FREEJOO

FREEJOO is THE Global Community of Educators and empowers them from their learning to their earning. 

Problem:

Even though there are more than 95 million teachers worldwide, 60% of them believe that they do not have access to localized, relevant, and affordable up-skilling programs needed to design courses for the 21st Century learners. Moreover, an additional 69 million trained teachers are needed to achieve the UN’s goal of Universal Education. But based on the recent trends, teacher salaries have been decreasing exponentially, and as such, the need for trained teachers is going up, not down.

Solution:

FREEJOO, THE Global Community of Educators that is trusted by more than 100,000 teachers globally. Through FREEJOO skillED, Teachers can earn stackable credentials on the blockchain through professional development programs designed by global experts which lead to better employment and income opportunities for them. Through FREEJOO designED, they get access to simple digital tools which enable them to create engaging blended and hybrid lessons for the 21st Century learners, and using FREEJOO collabED, a global community of practice, they can learn from each other, share ideas and lesson plans, collaborate on research projects, etc.

Transformation:

FREEJOO helps transform teachers into being able to design and deliver engaging courses that help learners be better prepared for the Future of Work. It also empowers them to be independent and generate income from several additional sources.  

Specific problems that we are solving:

1. Upskilling and reskilling of teachers and administrators is not easy, affordable, localized, relevant, and difficult to do at scale.

2. Teachers in these countries, very often, have to work extra jobs as the salaries they get by teaching are not enough to cover their basic expenses.

3. Quality EdTech tools are expensive for the average public school teacher.  

http://uis.unesco.org/en/news/... 

Public school teachers in these countries are anywhere in the 26-66 year age range and a majority of them are female. Many of them may have limited access to fast internet bandwidths and/or laptops and desktops. Most use their mobile devices to teach online, using relatively low bandwidths.

We work with our users to co-create our solutions. Version 2 of FREEJOO was co-created in consultation with public school teachers in the Philippines. We have observed them teaching in schools and online, empathized with the challenges they face, tested our early MVPs with them, and sought their feedback on the services and solutions we offer at every possible juncture. As such, we have collected a wide amount of data which helped us decide on how we should approach the design for FREEJOO v2.  

FREEJOO equips teachers, and system actors with the digital literacy and confidence needed to engage meaningfully with edtech and enables capacity-building in an affordable, localized, relevant manner and at scale.

Neelesh Bhatia

Traditionally PD for teachers has always been expensive, rigid, solitary, boring, difficult to scale and generally available in English. 

We are approaching the issue of educational inequity from the perspective of the teacher – empowering teachers to upskill themselves while building a community of support.  By providing accessible, affordable opportunities for teachers to learn and grow in their local languages, we are impacting the teachers who are often overlooked and overburdened. 

Using a low bandwidth platform, teachers can earn required Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits through a wide range of courses, all designed to help them become competent and comfortable in digital spaces.   We also have created a community of teachers for teachers to collaborate, share successes, and get advice and support reinforcing their value not only to their students and community but the broader world.

Additionally, we are able to scale easily and quickly and as we grow and reach more educators, we will continue to offer our courses in local languages and gain additional content partners to offer more than CPD credits thereby provide access to a wide range of degrees and certificates that will not only help teachers stay relevant but also increase their earning potential.

We are also expanding on our bimonthly webinars to provide tutorials and seminars on topics that are timely and relevant to teachers across cultures, disciplines, and grade levels. We remain responsive to the needs of our teachers by engaging with them, listening to them, and responding to their needs.

We have tested our approach with overwhelming success by initially providing eight courses to teachers primarily in the Philippines. Their excitement and enthusiasm for our offerings has resulted in over 130,000 teachers from over 35 countries engaging with us in less than two years. In addition to this, our bi-weekly virtual events regularly attract over 9,000 attendees on average.  The feedback from our users has been incredibly positive and we continue to gain new members daily. We have since launched v2 of FREEJOO and have already signed MoUs that will enable us to on-board 70,000 teachers from Indonesia in the next few months. 

We have developed a global network of educators for collaboration and support as well as a low bandwidth, self-contained learning management system that makes engaging with online learning more intuitive and user-friendly.  Teachers are able to engage with a range of CPD courses as well as courses to help them become more impactful online and virtual educators.  The teachers have the option of using that same LMS to create courses for their students – all on one page, very straightforward, very user-friendly.

Think of it as a blend of Linkedin, Netflix and Canva - but for teachers. 

Our Theory of Change is rather straight-forward – by providing teachers the support they need, not simply to survive in the changing landscape of education but to thrive in it, they will be more engaging and impactful.  If the teacher is more engaging and impactful, student learning improves.  When students engage with their education, they are better able to reach their potential.  

By empowering educators everywhere and supporting their success we are changing the educational landscape. Showing teachers, all teachers, that they are important, and providing them ways to learn in their local language, at their own pace, at a cost they can afford, using payment methods they can easily access may seem a simple thing – but no one has done it until now.  It may be the equivalent of dropping a pebble in the ocean, but when you consider the millions of teachers in need of exactly what we offer, you can see how those small ripples combine and make a massive impact.

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We are using a variety of metrics to measure our success that center around involvement and engagement:  

1. The number of participants attending our virtual webinars and events; 

2. The number of free-membership subscriptions; 

3. The number of premium-membership subscriptions; 

4. course enrollment; 

5. course completion rates; 

6. The number of users enrolling in multiple courses; 

7. feedback surveys; 

8. partner growth.  

We continually monitor feedback to improve our offerings and impact.

Our goal for the next year is to launch 80 continuing professional development courses for educators and education administrators, in 5 languages, on FREEJOO and onboard 250k new teachers from Indonesia, Vietnam, India and the Philippines. 

