ShortKode: Supplementary Teacher Support
Supplementing instructor expertise in low quality schools using guided materials created by highly experienced teachers.
70% of Nigerian children aged 10 can't read or do basic maths (World Bank). The standards for student learning are consistently not met by thousands of private K–12 schools and teachers.
Low Funding:
Over the past 3 decades government funding going to public schools dropped drastically paving way for private schools which grew 40% from 2018 to 2022, from 50,000 to 75,000.
As competition grew, profits became more important than grades and schools started paying exorbitant amounts of money to examiners to cheat on paper based national exams like WAEC, NECO & NABTEB. However not all the exams were paper based.
In 2022, 78% of the secondary school graduating students who wrote JAMB CBT exams (a national exam required to enter college) to enter tertiary institutions failed to hit the minimum cut-off mark, representing the lowest pass rate in decades in the country (JAMB).
Poor Teacher Support & Delivery:
To compound this, schools are finding a hard time hiring quality teachers and when they hire teachers, these schools look for lesson plans and notes that help their educators make up for their lack of knowledge in core subject areas.
Current solutions include standardised digital lesson plans and notes sold by retail lesson creators. Schools and teachers buy curriculum materials from these retail vendors, but the lesson plans, notes, and curriculum documents they buy don't tell them what their students should be learning, how to use them in the classroom, and how well the teachers are doing.
Due to the inefficiencies of these materials and the need to produce bright students, schools keep paying annually for exam malpractices, undermining the future of the more than 15 million children under their care.
Schools desperately look for solutions but are cut short as they are not finding the support they need to make their students hit high grades without cheating in national exams.
To apply successful solutions, we are adapting our methods from Bridge International Academies. Bridge is a chain of 400 schools in Nigeria, Kenya, Liberia & India that pull quality teaching content from top educators and uses that content to create lesson plans for teachers they hire.
Bridge converts the content into an app that guides the teachers in the classroom and have recorded double digit gains in student learnings by doing so.
Building on that, our solution is wordboxz.
Wordboxz is a collaborative platform that uses an insider market run by ShortKode to share winning teaching methods and strategies from top performing schools to low quality schools in Nigeria.
Teachers who work in these top schools are able to create additional streams of income by monetising their knowledge through wordboxz. When they share their lesson plans, notes and curriculum adaptations, ShortKode's team of expert teachers tailor it to the needs of low performing schools allowing these schools to improve their service delivery without paying for yearly exam malpractice fees.
When low quality schools purchase the wordboxz app for their teachers, ShortKode grants their teachers access to licensed lesson notes and plans used by the top schools in Nigeria. These teachers are able to repurpose the lesson notes to their setting and curriculum while also providing feedback in real-time.
Target population: Private K-12 schools, teachers serving students in suburban to rural areas which have been recorded to run malpractices. Schools which serve the middleclass and are regarded as low quality schools.
The high quality schools usually serve the top 10% of the paying parent population.
These "low quality" schools spring up yearly and are embattled with many problems which range from low support from the government, poor teacher performance, declining student performance and high competition from other schools for parents.
These schools are severely undersevered as the number of unqualified teachers outnumber the qualified teachers thus outpricing them from the market when they seek to hire these teachers. They then settle for undertrained teachers which perform poorly in the classrooms due to poor subject knowledge leading these schools to pay for exam malpractices in order to stay in business.
Wordboxz will help these schools compete better by giving them access to teaching strategies and guidelines used by the top performing schools. By supplementing their teacher's knowledge of core subject topics with expert scripted content, schools make up for poor teaching capacity.
This results in better informed teachers and improved student scores without the need to cheat in national exams as seen with Bridge International Academies's schools.
We are a group of educators who have worked in private schools for grades 3 through 12 and privately tutored students in secondary schools. With more than ten years of experience teaching English and fundamental science to students in Grades 3-5, we have experienced constant fatigue from looking for adequate lesson plans and notes. The majority of our time is spent developing these lesson plans, which prevents us from being able to meet the needs of kids in the class who have varied levels of aptitude for learning new material.
I have to occasionally step in by myself to home instruct my younger brothers because they are consistently failing their tests, understanding, and even spelling. When asked why they chose to leave the profession or work part-time as instructors, 80% of respondents who had been interviewed as teachers noted, in addition to inadequate pay, being overworked and a lack of adequate teaching resources.
