Enlightapp

The U.S. is home to an increasing number of racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. Public schools in the U.S. will see 33 percent more Latino students by the 2022-2023 school year, 44 percent more multiracial students, and 2 percent more African-American students. Diversity in today's classrooms provides many opportunities for positive growth, including social awareness and cultural understanding. However, children of color tend to face many more challenges. There is a lack of diversity among teachers and school leaders,  according to the USDOE Equity and Excellence Commission (2013). More than 79% percent of all full-time public school teachers were white in 2018, 7 percent were Black, 9 percent were Hispanic, and less than 2 percent were Asian or Pacific Islanders (NCES). The diverse nature of school populations in current education requires teaching that not only considers the differences in their students, but how their practices have an impact on a student’s ability to learn content. Even though student populations are becoming more diverse, the teaching force is not adapting to meet the needs of the ever-growing diverse population of students. We must bridge this empathy gap, to close the equity gap and unlock the full potential of future generations.

As the year progresses, schools are increasingly expected to ensure that classrooms function as equitable learning environments which foster trusting and caring relationships between teachers and students. Additionally, differentiating the curriculum and connect learning opportunities to student interests and identities are essential aspects of instructional preparation and implementation required for all students to have access to deeper learning. Schools lack a systematic way to support the ability of their teachers to uncover potential new pathways to their students' intrinsic motivations throughout the year, enabling them to offer personalized learning opportunities at scale.

Managing relationships between teachers and students can be difficult, especially when teachers are busy teaching classes all day and grading homework all night. Learning about each student takes time, especially for teachers with students from diverse backgrounds. As a result, some students are noticed immediately, others just on the surface, and many others go unnoticed, limiting their ability to showcase their personalities, talents, creativity, and potential beyond standardized test measures. 

Even when we share similar experiences, we are all still wired differently. While some of this is nature and some of it is nurture, the conclusion is the same: Our learning can't be maximized through a standardized set of shared experiences. Teachers need tools to help them present lessons in a way that taps into the intrinsic motivations of each of their students. It is essential that students see themselves reflected in the material they are learning in order to relate to it.

Enlightapp seeks to revolutionize the climate of the American classroom, putting teachers and students in holistic spaces where students can gain self-reliance and confidence as the teachers they work with everyday gain more genuine insight into every student’s identity, desires, dreams, and fears. This new way of connecting creates far more productive learning environments that enable teachers to achieve the impact they crave by uncovering the interests and intrinsic motivations of each of their students. This knowledge can be directly applied to help teachers connect with their students for purposes of improving relationships, information flow, and personalized learning. Students also gain SEL skills, confidence, and participate in an environment that fosters community, culture, and identity. Enlightapp is the platform that teachers across the country have been asking for, as demonstrated by the ever-growing waiting list of individual teachers, school districts, and other educational programs. 

A noteworthy customer, Ember charter school, is one of the top social impact school districts in New York. As a minority-focused school, they plan to use Enlightapp to continue supporting their mission of igniting, empowering and transforming people traditionally labeled “at-risk” into social entrepreneurs, engineers, and global leaders.

"If schools are to be places that disrupt racism and support diversity and inclusion, they must be spaces where students feel seen, authentically. Enlightapp empowers teachers to create such classrooms by closing the gap between who educators think students are and who they know themselves to be." - Rafiq Kalam Id-Din, Founder of Ember Charter Schools. 

Using Enlightapp to get to know the students then comparing surveys from before and after, we discovered that 70% of them felt heard and seen. The Headstream accelerator helped us to create metrics that will allow schools to track the success of their efforts to promote prosocial norms, prosocial opportunities, emotional competence, social competence, bonding, self-determination, emotional competence, resilience, identity development, spirituality, and behavioral competence. Beta testing revealed that educators were very interested in learning more about their students based on four main categories:

• Students' well being and belonging.

• Teacher's ability to teach material and students' understanding of it.

• Students' hobbies, interests, and aspirations for the future. 

• Student preferences in terms of activities and experiences that the teacher can use to offer personalized learning at scale. 

With $125 Billion in the American rescue package, $5 Billion has been specifically designated to address "learning loss" or disengaged students in public schools. School districts, private and charter schools are looking for new ways to educate and evaluate students. These schools usually have a lot of focus on social-emotional learning, personalization, and inclusivity. Their main focus is the student and their experience in the classroom. These schools, like Montessori schools, look to create a brand that attracts students who are prone to have a different type of educational journey rather than the traditional one.

