SEEKH – Free Tuition for Underprivileged Students

SEEKH("to learn" in Hindi) is an app that connects underprivileged students to volunteer teachers from any part of the country for free tuition.

The SEEKH android app connects needy students to volunteer teachers for free tuition. 

Students register on the student-side app with their basic details like name, age, standard, languages they know, and subjects they want to learn. 

Teachers register on the teacher-side app with their basic details like name, subjects they can teach, and the languages they know. 

After registration, both students and teachers are able to view each other's details and when there is a common match in their Standard, Language, and Subject, they will be able to connect with each other through their mobile numbers. 

In our experience, after students and teachers first connect through our app, subsequent communication takes place on WhatsApp, and classes are scheduled online on Zoom, Google Meets, etc. 

The app uses the Flutter framework to provide a clean user experience and all database entries are managed on Google Firebase.

When I got to know that my cook’s daughter had been missing out on her education due to COVID-19, I wondered how I could help. I realised that there would be many others like her whose education had been disrupted and further research revealed that the several lockdowns and school closures due to COVID-19 affected nearly 80 million underprivileged students in government schools in India.

These students would be out of their schooling for at least a year and with no one to help them, their education would come to a standstill. 

Due to the vast and diverse geography of India, the problem is compounded in semi-urban and rural areas which have even lesser opportunities for continued education. 

My solution seeks to serve children from low-income households (kids of daily wage workers, house helps – cooks, gardeners, drivers, delivery agents, etc) of the age group 10-16 who have lost out on their education due to the pandemic. 

Smartphones are ubiquitous in India and due to the infeasibility of physical offline classes, my solution is tailored to the underprivileged students who have access to a smartphone.

With the help of the SEEKH app, these students will be able to connect with volunteer teachers who are willing to teach for free. This will help them continue their education despite disruption factors beyond their control and also help support their understanding of subjects when they will graduate to the next class. 

At SEEKH, we also provide an opportunity to these students to engage in extracurricular learning. Keeping in mind that our students do not have the opportunity for such subjects even in their regular schools, we wanted to help them grow holistically and so we also have classes in arts and culture like Bharatanatyam (an Indian classical dance form).

Apart from speaking to my cook's daughter Barnali, our team and I reached out to other such students in our own local communities asking them how they had been coping up with their education and if an app like SEEKH would benefit them. 

We also found out that since they were dependent on their parent's phones, it was important to connect the volunteers with these students only during the times when they could access the phones. 

Furthermore, we ensured that our app was simple to use and made video instruction tutorials on the same in various regional languages for students' easy understanding. To make it simple for students to interact with teachers, we told our volunteers to communicate with students through WhatsApp after they got connected with them on SEEKH. 

Our doubts about the usage of SEEKH were put to rest when almost all kids of the age group 10-16 whom we interacted with were independently able to connect with our volunteers and start their learning through the SEEKH app.

We believe that SEEKH has now reached the growth phase as within 6 months of launch, we have been able to connect over 100 students to 55 volunteers as far as 2000Km apart, across 17 cities and towns in India.

We have also partnered with the Rigel Foundation, an NGO in Kolkata, West Bengal(a city in India),  and they have connected us with different orphanages in their city like the Embassy of Hope where our teachers teach students online for free.

SEEKH was also selected by Amazon as an AWS EdStart Innovator (an incubator for EdTech startups) .

The SEEKH app was developed using the Flutter framework to support both iOS and android devices with a singular code base. 

All database entries are linked to Google Firebase.

We currently serve 100+ students who have registered on our app. 

Our goal for 2022 is to grow 10x and serve 1000+ students. 

While the pandemic has caused many disruptions, it has proven that live online classes are possible and although their effectiveness is lower compared to offline classes, they are still very useful. 

Even after the pandemic ends, our volunteers will continue to teach students online and hence SEEKH will continue to function and make sure that learning for such students will not stop. 

Our goal for this year is to reach over 1000 students all over India who can study in classrooms of about 5 students each. In order to meet this goal, we require around 250 volunteer teachers as well. 

We’ve divided our target plan into 3 categories:

1. To further onboard more volunteer teachers, we plan to roll out an unpaid student teaching internship program in schools. For this, our team will propose the internship program to schools in Bangalore so that High School students will be able to teach underprivileged students in need. These incoming interns sign up on the app and are assigned a small virtual classroom of 4-6 students of the same grade who have similar conceptual challenges and speak a common language.

2. To be able to teach 1000 students effectively, we believe that our student-run teams alone won’t be sufficient to manage the operations of our organization. Hence, we would like to start increasing our task force by hiring paid interns who are experienced graphic designers, app developers, and content creators who would not only help us improve the app’s user experience but also help us grow our social media presence.

3. We also plan on advertising on Youtube and Instagram for influencer marketing. To reach out to more needy students, we would like to continue local magazine advertisements like our last year’s mention in the Devanga Kirana magazine to increase awareness about SEEKH in rural areas. 

Currently, we are able to measure how many students and teachers are able to connect with each other. Furthermore, our student-led mini HR team sends out a weekly form for our teachers to fill in with their week's teaching progress. 

This year, along with the classroom model as detailed in the above question, we are also adding a class remarks tab where teachers will be able to rate their classes, log their sessions and mention how their classes went. This metric will help us gauge how the classes are being conducted in a more automated way which is required as we scale. 

We believe that spreading the message within our target student and teacher communities(social outreach) in order to onboard more students and teachers will be the most challenging aspect of this year. 

Apart from that, we also plan to find students who can carry on the mission of SEEKH. Currently, it is led by a team studying in Grade 12 who will move to college this year/next year. 

I will continue to be an advisor, but the day to day operations need a fresh batch of students which I envision to be a rolling team, every year passing on the baton of SEEKH to the next incoming batch of 11 or 12 graders who would want to contribute to growing SEEKH and shares its vision – Free tuitions for the needy.  

To give back more than we take has been the guiding philosophy of everyone on our team. As school students ourselves, we understand the needs and requirements of our beneficiaries the best and we want to help give them every opportunity to grow. 

We all understand that coming from financially stable households, it is our duty to help those who most need it. From selling Origami models and donating money towards the school family fund to teaching in government schools during physical school days and donating funds to COVID relief through Python programming classes, each member of our team has worked in their own capacity to give back to their community. 

Coming from diverse backgrounds, having knowledge of different languages and cultures, and studying different subjects in school like arts, science, and commerce, we all have unique skills which have helped us build mini-student teams across digital marketing, community outreach, HR, and app development and take SEEKH to the next level. 

Currently, SEEKH has partnered with the Rigel Foundation, an NGO in Kolkata, West Bengal(a city in India), and they have connected us with different orphanages in their city like the Embassy of Hope where our teachers teach students online for free.

This year, we intend to partner with more such NGOs pan India to reach out to more needy students.