CholPori

While there is near-universal access to free primary education, quality remains a problem. Households in Bangladesh have some of the highest expenditures in the region on education because private tuition is so prevalent. Without extra support, students are unable to keep up. Even with support, educational outcomes for students are low with more than 55% of class 4 students not reading at grade level and 75% not having grade-level numeracy skills. Bangladesh has one of the largest primary school systems in the world with over 18 million students but quality learning is not happening. Reliance on rote teaching, high student-to-teacher ratio, and lack of differentiated teaching are some of the reasons that the primary school system in Bangladesh fails its students. Covid-19 school closures from March 2020-September 2021 and the lack of access to governmental hybrid learning interventions further exacerbated the problem by widening the learning gap.

Even though there is still little data detailing the effect of Covid-19 on primary school students, it is expected to be very long-lasting. During one of our usability tests with class 4 and 5 students in Dhaka, we noted the learning gap. Class 4 students, who had missed the majority of their class 3 and 4 education, were seriously behind academically while their class 5 schoolmates, who still had some foundational knowledge prior to school closures, were managing better in English and math.

Child-friendly, digital Bangla learning resources are limited and hard to find. This is the problem that we are trying to impact through CholPori. While English learning materials are in surplus off- and online, there is little for students of Bangla-medium government schools to pick from.

On January 1st every year, 102 million textbooks are distributed across the country to students of government schools. While annual textbook distribution is a tremendous logistical success, it can only be undertaken once a year. Textbooks are designed, edited, and distributed by a National Curriculum Textbook Board, a separate entity from the Ministry of Primary Education. Revision happens only once every 4-5 years. As a result, a student often goes through primary school with the same edition of old books that are outdated and very gender-biased. 

There are countless examples of gender bias and many knowledge gaps. For example, the English curriculum in the primary Bangla-medium schools does not teach students about nouns at any point. The structure of the textbooks is hard to navigate for a student independently without additional instruction. Girls and women are always depicted stereotypically in the textbooks such as housewives which further feeds into existing gender bias. We believe that the lack of quality learning and reading materials is one of the main factors contributing to low performance and high drop-out rates at the primary level.

CholPori supports literacy and numeracy development in primary school students of government schools in Bangladesh through engaging, age-appropriate learning materials. Cholpori is aligned to the National Curriculum and enriched with social-emotional learning. The curriculum is delivered online through a browser application using animation, multimedia lessons, and leveled bilingual books in Bangla and English. We use storytelling to build strong emotional connections to the domains and skills in the process of learning. 

CholPori delivers the original interactive learning materials through a digital platform with friendly UI and easy navigation. The content is accessed through personal student and guardian profiles and the platform stores student user progress. 

The Beta version of the platform, released in March 2022 contains upper primary classes 4 and 5 materials. We have developed:

Leveled Books for Literacy & Emotional Development

Gender-Sensitive Textbook Learning Tools for English and math aligned to NCTB textbooks 

Educational Multimedia Content Video and audio content to help children with different learning styles assimilate and retain lessons, furthering their academic excellence. 

Personalised Dashboards and Rewards to Drive Curiosity through positive affirmation strategies. 

We have developed a teaching methodology based on multiple-intelligence theory and incorporating the principles of social-emotional learning. We apply the method to the curriculum to elevate it. We use animation, audio, visualizations, and rich text to create engaging and effective learning experiences and materials. 

CholPori lessons are broken down into digestible parts, allowing a student or teacher to go through the material at their own pace. Each lesson contains multiple-choice questions and by answering these questions, students are rewarded through a star system. 

CholPori Bangla and English illustrated books are leveled - to stage reading development. They are written for children who are learning to read and reading to learn. Books build vocabulary and cover a wide range of topics and relevant issues. We have integrated a read-aloud highlight feature in the books to develop reading capacity. 

In addition, in 2022 we are developing a CholPori Educator Beta version which allows teachers with a verified institutional ID to register for free and use the materials in their classroom. Furthermore, in 2023 we will allow educators to create their own lessons using our rich asset library and templates. This will empower teachers to create their own digital learning materials and improve classroom engagement.

Our target population for the Beta release is class 4 and 5 students of Bangla medium schools from households with a median monthly salary of 600USD in urban and peri-urban areas in Dhaka Division. Long term, our solution will serve the whole primary school system, but we are at present focused on students of upper primary. The primary school student body is 18 million students, 5 million of which are enrolled in Bangla-medium government schools. We will aim to reach 0.5% of this student population by the end of 2022, through direct sales and several early-adopter pilot schools.