We have focused our initial efforts on charter schools since they have greater budgets for adoption, which is where we’ve had the most success. We are beginning with a freemium model to achieve deep market penetration. As more teachers adopt within a school, we will expand to enterprise solutions for schools and districts. We know how hard it is to gain adoption at the district level or even at the school level. So, we are building influence, through teachers and then moving up. And that has been the case for us. While our initial Alpha testing required teachers to pay out of pocket, the Beta, which was fully funded by Headstream and Teach for America, has provided the insights needed to fine-tune our product to prepare to launch into the nation’s largest school districts. 

To date, Enlight has added more than 500 teachers from all over the world to their waitlist, including three U.S. schools and five U.S. school districts across Minnesota, North Dakota, New York, Colorado, and Texas. Teachers who are adding their names to our waitlist cite having access to all the actionable information they need in one place to build inclusive learning environments and promote a growth mindset in themselves and their students as key reasons for signing up. These educators are mainly young, passionate about social justice, equity and creating impactful student engagement. They describe themselves as empaths, tech-savvy, and are usually very active on Twitter chat groups, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook Groups. 

24 year-old Enlightapp founder, Dieumerci Christel, was born in a refugee camp in Tanzania and was disappointed by his initial experience with American schools when he emigrated at the age of 13. Rather than focusing on rudimentary school work, Dieumerci began a lifelong trajectory of self-instruction, leading to the creation and mission of Enlight, while still in College. Dieumerci and Enlight were quickly accepted into numerous accelerator programs such as Techstars, Headstream, and Future Founders. Dieumerci participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield as one of the top startups coming out of the U.S. market to disrupt education. 

Chinwe' is a Software Engineer with a background in international business and customer service. After graduating from the University of North Texas and spending seven years in the restaurant and hospitality industry, Chinwe' found an unconventional way to combine her passions for creativity, hospitality, and education, leading her to pursue a career in edTech. Today, she carries her educational experiences with her, along with the legacy of her family, and the mission to empower young people in classrooms all over the country, so that no student feels left out, or left behind. No matter their circumstances. She hopes to offer a fresh technical perspective to Enlightapp’s mission to dynamically impact the education system, and is very excited to be a part of the team.

We plan to acquire top talent in the Education Space to spearhead our efforts to make individual empowerment a reality for every student. We have identified two critical positions and skills that we need to add to our team. 

Role: Business Development Executive

Our business development executive will be responsible for partnering with internal and external stakeholders to develop focused go to market campaigns that create customer awareness, open new sales opportunities and increase brand loyalty. Their role will include coordinating B2B marketing efforts with both pre-sales and post-sales follow-up to ensure customer satisfaction, service and support. They will be able to prospect for new business, negotiate contracts and maintain a customer-centric approach. Other responsibilities include acquiring new customers while demonstrating our products' value to key decision makers. 

Skills & Experience

• Experience in taking a new product to the marketing

• A minimum of 3 years' experience in Business Development (B2B) or Sales/Key Account Management, preferably in the EdTech sector.

• Expertise in handling key accounts.

• Expertise in strategic sales and the ability to prospect and manage relationships at the senior level.

• Experience in negotiation, networking and relationship building.

Role: Community Engagement & Teacher support

Our Community Engagement Manager will be responsible for converting the growing number of schools and teachers on our waitlist into raving fans and successful users once we launch. The role will involve training admins and teachers on the best ways to use Enlightapp, creating engaging emails, videos, and articles to share with current and prospective customers, and participating in all phases of the customer journey.

Skills & Experience

• 4+ years of experience in teaching

• Experience in scheduling and running demos with potential prospects.

• Experience in growth marketing and content creation capturing innovative uses of Enlightapp and promoting them digitally (blog, newsletter, social media)

• The ability to moderate communities.

• Expertise in delivering and reviewing analytical reports and summaries to strategic accounts.

• Expertise as a support specialist responding to technical questions with ideas and solutions. In addition, maintain our extensive knowledge base as our platform rapidly evolves.

• Experience in recruiting and executing strategies that generate referrals from happy clients.

