MIT Solve

Solution Overview & Team Lead Details

Solution name.

EduBeyond, edtech for underprivileged youth

Provide a one-line summary of your solution.

EduBeyond will increase education effectiveness in underdeveloped regions by providing a gamified adaptive-learning interface as a digital complement to their educational infrastructure.

What specific problem are you trying to solve?

EduBeyond is solving the issue of educational disparity on a global level. Given recent efforts in increasing the accessibility of education, the percentage of world adolescents out of school has decreased to 17%. However, education disparity remains a prominent issue even for those with access to basic education.

In Indonesia, where we have been operating for the past year, the public education infrastructure has been one that is "enforced" but not necessarily effective. This is evident in only 16% of young Indonesian adults being able to transition into tertiary education despite a 98% and 79% enrollment rate at the primary and junior secondary levels, respectively.

With adolescents making up around 28% of Indonesia's population, it is essential to evaluate the topic of education beyond the accessibility baseline. This is shown by the stagnant tertiary education rate lagging behind the increasing enrollment rate. As public funding for education increases, adequate infrastructure is essential to ensure a significant impact on welfare.

Education effectiveness/quality, or lack thereof, can be attributed to factors such as lack of proper learning materials, low-quality teacher training, and inequitable resources due to varying income classes. These factors, and many more, have been exacerbated by the recent pandemic, which was the catalyst for an abrupt change in educational content delivery.

To put the pandemic's disruption of learning into perspective, a study by Mckinsey showed that the graduating class of 2021 lost, on average, five months of teaching materials, with an accumulated total of 2 trillion teaching hours lost worldwide. Even during digital instructional hours, "stunted behavioural and socioemotional development" and "chronic absenteeism from students" are common problems in many education systems.

These statistics indicate that while there are sufficient digital infrastructures for classes to be conducted during the pandemic, the lack of personalization and engagement factors has created adverse consequences for the effectiveness and efficiency of content delivery.

Equitable, quality education allows for an increased high-skill workforce, a significant increase in lifetime earnings, and added bridges for globalization. As Indonesia has the fourth largest education system in the world, an effective intervention tool would result in a larger talent influx to advance the world economy and innovative solutions for global crises.

With regional governments increasing their educational spending on physical infrastructures, the advancement of technology and curriculums must catch up to create quantifiable improvements in welfare. Given the estimated 1.5 billion primary and secondary learners worldwide, effective digital interventions must be implemented systematically to prevent a loss of potentially $10 trillion in lifetime earnings.

Elevator pitch

What is your solution?

Education interventions must contribute to a quantifiable increase in learning metrics (standardized testing, graduation, tuition costs, etc.) while being flexible enough to be integrated into the hybrid learning model of today.

Thus we have developed a gamified adaptive-learning interface that can be incorporated with any curriculum at any grade level between K and 12. With the foundation of a standard digital classroom, we have integrated adaptive feedback systems and gamified courses to make learning personalized and engaging.

Our digital interface is similar to that of Microsoft Teams and Canvas, including basic features such as classroom chats, WebRTC, assignment upload, and discussion forums.

To ensure that homework and practice problems are calibrated to each student's progression and proficiency with the subject, we have developed an adaptive feedback system with variants of the Leitner method. Depending on the student's "feedback" with each practice question, the algorithm can adjust the retention intervals for optimization.

Additionally, EduBeyond provides a chatbot that provides academic support during non-instruction hours. Currently, the chatbot can give hints and recommendations based on student inputs.

Each course has a corresponding gamified world to increase engagement and incentivize out-of-school studying. The world will be mapped out as a "skill tree," where students must master/complete certain levels before advancing. In education, the world map could be a visual representation of an English curriculum; completion of the "phonics" level can lead to vocabulary, etc.

Gamified courses can effectively track student engagement and progress, where both the students and teachers have an adequate understanding of the progression with reference to the student's location on the world map.

We hope to exhibit the quantifiable effects of our various features through random controlled trials under the supervision of the education faculty at the University of Toronto.

Who does your solution serve? In what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Since 2020, we have been working with students on the outskirts of Jakarta and Surabaya. While having access to basic education, these students are behind in their English and technological proficiency by almost one academic year compared to their counterparts in private and higher-end public schools. Given the recent pandemic’s disruption of course administration, the gap has widened significantly.

