Lina

A fully-stocked mobile classroom, learning management system, and instant communication channel that improves learning outcomes in low-income K-12 learners. 

Short for the Filipino word Linang, translating into "cultivation" in English, Lina aims to provide millions of out-of-school Filipino children with the necessary cognitive foundations from a young age. 

Lina is a low bandwidth learning management system (LMS) and remote learning solution that allows remote students to connect with teachers and their respective schools through a free mobile application and/or website. Lina's LMS allows school administrators and teachers to monitor, guide, and direct their students through the app's free and extensive library of courses, (as aligned with the Philippine Department of Education's essential competencies). Furthermore, integrated live-chat systems and discussion forums let students, teachers, and classmates communicate synchronously when working through lessons and assignments. Student grades and history are also recorded and saved to Lina's servers, saving device storage while maintaining records of student performance and growth over longer periods of time.

Plagued by an already poor educational system, as a result of poor student performance, teaching discrepancies, and a lack of government financing, the Philippines has had its educational crisis further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. A nation already ranking last and second-to-last out of 79 countries in literacy rates and math and science subjects respectively in the 2018 International Student Assessment (OECD, 2018) has shut its schools' doors for 22 months and counting, as of January 2022. Approximately 27 million students are now forced to study with limited to no access to educational resources, technologies, and formal instructional guidance (Marquez, Olivar, et al., 2020). Above 80% of parents report that their children display slower learning improvement on a distance platform (UNICEF), and an estimated 2-3 million students have completely dropped out of school (Rappler). Methods employed by the Philippine Department of Education (DepEd) include paper-and-pencil modules set to students' homes, with the expectation for parents and students to self-learn the concepts in every pack of modules. However, criticism arose due to faulty educational modules, delivery complications, environmental impacts, derogatory references, and incorrect responses (Magsambol, 2020). 

This educational crisis, if left unattended, will cripple the future generations and outcomes of a nation. The National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) estimates a $219 billion productivity loss in the Philippines over the next forty years as a result of prolonged distance learning. The risks for child labor and teen pregnancies are also slated to increase, as stated by UNICEF specialist Teresita Felipe. 

Research has shown that in the Philippines, the already most-vulnerable students will bear the brunt of the adverse effects of distance learning (UNICEF, 2020). While wealthier students have been able to participate in synchronous lessons through high-bandwidth apps like Zoom and Google Meet, the overwhelming majority of students who rely on DepEd's printed modules have not been able to connect with their teachers for almost two years. Many families live very far from schools and have to traverse rivers and mountains to pick up and drop off materials, with teachers having to make the same journey to visit their students for rare at-home visits. Many areas are not allocated any governmental funds, leaving administrators forced to shell out their own money to compensate for the government's lack of financing for the educational sector.

Upon speaking to institutional staff and families suffering from this crisis, many expressed their desire for a comprehensive online platform that connects students to teachers and reduces dependency on these often ineffective and inconvenient modules. It is alarming that no other digital intervention strategy has been widely employed throughout schools over the two years despite a high percentage of Filipino households owning at least one mobile phone; UNICEF states that thirty-seven (37) percent of students do not plan on using any gadget for academic purposes. There is so much potential for the implementation of a digital educational platform, and yet a huge percentage of Filipino students have not been able to access adequate sources of schooling/education.

Through working with local non-profits dealing with educational inequity, I have mentored and formed relationships with students from Lina's target demographic. Writing curriculum-aligned workbooks and resources, first-hand experiences, and meaningful interviews/conversations have equipped me with a deep insight and understanding of the educational issues in the nation. Furthermore, as a student, I have been exposed to a wide variety of distance/self-learning strategies, and understand available methods and features available, and others that are lacking and could be implemented into Lina's original software. I have also conducted an academic research study exploring the "Impacts of Prolonged Distance Learning on Filipino Children's Academic Performance", which further highlighted the urgent need for an educational intervention program to ease academic hardships from long-term school closures.   