We are in the business of human connection by becoming a catalyst and a relationship accelerator platform. With every student profile built on our platform, multiple access-points are created from students and shared to the teachers on our platform in order to enhance their experience. We are a living CRM that turns qualitative data into easily [quantifiable measurements], because quantitative data is not enough to build meaningful relationships.

Our platform enhances people’s experience through relationship building, inclusion, and user feedback. Which fits in perfectly with the new normal of teachers being forced to provide the best learning experiences for their students from a distance. 

Our primary goal this year is to work with 20 schools and impact over 5,000 students. We plan to achieve this goal by utilizing our growing waitlist of more than 500 teachers from all over the country, including three U.S. schools and five U.S. school districts across Minnesota, North Dakota, New York, Colorado, and Texas.

We are dedicated to ensuring that we are diligent in measuring our impact and success. To do so, we have defined specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to both track and measure student / teacher engagement, which can then be evaluated against classroom performance.  Improved student / teacher engagement will provide better insight and establish stronger relationships that facilitate deeper learning experiences.

Here are the metrics that we track to ensure that our product is delivering the value that we promise. 

Teacher Engagement

Student Engagement

Teacher / Student Engagement vs. Classroom Performance

Enlightapp collects and analyses student data to deliver current and relevant data on the students in their fluidly changing classrooms with the goal of increasing student engagement, teacher performance and a sense of inclusivity and community in the classroom.

We have built a web app on the 8Base platform. Our web app can be accessed both the web and on the phone. 

If schools are to be places that disrupt racism and support diversity and inclusion, they must be spaces where students feel seen, authentically. Enlightapp empowers teachers to create such classrooms by closing the gap between who educators think students are and who they know themselves to be.

At Enlightapp, we know the classroom is supposed to be a place where students are meant to feel included, inspired and supported. But we also know that for many students, it’s not always like that.

Our focus is to highlight diversity and inclusion in the classroom, therefore leading the path to equity in education as a whole. We believe there’s a different side of our students waiting to be uncovered that can’t be measured by standardized tests—and we believe that to effectively address the opportunity gaps especially amongst students of color, educators need clear visibility into who their students are, where they come from, and what dreams, ideas and experiences they bring into the classroom.

We are making it possible for teachers to see every student as an individual with unique strengths, life experiences, dreams, and ideas—not just one piece in a giant puzzle of uniformity. In classrooms full of diverse learners with varying backgrounds, everyday seems like there is something new for everyone to learn about themselves and their peers. We want educators to be able to encourage those conversations and help facilitate this kind of understanding amongst students so that they can feel more comfortable sharing who they are with others in the classroom.

Through clear visibility into each student's background, experiences and interests, we're helping teachers truly get to know their students on a deeper level than ever before—and giving them the tools they need to create safe spaces for learning within their own classrooms.

Public education is a $786 billion industry. Pre-COVID, E-learning was a $240 billion industry with 8.8% growth. “The influx of federal stimulus money and venture capital will further fuel ongoing efforts to transform education with a pedagogical bent towards passion-driven learning and creative expression.” (Reach Capital). There is a push for schools to engage students in a more meaningful manner - not just through academics, but also with SEL, culture, climate, and identity. Enlight is the only platform to address these issues directly through teacher-student relationships. In addition, we are seeing a surge in demand as the year continues due to our website conversion rates going up by 200%, primarily with middle school charter school principals and instructional coaches. Moreover, 90% of our current waitlisted customers found us through their colleagues, proving that virality is a strong factor in promoting our product. 

At the beginning of our beta testing, schools and teachers paid $50 per teacher to use the platform. Over the first three months that we tested our concept, we quickly earned over $1,200 through local school districts and teachers that paid out of pocket. During the fall, Headstream and Teach for America fully funded the Beta version of our product so that we could continue to refine and test it. We learned during our research that the platform's procedures for collecting, storing, compiling, and distributing data needs to be improved. Unfortunately, Chinwé cannot fix everything that is going on with the product alone, fast enough. We need to hire another developer to reach our deadlines on time and keep up with product demand. By the spring of 2022, we can project having over 20,000 students connected to our platform if we onboard the schools on our waitlist. The Camelback Accelerator will be an opportunity for us to refine our pricing strategy and financial models, learn how to build an efficient distribution model between schools, as well as hire an additional developer to increase our development capacity.