As mentioned in the “specific problem” prompt, low-quality teachers, untested curriculums, and inadequate digital infrastructures are some of the major factors why the tertiary education rate is notably lower in rural regions. Further, many of the students we currently serve come from a long line of life in poverty, resulting in a lack of incentives to pursue higher education even if the opportunity is present.

To put it in quantitative terms, the average school day in Indonesia is 10 hours, with a mandatory 12 years of compulsory education. Compared to the United States, where the school day is 4 hours shorter and almost 50 ranks higher in quality (according to the World Population Review). With this in mind, more than 90% of low-income students would elect directly into low-paying labour jobs in hopes of providing financial assistance to their families.

EduBeyond’s solution addresses this problem in a few ways. Our technical solution aims to accelerate the academic progression of low-income students while lowering their required instructional hours. Using interactive features such as our chatbot and gamified courses, we hope to retain more students past the mandatory compulsory education duration. With the support of product research backed by the University of Toronto, quantifiable improvement in learning results will be shared publicly for transparency.

In summary, our product contributes to a higher likelihood of transition to tertiary education, improved language and technological proficiency for high-skill jobs, and academic research that could advance education-infrastructure development in similar communities worldwide.

How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?

The team’s co-founders are Tien-lan Sun, Miklos Sunario, and Alec Shi.

Tien-lan is EduBeyond’s CTO and a freshman at UC Berkeley’s MET program. Having won first place at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in the Translational Medicine category with his novel AI fundus camera system, Tien-lan is leading the development of our interface, with a particular focus on the adaptive question algorithm and the AI-powered chatbot. Tien-lan is working with Berkeley’s ML@B in training EduBeyond’s ML model.

Miklos Sunario is EduBeyond’s COO and a second-year at the University of British Columbia. Having experienced the Indonesian education system, Miklos is a key player in our consultation with local students and teachers in Indonesia. He is responsible for many of our Indonesia-based progressions, such as an invitation to present our product to the Indonesian Parliament and having our computer science curriculum be certified by Indonesia’s ministry of education.

Alec Shi is EduBeyond’s CEO and a second-year student at the University of Toronto. Alec is responsible for EduBeyond’s internal governance and external applications. One of the applications led to EduBeyond being selected as an award winner by the Moonshot Platform, a social impact foundation powered by the Avast Foundation. As a result, the founding team was able to present their project to the Deputy Secretary General of the UN, Amina Jane Mohammed. Alec has also been invited to a legal incubator hosted by McCarthy Tétrault, the leading Canadian law firm in international trade practices.

What steps have you taken to understand the needs of the population you want to serve?

EduBeyond has been working with youths in Indonesia since June 2020. We started as a tutoring network, serving as an emergency response due to the abrupt disruption caused by the pandemic.

During the first year, we helped around 5,000 students in Jakarta and Surabaya through our network of local nonprofits and charities. However, we soon realized the solution lacked scalability as recruiting volunteer tutors was highly inefficient.

Around late 2021 we started to pivot towards developing a digital learning interface that can be fully integrated as a digital component of the educational infrastructure. From weekly consultations with our partner organizations (whose students we were supporting), we elicited some common concerns regarding the post-pandemic education state.

The qualitative feedback clarified public statistics we found online, such as why the tertiary education rate was meagre despite a high enrollment rate during primary and secondary education.

After a year of brainstorming and feedback from local students and teachers, we were able to plan out specific features we wanted to integrate within our learning interface.

We have recently started the beta testing period with a sample group of 5,000 students in Surabaya. We are running random controlled trials alongside weekly feedback sessions to create quantifiable impact metrics for product optimization.

By April of 2023 (the end of the first beta testing period), we plan to draft an in-house research paper with support from the University of Toronto and Berkeley to identify the effectiveness of each feature based on pre-established impact metrics and user feedback.

Which aspects of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Improving learning opportunities and outcomes for learners across their lifetimes, from early childhood on (Learning)

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business model

In what city, town, or region is your solution team located?

Toronto, ON, Canada

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Alec Shi