Over the next three years, we aim to replicate this playbook in Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and onboard 2.5 million teachers.

And in the next five years, we hope to enter the North American and African markets as well, onboarding more than 5 million teachers by then.

In addition to this, we are working to build v3 of FREEJOO which will also allow a pathway to improve their ability to earn extra incomes as well.

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The main barriers we face are empowering a growth-mindset in teachers.  For far too long, a large number of teachers have found it acceptable to not engage with technology. We have all experienced a teacher, at some point in our education, that didn’t know how to use the white board, slide projector, or overhead projector. We rolled our eyes and someone in the class helped them figure it out (until the next time). But that lack of willingness to engage with technology is no longer acceptable. COVID has forced us to look more deliberately at technology and its role in our lives and specifically in education. Educators unwilling to learn how to use technology no longer send the message that they are wise in so many other things, it sends the message that they are unwilling to learn. Teachers unwilling to learn create students unwilling to learn.  

We are overcoming this in the design of our platform and our approach. By creating engaging online learning opportunities for teachers, we are not only teaching them we are demonstrating the very things they can do. They are not only learning online, they are understanding what it means to learn online. We are showing them the realm of possibilities and then helping them understand how to use the tools themselves easily.

Akadasia was formed in 2019, with the goal of designing an LMS for the Asian market - something that was affordable and available in various Asian languages. 

But by June 2020, we realized that it was not the technology which was the big bottleneck in education, but instead, it was the teachers who found it challenging to use technology to create engaging and interactive online/blended lessons for their learners. 

So we pivoted, in order to empower educators everywhere because we realized very quickly that the teachers were not receiving much support and the overall quality of the lessons being designed and delivered online by them was deteriorating, stressing out the students, parents and the teachers themselves. 

We ran a small pilot program in Aug 2020 in the form of a teacher training program, "Introduction to Online Teaching", and have not looked back since. 

We have since co-created v2 of FREEJOO with teachers who had signed up for our earliest training programs and have built the MVP to now one of the largest online communities of teachers in Asia. 

Currently we have 18 people in the team located in 6 countries. 

Neelesh, our Co-Founder and CEO has more than 30 years of experience in the education industry. He has been involved with education technology, curriculum design, teacher development and entrepreneurship education at a regional level and has a wide regional network of educators and education administrators. He resigned from his tenure-ship at Singapore Polytechnic where he was the Founding Director of their Entrepreneurship Centre, SPINOFF, to launch Akadasia. 

Kirsten, our Chief Academics Officer, has more than 25+ years of senior academic experience and has been involved with curriculum design and teacher development in North America. She resigned from her tenure-ship as the Director of the Louisiana Scholars' College to join Akadasia.

In addition to them, we have 9 more teachers on the team from the Philippines, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, who understand the needs and wants of the teachers and are able to deliver an effective, relevant, accessible and an affordable solution to our users.

Neelesh was the one who conceptualized the idea of FREEJOO, a platform that empowers educators everywhere. 

From an idea that was initially sketched out on a piece of paper, he created a pilot, where he created our very first teacher training course, hosted it on a basic website and started telling teachers in his network about it. It was a low cost solution devised specifically to test waters. 

Based on the learnings from this test, he then created additional training material in the form of new courses and kept on putting these courses up for sale on our website. 

He then started mentoring teachers on one to one calls and in return gathered a lot of data about what teachers liked and did not like about our initial solution.

With this data in hand, he hired our CTO and shared with him, the plan to build v2 of FREEJOO, which is now ready and has more than 130000+ teachers on the platform. 

1. Julia Gabriel Education (SG) - They are developing additional teacher training content specifically for early childhood training.

2. DepEd (PH) - We have trained more than 90,000 public school teachers from all over Philippines

3. Ikatan Guru Indonesia (ID) - We will start training more than 40,000 teachers from East Java province as part of a pilot program

4. Singapore Management University (SG) - We are part of their BIG Incubation program, Cohort 3.

5. Eduspaze (SG) - We are part of the Cohort 3 of their acceleration program.

6. SuperCharger Ventures (UK) - We were part of their acceleration program, Cohort 2.

7. AWS Edstart - Our solution is hosted on AWS cloud.

8. Philippine Association of State Universities and Colleges (PH) - We are currently contracted to train their faculty.

Our main barriers to achieve scale at this moment are access to talent and financing. We are applying to Octava Social Innovation Challenge because:

• We would want to access your network of resource partners, mentors, and coaches across industries and sectors as that may help us attract talent from across the world, people who believe in our mission of Empowering Educators Everywhere and want to be a part of our journey.

• We would love to participate in Solve’s annual flagship Solve at MIT event as that may provide us with a platform to share more about why our mission is an important one and hopefully we can find more supporters for the same.

• We need help in building our impact measurement practice

• The prize money will allow us to hire additional talent and scale faster

1. Human Capital - best practices when it comes to hiring and retaining top-quality talent

2. Financial - we are looking to hire a CFO

3. Network Connections - Our solution is scalable and can be localized to any country easily. Moreover, we offer the solution at a price point that is extremely affordable to private and public school teachers, equally. As such, in order to help scale teacher training and improve the quality of teachers quickly, we need help in connecting to governments who believe that our solution would be beneficial to their teachers, private sector, and implementation communities who could support us and bring us into countries and areas where we can help empower educators.

4. Monitoring & Evaluation - We want to learn more about the best practices of measuring our impact.

5. Product/Service Distribution - In countries where we can't sell our solution directly, we want to find distribution partners who are able to provide our solution to teachers, education institutes, and governments in their countries.