needs. We see every child as a holistic human-being who has the potential to reach their goals. For this reason, Skalo motivates teachers to transform their education to flexible, inclusion-based methods, consolidates data on educational barriers, and integrates the family, the teacher, and the institution for a coordinated management of the student’s academic journey. Skalo was created under UDL framework, therefore it can be implemented to any educational system and if scaled globally we could transform education and give access and participation to every student.

In Colombia 56 out of 100 students don’t graduate, these students face academic barriers from permanent disabilities to bullying, domestic violence or COVID-19. With the right tools and guidance, most of them could find their own way to successfully achieve their full potential based on their preferences, characteristics, abilities and needs and continue with their academic journey. Skalo hopes to create a path for every student, and with the help of parents, teachers, and institutions, create a community that works towards inclusion of every child despite any barrier, disability or challenge they face. We aspire to be a system that is affordable, innovative, straightforward, and personalized for everyone involved in a student’s academic journey. This way we will contribute to education and make it accessible and equitable for all.

Skalo is a LMS that personalizes accommodations and aids for diverse learners. With our algorithm, we have created an effective way of transforming the challenge of an academic challenge into the opportunity of developmental achievement. For Skalo to do its work, we involve the student’s family and teacher to get an idea of who the student is and what their strengths and weaknesses are. After having the student’s profile, our algorithm comes up with 10 optimal accommodations that the teacher can implement during 6 different moments of the day to allow the student to participate, progress and remain in class. Skalo creates value for everyone involved in a child’s educational journey by addressing their pains and giving and easy-to-use tool that motivates teachers, institutions, and families to engage in every student’s process and transform their education to personalized inclusion-based methods. With our learning system, teachers will be able to manage diversity within a classroom whilst gaining skills and improving their knowledge on class diversity management, families will find a place for guidance and support, institutions will become available for any student, and students are given an opportunity to learn in their own way and pace and reach their maximum potential.

Skalo’s targets every stakeholder involved in a child’s academic journey. Our current target population is based in Colombia, and we work to improve the lives of teachers and parents with children that face permanent or temporal barriers and challenges, and students who are not able to graduate school because of these barriers. Our target population lacks the tools to guide children who face any type of barrier or disability, for this reason, not only have we started our pilot stage with schools from all socioeconomic backgrounds, but we have also organized workshops for parents and teachers where they tell us what they expect, the difficulties they currently face and what the ideal solution would be. In Skalo we are fully committed to each stakeholder individually, which is why we have created an algorithm with specialized and personalized content for every type of user.

Skalo is an innovative tool that aspires to enable access to quality education for children of all backgrounds despite the difficulties they face with traditional methods of education. We have created the tool that facilitates aids and monitoring for teachers to include every student and allow them to participate and access the curriculum. In addition, by allowing every student to participate and learn, we are providing the tools for them to reach their potential, become holistic human beings and be able to commit to an academic journey that will take them to better opportunities in the future.

We are currently on the pilot stage of development. We are testing Skalo with over 300 students from all socioeconomic backgrounds in 3 different regions in Colombia, both rural and urban areas. We have a total of 12 institutions (schools and kindergardens) piloting Skalo and we hold workshops and focus groups with each of them to understand their needs and difficulties even further and to improve Skalo for our launch, which is expected for October 2021.

Our solution is a straightforward system that allows a holistic view of every student to develop personalized accommodation plans for each. For Skalo, each student’s strengths, weaknesses, expectations, and preferences are important and are determinant factors for each personalized plan. What makes Skalo innovative is the personalized guide that every user gets when they become a part of our community. Students are given a way to actively learn and participate while families get full access to their child’s education and simultaneously learn about the best methods to help their child learn and develop when at home. In addition, with Skalo teachers and institutions are encouraged to engage with every student’s process with the help of a straightforward tool that allows them to monitor each learner’s process while incrementing their abilities through experience and advancing their careers with the possibility of participating in courses, webinars and more. Our solution will not only transform education for teachers, families and institutions but it will also enable students to recognize their strengths and further on expand their opportunities to learn and become holistic professionals.

Skalo owns an innovative technology that implements an algorithm to generate the optimal accommodations for a child with learning barriers or disabilities. Through our web and mobile applications, we facilitate communication between the family and the teacher, seeking greater effectiveness in the implementation and monitoring of each accommodation. Skalo relies on existing technologies available for developers and cloud services, specifically the following:

-        Ionic, which allows us to generate each new version of Skalo both on a web and mobile platform for Android and iOS with a single version of the code.

-        Amazon Web Services for storage of NoSQL databases, storage of unstructured files such as photos and videos, and user authentication.

We also rely on basic business intelligence tools to generate scoreboards and gamification for educational institutions at the sectoral or national level. In the future we will rely on Machine learning technologies to use artificial intelligence in the generation and management of each optimal accommodation.

