Teach the World Foundation

The world is experiencing an educational crisis. According to UNESCO’s Education for All Monitoring Report, about 1 in 10 people in the world cannot read or write, adversely affecting achievement of the SDGs. The developing world is the worst hit, with millions of children out of school and millions more poorly educated. Traditional education models cannot solve this problem within an acceptable timeframe. By introducing a combination of eLearning, tablets, smartphones, and gamification, digital technology can be a game changer.

There is an imperative need for a rapidly scalable and easily deployable model of education that allows mass access to quality education, with built-in accountability to tackle the global educational crisis with the necessary urgency required. Our ELAN model is a simple and scalable “functional literacy” solution for students in kindergarten to grade 5 (K–5). It has been deployed with excellent results in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Malawi, in varied settings, from urban slums to refugee camps and remote Himalayan villages. 

The model delivers world-class reading, writing, and math applications in a gamified format, on low-cost tablets and smartphones, in a facilitated setting. ELAN students outperform students in traditional schools, achieving at least 1.5 times the learning gains, as measured by independent third parties across time, multiple geographies, and environments. 

As part of a “think big, start small” strategy, Pakistan is our starting point to establish these models. Ultimately, we plan to expand these models globally, to millions, in a disciplined, phased manner.

Our program has three deployment models:

1. Maximizing access through one-room micro-schools

Focus: Out-of-school children in marginalized communities without schools/teachers

Launched in communities with large out-of-school populations, this model provides an excellent alternative for children in urban slums, refugee camps, and internally displaced person (IDP) environments. We rent a room accommodating 25 children, equip it with 25 tablets, hire a teacher or facilitator who is trained in 5 days, and operate 3–5 shifts of 25 children daily. Mobile hotspots provide WiFi powered by solar. We can launch schools for 75–125 students in weeks for US$10,000–US$15,000, with annual costs of less than US$10,000. This model can be scaled very rapidly.

Community partnership and engagement is key, with communities providing space, teachers, and support. In Karachi, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)sponsorship funding just allowed us to launch 100 micro-schools. We are planning to expand to 1,000 CSR–sponsored micro-schools by 2025.

2. Enhancing quality in existing schools

Focus: In-school children suffering from poor quality of education

In Pakistan, 32 million in-school children underperform, with more than 40 percent of fifth-graders unable to operate at second-grade level (ASER Pakistan 2019). Our model is deployed in partnership with large local NGOs already operating schools, leveraging their staff, classrooms, schools, and utilities. Incremental costs are less than US$30 per student per year. Learning is delivered on tablets, using “best-in-class” English, math, and local language content. This model addresses the poor quality of teaching endemic to public schools in Pakistan.

3. Providing mass access on smartphones, for at-home schooling

Focus: Out-of-school children with no access to schools and in-school children needing quality enhancement

Our at-home model was driven by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. With more than 50 million children in Pakistan having lost access and tablets being cost prohibitive, ELAN needed alternatives. Despite some drawbacks, smartphones provided an answer, with their massive installed base of more than 23 million in Pakistan. We launched using our existing portfolio of educational games for both in-school and out-of-school variations through existing implementation partners.

The program is managed by facilitators working with children through their parents. We found parents—who are often illiterate—taking great interest in their children’s learning gamified learning apps. An unexpected but powerful ancillary benefit emerged here, turning this program into a potential family literacy program.

We are currently testing this model with more than 1,400 children in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Early results have been strong. Focus groups with parents show that the program has been very successful at engaging and motivating children to study despite school closures. Results from weekly quizzes confirm these results.

This model has proven to be ELAN’s fastest growing, with massive potential to scale. By 2025, smartphone penetration in the developing world is expected to reach 70 percent (World Economic Forum 2019). This is also our lowest-cost model, with cost per student at around US$20 per year. With family literacy added, it could be our highest return on investment play.

Our Theory of Change:

Exponentially improving digital technologies & gamified self-learning applications, deployed on user-friendly devices, show considerable learning gains in functional literacy and numeracy, alongside other benefits (digital literacy, self-learning attitudes) at the primary level, in contexts where there is a lack of teachers and poor infrastructure availability.

ELAN started as a proof-of-concept at a school in Karachi. Nielsen conducted an independent evaluation of our proof-of-concept in 2016. They ran a controlled study of 43 children, with 23 children in the intervention group and 20 in the control group. The results showed the intervention group outperforming the control group across by a factor of 2x or more.  Following successful outcomes, it was deployed in three countries and varied geographies and environments, such as refugee camps, urban slums, orphanages, and Himalayan villages, with similar results.