Lina was first and foremost realized for the community. Thus, external input has always been a priority of mine since the conception of the app. Before even starting development, I met with a diverse group of Filipino and international scholars, teachers, parents, youth psychologists, and educational professionals to decide which features and design choices would be more beneficial on a larger scale. This platform is ultimately for community use, and I thus prioritized users' opinions and input to create as useful of an app as possible. Regular brainstorming sessions continued to be held throughout the advanced planning and development stages, with potential users providing feedback and features they wanted to see at the app's launch.

Technologically, Lina's mobile app is currently under development. All UX/UI prototypes are functional, and 70% of the app's back-end has been completed and coded. Features have been approved and optimized to best cater to target audiences, and are constantly updated with the feedback of a sample from the target population. Curriculum development has been completed and is to be submitted to DepEd for further guidance and approval.

Lina has also partnered up with a variety of schools across the nation, ranging from small private schools to large public schools in rural, semi-rural, and urban environments. These schools have consented to their participation in the app's testing and trial runs, which will begin at the start of the 2022 Filipino school year. Select participants have also begun testing the UX/UI models.

Lina's business model has also been kickstarted through the winning of a seed grant from an emerging tech solutions company. The company is planning to present its product to major corporations both within and outside the Philippines to maximize its reach and impact. 

Lina is a lightweight and low-bandwidth e-learning suite that will be available in three iterations: student, teacher and parent. Each app will have its own unique set of features: student and parent apps will be built as Android-compatible mobile/tablet downloadable apps, while teacher apps will be coded as web-based apps to be accessible for instructors using all sorts of devices, including laptops and desktops. 

Teachers can keep track of their students' work and grade them as efficiently as possible. Lina collects (and safely encrypts) performance metrics and data on students' performance across certain assignments and tests, which algorithms will use to construct a holistic and detailed student profile that lets teachers to provide personalized feedback and exercises for further student growth. Data is stored on Lina's cloud-based servers to keep the app as light as possible, while allowing parents and teachers to maintain records of students' progress and overall learning journeys. Lina's real-time, low-bandwidth messaging/forum solution also uses company servers to allow quick communication pathways between student, parent and teacher. 

As of now, Lina's software uses PHP via Laravel, HTML5 and ReactJS. However, these languages are expected to expand with more complex coding and developments on the apps. 

In the future, Lina also plans to apply AI technologies to create as customised of a learning experience as possible to aid all parties through students' individual learning paths. 

Upon launch, Lina is projected to reach no less than 2,500 users (this includes students, teachers, and parents) by the end of 2022 across six different schools. These schools will be using Lina concurrently with the national DepEd modules and will be using its comprehensive content library, chat/discussion features, and quizzes as curricular supplements. The users will be in consistent contact with the Lina team to aid in developments and improvements in preparation for a larger release in 2023. 

Once Lina has passed its prototyping stage and enters its phase of growth, we will enter the second quarter of 2023 with 10,000 users. However, we will be expanding aggressively over this year and hope to finish the 2023 school year with 20,000 users across fifteen different schools who are able to use Lina as one of their main sources of communication and education. Furthermore, by this time, Lina's software will be able to cater to out-of-school youth who are not enrolled in any formal institution. We will hence pilot the app within a group of 500 unenrolled students and expand to a target of 2,000 independent learners by the end of the 2023 school year, at minimum.

1. Access, access, access!

We want to touch as many students as possible, especially those who have bore the brunt of the negative effects of the prolonged school closures. To do this, we will be reaching out to as many schools of different circumstances and backgrounds as possible to see how our app will hold up under varying conditions. We will also be gathering regular feedback and conducting regular checkups: suggestions for improvement are crucial for Lina's prototype year.

2. Enjoyment and empowerment in learning

There are many underrepresented groups in education, such as indigenous and very low-income individuals who may not necessarily feel confident or happy under distance-learning conditions. Lina wants learning to be as fun and as inclusive as possible: through our interactive and sometimes gamified interface, students are able to engage in enjoyable experiences that many have missed over the pandemic. Furthermore, through our original curriculum development, we are including supplemental units and concept integrations on sustainability and Filipino culture and heritage to empower our students, elements often lacking from the current national curriculum.

3. Building a community sentiment

Parents, students and teachers all shared the common sentiment of missing the community feeling that comes from a face-to-face school environment, with many students not being able to see their friends since March 2020. We plan on releasing consistent leaderboard challenges that connect schools from all over the nation to inspire a sense of togetherness within communities, no matter their geographic distance from one another.