Upper primary students vary in age because of grade repetition, on average they are 8 - 14 years old. The main language of instruction in school is Bangla and the majority of teachers rely on the principle of rote learning - memorization, not understanding. Only 9% of students have more than 3 books at home and rely on textbooks and tutors for their instruction and sources of information. 

CholPori delivers quality materials directly to children. We use multiple mediums to engage students including animation, audio, math visualizations, and illustrations. Moreover, we use storytelling and CholPori characters to build new knowledge and important emotional connections to the learning. 

CholPori content also serves to nurture a sense of unique cultural identity. Due to a lack of local content, students often look to foreign media. Indian cartoons are very popular in Bangladesh, as they are more relatable than Disney and have higher production quality than the local shows. One of the only localized shows, Sisimpur, a USAID-sponsored local version of Sesame Street, is popular. It is in its 12th season and broadcasted on national television - this demonstrates the demand for local edutainment content.  

Moreover, CholPori offers students the individualized attention and motivation that students need to succeed. A significant body of research links the use of educational technology to improved student outcomes around the world. These outcomes are not always strictly academic achievement but also affect socio-emotional factors. Cholpori’s content is embedded with socio-emotional learning and helps students develop a growth mindset. We are very sensitive to our target population’s needs and continuously update CholPori through usability testing, research, and engagement activities with our target audience. 

CholPori's team has extensive experience in creating educational content for children. We have been creating print media through our children’s books as well as animated educational content teaching subjects like civics and Bangladeshi history. We have integrated ourselves with the communities that we serve and the idea of CholPori was born as the result of the needs of our target learners. 

Our team consists of teachers and researchers who worked in public schools that serve our target audience in Bangladesh. CholPori came into existence in 2020 as a sister project of HerStory Foundation, which creates learning materials and books that celebrate female ingenuity. In 2018, with the support of the Edward Kennedy Center for Public Service and the Arts, HerStory developed a teaching tool to complement the first volume of the children’s book HerStories. This modular Teacher’s Guide was designed to be used in over-crowded, under-staffed classrooms (the reality of the majority of Bangladesh’s public schools). 

The HerStory Reading Fellowship was launched in partnership with the Women and Gender Studies Department of Dhaka University and International University of Bangladesh. The one-year program trained fellows to read HerStories to students of classes 5 and 6 and use the Teacher Guide to moderate discussions about gender and power. The fellows made regular school visits for Incredible Read-Alouds to teach students. 

Through our fellows, we began to notice many issues faced by teachers and students. A particular need was reading fluency and English language skills. When in-person schooling was shut down in March 2020, HerStory Foundation pivoted and began working on a technology-based solution, for primary students. These long periods of school closures made the need for a solution like CholPori even more necessary. 

Our team at CholPori is made up of educators who intimately know the public classroom and are in constant dialogue with teachers, students, and parents from our target population. Our research team conducts continuous and frequent feedback and UX usability testing sessions. Our research advisors are both local and international and have worked extensively in the area of education technology and ensure that CholPori remains relevant and driven by data.

MIT Solve is a unique platform that brings together innovative thinkers and problem solvers. We want to apply in order to benefit from a network of impact-minded leaders who are serving their various communities through creative solutions. We would gain from their experience, expertise and support while providing them with ours. In addition, we would greatly benefit from the Solve’s support in terms of strategy and research as we would like to create a robust and iterative research cycle to monitor and evaluate CholPori in order to ensure the maximum amount of impact to Bangladeshi learners. Moreover, the mentorship and coaching from experts as well as access to MIT’s resources would be extremely beneficial for us at CholPori to create a solution where students who learn through our application receive the best education. 

CholPori is the first EdTech platform in Bangladesh that is specifically catered to increasing literacy and reading fluency for primary students. The lessons are designed for students with different sorts of intelligence using diversified media like animation, podcasts, GIFs, etc. to ensure learning with joy. We have created original leveled reading materials, lessons, and practice sets that complement the national curriculum to provide better resources for students. 

In addition, CholPori is infused with socio-emotional attributes in order to instill emotional regulation and good learning habits. While most of the platforms in Bangladesh cater solely to academic achievement, we have gone beyond teaching to the test and created a platform that targets the holistic growth of primary students through the growth of contextualized characters. Through this venture, we hope to highlight the need for a holistic approach to teaching primary students, especially post-pandemic and change the way education is delivered in the country. 