Our most recent evaluation in Pakistan, our key area of focus, shows the impact of ELAN on K–2 students in Lahore and Islamabad. Students were assessed digitally using SurveyCTO, an assessment tool designed using the Early-Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and Early-Grade Math Assessment (EGMA) frameworks developed by USAID. Tools were further modified and validated by the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP).The results, shown in the figure below, indicate that learning gains were 1.5 times greater among intervention group students than in the control group students.

Based on third party evaluation employing a quasi-experimental approach (QED), our deployment in Bangladesh and other countries have also shown average learning gains (English & Math) that are significantly better than control groups. The assessments were based on Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and Early Grade Math Assessment (EGMA) frameworks developed by the Research Triangle Institute (RTI).

In order to measure progress we shall use the following indicators:

1. Proportion of K-5 learners achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in (i) reading and (ii) mathematics, dis-aggregated by gender

This will be measured through rigorous impact assessments with data-points at baseline, midline and endline using the EGRA and EGMA tools developed by USAID and RTI. In addition to that, focus groups will also be conducted with parents as well as facilitators for qualitative feedback, anecdotal observations and insights from the ground

2. Student participation rate in self-directed learning, dis-aggregated by gender

This will be measured through in-app engagement data and dashboards which are provided by our content partners

3. Proportion of K-5 learners achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in 21st Century Digital Skills, dis-aggregated by gender

This will be measured through tests specifically designed to measure digital literacy and proficiency

4. Number of new deployments

5. Number of Learners

This will be documented through student enrollment records

Our objective is to provide functional literacy and 21st century digital skills amongst the most marginalized populations using digital technologies.

Research Premise and Questions

The e-learning content for our ELAN models primarily caters to the functional literacy of students. However, we do observe that our students’ confidence, motivation and eagerness to learn improves over the course of our deployments. While we have been able to formally measure students’ academic progress in terms of learning gains for all of our ELAN models, our measurement of improvement in students’ Social/Emotional Learning (SEL) indicators is limited to anecdotal evidence from the field.

Through this project we aim to formally pilot content catering directly to students’ social/emotional learning and come up with a research study to measure its impact in order to make our evaluation strategy more holistic. We will thus aim to answer the following research questions:

1. What kind of SEL content would best suit Teach the World’s ELAN model given its deployments across marginalized contexts in the developing world?

2. How can we best measure the impact of our model/content on students’ social/emotional learning?

Project Deliverables

Deployment of e-learning content:

1. Review of ELAN’s existing e-learning content to figure out which SEL competencies are being covered

2. An overview of existing SEL e-learning content deployed in similar contexts to select the best off-the-shelf SEL content for ELAN

3. Pilot-testing of selected SEL content in 2 ELAN deployments (this will be facilitated by Teach the World’s on-ground teams)

Impact Assessment Pilot

1. A Literature review of SEL evaluations in primary education (ideally Edtech) in developing world (South Asia in particular) to come up with SMART indicators for measuring SEL

2. Development of tools/Instruments to measure SEL

3. Field-testing of tools for reliability and validity and revisions to tools after feedback (this will be facilitated by Teach the World’s on-ground teams)

4. Finalizing tools for SEL to be used across TTW microschools

Project Scope of Impact

Project Objective

Through the ELAN model, Teach the World aims not only to make students functionally literate but to cater to their holistic social/emotional development. However, we have not been able to deploy content specifically catering  to SEL or formally measure the impact of our model on students’ SEL.

Therefore this project will help us fill gaps in our existing content as well as our evaluation model to make it more wholesome by supplementing analysis of academic learning gains with formal qualitative/quantitative findings pertaining to students’ confidence, motivation, eagerness to learn, social awareness and any other relevant SEL indicators. 

This project will be a huge step towards expanding our approach to research and evaluation and will help us come up with actionable evidence from the community as to how we can further improve not just our impact assessment strategy but our model itself through effective incorporation of SEL. The tools developed through this project shall be replicated for use across the TTW model and the findings shall be used as actionable evidence for model and process improvement throughout all of Teach the World’s ELAN deployments in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malawi 

Project Limitations 

This study will be limited to 2 ELAN deployments. However, we aim to use the selected SEL content and assessment tools developed further across all of our deployments. For this purpose, it will be essential that the content and assessment tools developed are deployable and replicable across marginalized contexts.