Here is a demo following the step by step journey that our users currently go through when accessing Skalo: https://youtu.be/wfuzwzUQbzw

The mitigation of the following risks has guided Skalo’s technology architecture design process:

1.     UX: Loss of product integrity due to excessive user customizations. As a policy, particular configurations that do not allow adaptation with the existence of general product parameter should not be allowed.

2.     Failures in the availability and continuity of technology operation: Skalo was designed with technology that eliminates dependency on servers (Serverless). This significantly reduces the risk of a general crash preventing user access at any given time. Skalo relies on cloud services that can be replicated across multiple geographic locations. The risk of unavailability due to general drops in Internet access remains.

3.     Data security and privacy: Access to Skalo's data is designed with high standards of information security, clarifying that no computer system can be considered invulnerable. More sensitive data, such as photos and videos of children, are encrypted.

4.     Support and maintenance capacity: all Skalo components have been developed with technologies for developers that have a high level of diffusion and are known in the market, reducing the risk of dependencies due to very specialized knowledge.

Currently serving: 1321

One year: 2500

Five years: 18000

During our first year we plan to continue developing and improving Skalo with the input received from our ongoing pilots and to create a word-of-mouth within the private sector in Colombia. We have a commercial strategy that looks to present Skalo to private institutions and start our freemium period with them during the next months. After establishing our anchor schools, finishing the freemium period, and starting our sales with multiple schools we will focus on the public sector. We currently have an alliance with United Way that gives sponsorship to 1000 students from low-income families during a year, further on, we will continue looking for sponsorship for the public sector. This will allow us to further expand our reach and number of users.

Skalo works in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, specifically goal number 4: Quality education, and number 10: Reduced inequalities. Our measurable indicators are divided into three branches: technology, comercial, and social impact. 

In technology we focus on measuring our IT Support and having a reliable platform that works and gives values to users. We have measurable indicators that align to this objective such and allow us to understand usability and improve our system to make it accessible and easy to use for everyone. In addition, our commercial indicators focus on growth. As one of our main impact goals is reaching as many students as possible it is important for us to increase the number of institutions and users we reach monthly. On social impact we have indicators that allow us to understand how a student’s academic journey changes once they are part of Skalo.

Full-time: 3

Part-time: 5

Contractors: 3

Skalo was built as a solution to the pain felt by the founder when trying to get her child with educational barriers through school. As a mother of a kid with cerebral palsy, she experienced the pain of trying to find the appropriate aids to ease her child’s school experience while also helping him maximize his abilities. Since her son was diagnosed, she began a journey to help him and others by turning her experience into an opportunity to create a non-profit (Fundación Cero a Tres) that has been helping more than 350 children from low-income families for more than ten years. Throughout this process, she’s met lots of families, teachers, and institutions who want to include their children in school, but the tools for doing this are scarce and the process can be exhausting and emotionally draining. In Skalo we understand the importance of integrating the student, the family, the educational institution, and the teacher for a coordinated management of the child with temporary or permanent learning barriers since the first day of kindergarten. For this reason, by creating a team of experts who are involved with each of Skalo’s stakeholders, we are able to understand and create value for everyone involved by addressing their pains and giving an easy-to-use tool that truly motivate teachers, institutions, and families to become inclusive and transform their education to inclusion-based methods.

In Skalo we seek to create a diverse, equitable and inclusive leadership team through our values and our mission to make education accessible, equitable and of quality. Our team is composed by people of all expertise and all backgrounds which allows us to have a greater perspective on where we stand and what we stand for. In addition, our ideation methods through the whole creation of Skalo have been based on human-centered design and solutions which has led us to fully understand our stakeholders by having first-hand interaction and involving all those who will be the beneficiaries of Skalo in the future. We believe that Skalo must reflect all its core values starting from its leadership, which is why we seek to create a team that is accessible for all, open to everyone and upholding the principles of integrity and mutual respect.

We are applying to MIT TPrize not only because we feel that our solution is completely aligned to the challenge's objectives, but because we consider that the opportunities that arise from receiving mentorship and guidance from experts will allow us to improve, grow and expand. Currently, one of our biggest challenges relies on the public sector and on how to implement Skalo in areas were internet and devices are scarce. With the funding and the mentorship we will be able to focus our efforts on making our technology more effective for mobile devices with poor cellular data. In addition, we hope that with through MIT TPrize we are able to expand our connections and accelerate Skalo so we can expand through Latin America in the near future and help as many children as possible. 

As mentioned, we need advice on how to expand our client base and how to develop our marketing strategies to improve our public relations. In addition, we seek to improve out metrics and what we measure so that we can become more accountable to prospect partners and to our clients.