CholPori’s main impact goals for the next year and the next five years for primary students are to increase:

• Literacy and reading fluency in English and Bangla as per grade level

• Numeracy skills in mathematics as per grade level

• Self-motivation for learning

• Engagement with different learning materials (books, audio, stories)

• Self-regulation of student learning

• Less biased conception of gender roles 

In addition, our immediate goal is to provide a platform where students can learn at their own pace and receive remedial learning to recover the gap in learning that was further exacerbated by school closures during the pandemic. Overall, we want to reduce dependency on private tutoring as CholPori acts as a digital tutor. We want to promote learning using technology in addition to regular classroom learning (ex face-to-face classes) so that students can reinforce their education, anywhere and at any time. 

Apart from students, our goal is to increase parental involvement in their children’s learning. We also want to provide tools for teachers to incorporate CholPori’s resources such as animations, practice assessments, and socioemotional tools in their regular lessons. Within the next year, we will provide teachers with a lesson builder so that they can do so with ease. Within the next five years, we expect that CholPori will be used in the majority of primary schools based on the national curriculum and primary school students within Bangladesh. We envision that through using CholPori and its components, students will receive more quality learning experiences which can lead to lower dropout rates in primary schools. 

We want our platform to achieve the impact goals to improve the educational quality and gender representation in Bangladeshi primary schools and have already started to put measures in place to achieve them. Firstly, we conduct regular content and usability testing and have various feedback channels with students, parents, and teachers to track our progress. We also conduct regular focus group discussions and user testing to track our progress which will be kept in place going forward as well.  In May 2022, we are launching our first longitudinal pilot research project which will be a randomized controlled trial to assess the impact of CholPori.

We have a Research and Innovation team that is advised by academics from Bangladesh and international countries such as Turkey and the UK. Additionally, we have a Ph.D. student whose research as well as dissertation is based on the effectiveness of CholPori in Bangladeshi primary schools which will additionally inform the progress of our goals. This team member will be tracking CholPori’s impact goals for the next four years using resources from Trinity College Dublin (her home university) as well as through partnerships with local universities such as the Institute of Educational Research at Dhaka University.

CholPori’s mission is aligned with SDG 4 Quality Education and SDG 5 Gender Equality. We want to increase and measure cognitive outcomes such as student achievement in literacy, fluency and numeracy. We also want to increase and measure affective outcomes through recognized measurement scales such as motivation scale and engagement scale. 

Within the next five years CholPori will:

Increase literacy and reading fluency in English and Bangla in primary school students using CholPori by 25% so that more students are reading and understanding language as per grade level as well as retaining this knowledge. 

Increase numeracy skills in mathematics by 25% so that more students have mathematical skills as per grade level as well as retain this knowledge.

Increase student motivation by 75% as measured against the baseline in English, Bangla, and Mathematics. 

Increase student engagement with different learning materials by 75% as measured against the baseline in English, Bangla and Mathematics. 

Moreover, our internal analytics will also inform us about the progress of our goals as we are able to track student, teacher, and parental participation. Through internal analytics, we can measure:

• Student self-regulation (the number of attempts that students make with lessons that are harder for them) by 25% within the next five years. 

• Increase parental involvement (use of reporting tools within CholPori to inform parents of their child’s progress and challenges) by 25% within the next five years.

• Teacher integration (using the lesson builder and incorporating CholPori lessons in their teaching) in CholPori by 25% within the next five years. 

While we have put in place measures to track our progress towards our impact goals, we will also welcome feedback and suggestions from the MIT Solve Team to ensure maximum transparency and success. 

 

Cholpori’s mission is to create engaged, self-motivated primary school students who are equipped with critical thinking, socio-emotional and problem-solving skills. Our main outcome for our Theory of Change is for all children in national curriculum schools who are in classes K-5 to be fully engaged in high-quality education and socio-emotional learning enhanced by technology. We seek to achieve this goal through improved learning materials and experiences that positively affect academic performance and social-emotional development. 

We have defined our key stakeholders as students, parents, teachers, school administration, and government agencies. Through activities such as spending time on CholPoru, using its lessons, and completing the practice tests, we hope to achieve the short-term outcomes of engaging students through multimedia lessons, practice assessments, and leveled storybooks that will result in mid-term outcomes such as increasing student academic performance, parental and teacher engagement (through joint activities) and their socio-emotional development. Through continual usage and feedback loops, we hope that CholPori will improve students’ midterm outcomes so that they are more motivated to learn and read. 

These short-term and mid-term outcomes will lead to fulfilling our overall outcome of all children in national curriculum schools who are in class K-5 to be fully engaged in high-quality education and socio-emotional learning enhanced by technology.