While Lina is a data-driven software, I believe that education can never truly be measured through grades/academic success and requires human input and feedback. Thus, I decided to split progress measurement into multiple components: 

1. Download rates

Accessibility is one of our main priorities, and download rates will give us an exact number as to how many users we have been able to reach with our platform. 

2. Objective performance metrics gathered through assessments/problem sets through improvement, completion and success rates

Grade history and cloud-storage show a student's trajectory and growth will be used to analyse success and improvement rates. Scores on individual assignments can point to topics that students are either confident with or may need more work on.

3. Happiness and satisfaction ratings amongst randomly selected Lina users. 

Education must be as fun and as enjoyable as possible; our users' feedback and enjoyment is crucial to us. Thus, we will be sending out surveys both through and outside of the app to gain a representative sample of ratings regarding our app's effectiveness and utility.

4. Content upload rates

We want to keep expanding and making as much material available to our users. Because our team is behind the creation of these resources, it is key to measure the rate of content (lesson, quiz, problem set, question-bank) upload onto the app to see how much and how fast we have been able to make quality work available. 

1. Technological

Lina will face technological barriers, especially when we expand to very rural areas with little to no signal strength. Although light and low-bandwidth, the app still requires some semblance of connectivity to function, which would only work in urban and semi-rural regions of the Philippines. We will have to come up with innovative strategies to support these communities and find a way to share lessons and content without WiFi or data.

2.  Financial

Although Lina is lucky enough to benefit from sustained grants from local companies, developing and maintaining a high-quality app can get expensive. We are currently thinking of solutions/methods to ease these expenses while still being able to deliver as strong as a curriculum as possible. 

3. Legal

No members in our team are certified professional lawyers nor have any expertise in this field. Should conflict arise in the future, we will have to source counsel regarding technicalities and conditions in the law.

The Lina team is a diverse, 100% Philippine-based group of talented and high-level engineers, developers, designers, psychologists and teachers. Members of the team hail from incredibly different backgrounds with experience in each of their respective domains ranging from blockchain technology, financial technology solutions, research in developmental psychology/learning methods, and local and international teaching opportunities. 

Team lead Julia Ongking believes that at the core of education lies the development and synthesis of different perspectives to create as deep and comprehensive of a worldview as possible. As a student herself, she was very grateful for the opportunity to enlist the help of skilled professionals and share her then-basic ideas with a unique and stimulating team. The huge range of individuals on the team (whose ages range from 15 to 74) lead to the formation of a huge pool of ideas and outlooks on Lina's growth into a fully functional program. With everyone's distinctive skill-sets and ideologies coming together over a shared passion for educational equality and justice in the home nation of the Philippines comes fresh and innovative ideas, proposals and solutions to an incredibly complicated and deep-rooted societal problem; Julia's initial ideas and inspirations ended up ballooning into a real, powerful and applicable mobile-app solution that is now in the works to be distributed and marketed around the entire Philippine nation. 

The team's collective Filipino roots also arms them with a deep knowledge of the problem that is trying to be solved. All members of the team had themselves grown up within the Filipino school system, and hence bring their own experiences and insights to the table when deciding Lina's development path and expansion plans. 

• Lina works with Filipino non-profit Kahon ng Karunungan (KnK) for mentorship and advice regarding the formation of curriculum materials and the delivery of lessons. KnK partner schools are also working with Lina for app development and improvements.
• The Philippine Center for Gifted Education (PCGE) also provides mentorship and support regarding curriculum development, outreach opportunities and app setup. 
• Lina is also in contact with individuals from the Philippine Department of Education, who aid in app development and will later advise on the most sustainable and far-reaching business model to follow.

Although Lina does not directly advocate for sustainability, it has a great indirect effect on the creation and maintenance of sustainable systems and communities throughout the world. 

Lina's curriculum has integrated important concepts and sustainability lessons to educate children on these crucial topics that are often neglected in national curricula. Furthermore, by virtue of shifting the educational system onto a digital platform, the copious amounts of paper and other resources currently being used for the printing and distribution of modules will be drastically reduced.