Shule Technologies Limited

The Lesson is a cloud-based academic portal incorporating all the Ugandan national curriculum subjects for primary and secondary education in video format to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all Ugandans.

Problem: In Uganda, there are inadequate learning resources for homeschooling and the cost of attaining education is not affordable by the majority. The only revision resource is the school Library which is not well equipped, a student is only entitled to one book at a time, yet our education is now student-centered. This makes it difficult for learners to revise and perform better. Students miss classes as a result of a lack of fees and hygiene during girls' menstrual periods and those that get pregnant while in school, they can not consult teachers because the student numbers an overwhelming at a ratio of 1:150 instead of 1:40 in most Ugandan schools. This makes children between 12 and 20 years to eventually drop out of school leading to generational poverty and over-dependency in the country.

For the children between 5 and 12 years (primary level), we have already recorded 90% of the lessons that they are supposed to learn, meaning those already have home learning resources in case they fail to attend classes.

Solution: We have partnered with qualified teachers from different Ugandan schools to disseminate their knowledge through recorded video lessons. The teachers make lesson plans with guidance from the national curriculum of primary and secondary education, we record these teachers as they teach in chronological order, and then we upload and organize these recorded lessons on our cloud portal where learners can access them at their convenience.

WIth The lesson, children will have access to affordable education.

The most affected communities are the children in Semi-urban and rural areas. In October 2019 we were researching how we can support the students to learn from home especially during the holidays because these students would pay someone to coach them. Because they are from different schools, there would be inconsistencies in lessons.  We unveiled the Idea to students that would gather for holiday coaching and they encouraged us to start, it would help the generations to come. It would be a repository of knowledge from ancient experienced teachers.  These students advised that we should record these lessons according to how the curriculum is organized so that one can follow along with the teacher in case they did not understand in class.

We look out for qualified teachers that teach different subjects, we then set up a timetable for when they are going to be teaching, they are advised to follow the same design as the national curriculum, they design lesson plans and start to teach as we record those lessons one at a time, our editing teach cleans the videos and we publish them on our online portal, The Lesson. We incage parents to subscribe for their children at only UGX 1,000 daily through social media and word of mouth. Parents subscribe and their children start to learn more and interact with the teachers. 

Students normally do not perform better in science subjects and that is where we would like to put a lot of emphasis so that in the long run more Ugandan students perform better in sciences. This will make them take on profitable courses at the university level so that they can because more productive to the nation, and this will reduce the Unemployment and lead to a general growth of our economy.

We have a stable platform where we publish all the learning content that we create. https://lesson.co.ug/

Our main objective is to improve the academic performance of students and reduce dropouts. The first students that have been using our platform are sitting for their final exam at the end of 2022, however, we also track impact from the feedback that parents and students give us, and the continuous daily subscriptions that they pay.

The Lesson is a cloud-based academic portal incorporating all the Ugandan national curriculum subjects for primary and secondary education in video format to improve the quality and delivery of general education to students. We ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all Ugandans.

We would like to create more learning content for the secondary level, and we need money to facilitate the teachers and the quality assurance team, we also need better equipment like video cameras and accessories. We need to advertise and do outreach to the students that have failed to return to school so that they can keep learning from home. 

LEAP fellows should guide us on how we can deliver this content to rural areas where they do not have consistent electricity.