We acknowledge that we are assuming students to have access to devices and the internet as well as parental willingness to be involved but believe that there is higher access to devices now and parents are a lot more engaged in student learning due to the pandemic than they were before. 

Our solution is a digital learning platform that relies on a Cross-Platform Web and Mobile Application.

We use a PostgreSQL database. Our server-side code is built with ASP.NET core, and our client-side code uses the Typescript framework Angular. Our website is deployed through Azure web services.

Our content is available in both English and Bangla, and the content localization has been developed with scalability in mind, to be able to seamlessly expand to other localities as required.

We have employed two-layered caching for enhanced speed and lower data consumption. We constantly keep our code updated to stay on top of the very latest releases for our software stack, especially the security updates considering our underaged user base. 

CholPori is strongly committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The very makeup of the leadership, as well as the team, reflects that. We are a majority women-led organization and represent all sectors of Bangladeshi society and ethnicities. Our staff is made up of 30 people, of which 17 are female. We work with children on fair terms - we have 2 child voice actors, a Youth Editor for the books, and an under-18 software developer. 

We are also very inclusive in our application, ensuring that our content is gender-balanced and ethnically inclusive. Most of the content in Bangladeshi textbooks is very biased against women and all of our content is designed to be gender-inclusive and empowering for females. Bangladesh is also made up of many ethnic groups who are underrepresented, if at all, in the curriculum. Our content reflects the diversity of the Bangladeshi demographic and is designed to teach students about the rich ethnic makeup of the country. 

Our product, CholPori, serves students by providing them with age-appropriate learning materials aligned with their classwork. We are starting with a direct-to-consumer business model - while registration is free and there is a number of materials available to all users, full access is bought on a monthly or annual basis.   

Our value proposition is delivering high-quality gamified digital content tied to the Bangladeshi national curriculum for K-5 students in Bangladesh. Our main model is B2C. The decision-maker in our model is the guardian, they make the purchase based on a recommendation of an educator or a need to improve a child’s academic performance. To encourage the purchase we allow a guardian to follow the student’s progress and development. We send updates and notifications, and continuously work to improve the features. Our pricing is 600 taka per month ($6.96) or 4800 taka per year ($55.69) for access to CholPori’s content which is significantly less amount than what households spend on private tutoring. Thus, our revenue stream comes from subscription fees at the moment. 

We are looking for funding from international organizations that support primary learning programs. We are also looking to form key partnerships with the Ministry of Primary Education, fintech, and telco to boost distribution and facilitate accessibility. 

Our main activities are content creation and distribution. Our key resources are our team - we combine the talents of animators, educators, engineers, and designers to produce quality materials for different learning styles. We produce everything in-house, we have a small recording studio for voice-overs and radio sessions with children. We use as much open-source software as possible, but a big portion of our costs is subscriptions and third-party technologies such as Adobe, Miro, and Asana. 

We have a small customer relationship team and multiple opportunities for feedback on the site. We are set to offer 1:1 customer support during the Beta phase. We have a teacher relationship manager to establish and maintain contact with academic institutions and administrators. We want to establish channels such as school partnerships to build awareness and trust, social media advertising, optimizing SEO engines, and conducting webinars. 

In 2023, we will diversify our model by offering the product to schools. We also plan to offer content builders equipped with asset libraries as a service to educational institutions to create custom learning materials. School sales will be annual and we are working towards a central distribution system through the Ministry of Primary Education. 

In its Beta iteration, CholPori has a subscription fee for service, which can be paid monthly or annually. The cost is significantly lower than what an average household spends on private tutoring. We wish to deliver high-end materials to low-income classrooms and households at a minimal cost. 

We estimate that we will not break even in the first year in the market, but see the growth spurt in the second year as we plan to distribute widely through schools. A partnership with the government is key to distribution for us. This is something we are working towards as well as developing partnerships with a Telco and Finco to boost accessibility. We aim to cover expenditure in the third year of operations.

Our expenditure is on people and hardware. We are a compact team for the type of product we aim to build, and many of us wear more than one hat. In raising capital we want to expand our education and tech teams and fund the marketing efforts. 

Up until now, we have been bootstrapped. We aim to sell subscriptions to individual students and work with schools to develop a classroom model. Sales will begin in late April 2022, at which point we will be measuring conversion and retention rates. At present we are applying for grants and incubators for the first time, we hope to see results soon. We were selected for the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service Capstone 2021 project and the Standford Seed Spark 2022 course.