We plan to collaborate with top performing schools like "Pacesetters Academy, British International School Nigeria" and are planning discussions with them to obtain content to convert and share with teachers from lower quality schools we hope to serve. We also have a school consultant on our team.
We have interviewed more than 200 teachers and 10 schools to get their input on what they will look for to support student learning and teacher deficiency.
We have analysed lesson plans and notes from Bridge International Academies and current alternatives to spot differences, what Bridge International Academies is doing better, how we can incorporate that at scale and what can be improved upon.
- Improving learning opportunities and outcomes for learners across their lifetimes, from early childhood on (Learning)
- Concept: An idea being explored for its feasibility to build a product, service, or business model based on that idea.
Current alternatives that Nigerian K-12 schools use are standardised lesson plans, notes, videos for their undertrained teachers and exam malpractice fees they pay to examiners for paper based exams.
These standardised lesson content are not designed for inexperienced teachers as they give no guidelines on how they should be used, what methods to track effectiveness of teaching when in use and have no medium to give feedback to the creators as these are individual pdf and mp4 files.
The exam malpractice fees do not help the schools because they are a big drain on finances and fake student scores ultimately harm the student once they look to enter tertiary institutions. Tertiary institutions use Computer based tests (CBT) exams to find out students who actually passed and majority of these students who wrote paper based exams with malpractice methods fail to meet cut off marks thus making them repeat entire school year sessions over again.
Wordboxz improves on current alternatives by adapting the success of Bridge International Academies and scaling it. Bridge International Academies has produced student score averages that beat national standards annually by using lesson note content gotten from top teachers (Bridge 2022, Harvard 2015, Issuu 2019).
Wordboxz helps low quality schools compete and deliver on education outcomes better by giving them access to lesson content which are used by the top performing schools. The wordboxz app allows teachers to give feedback in real-time allowing ShortKode to update the content sent to them to align with specific needs and knowledge gaps of teachers per school.
By helping top performing teachers make more money from their knowledge, we believe wordboxz as a community of knowledge sharing will grow and there will be other initiatives like it even in other industries. This will be catalytic as once a few other industries follow this trajectory, Nigeria's economy will grow more quickly.
By December 2023:
— Schools will record a 5-30% improvement in student test scores in National standardized tests run by West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and The Joint Admissions And Matriculations Board (JAMB)
— 50% of teachers aged 25-45 years reporting improved understanding of concepts to be taught to students.
— The number of parents & schools reporting improved student learning for grade 9 (This grade is graduation. Where students write national standardized tests before proceeding for tertiary education) versus number of parents who notice no change.
We intend to make these goals a reality by:
— Partnering with the top ranked schools by National standardized test scores & educational scholarship competitions.
— Tracking student performance in National standardized tests.
— Effectively communicating with teachers by creating in person & online feedback channels to allow the Wordboxz team guage effectiveness and decide methodologies to change or remove.
— Translating teaching content into local languages with an emphasis on student-teacher vocabulary improvement.
Wordboxz is a mobile app teachers download in their phones.
Currently we are at the concept stage with surveys collected from more than 200 teachers and 10 school administrators. We have not built a website to store teacher content due to resource constraints and need to forge relationships with top schools for guided content creation. We have picked out in Lagos, Abuja and Ogun state respectively which routinely beat national standardized test scores.
We have gone ahead to keep relationships with more than 100 schools and a database of 1,000 schools including Bridge International Academies with which we are replicating their education success.
- Crowd Sourced Service / Social Networks
- Software and Mobile Applications
- Nigeria
For this solution we are currently working closely with 100 teachers from a pool of 600. And we have access to more than 1,000 private K-12 school leads located in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria.
By the end of 2023, we expect to have wordboxz operational in up to 200 K-12 schools and partner with 3 top performing schools to create content. Reaching over 400 instructors and more than 5,000 students .
We are currently looking for a new technical cofounder. The one we have on our team is currently bugged down with work from his workplace so he works with us part time.
We have spotted a good developer and we will need a budget to build this website.
We also will need financial support to approach top schools as they see their teaching staff as a competitive advantage which they use in attracting high paying parent customers. To partner with them, we will have to pay for their services and that will require a budget till we are profitable and can share revenue with them later on as wordboxz expands.
ShortKode's wordboxz is in talks with
one potential partners for Web and app development to run initial pilots.
— Northeastern University on a student-led Web development project.
With their technical support, ShortKode will be able to focus on raising capital & content creation resources needed for a successful pilot.
Wordboxz will use a marketplace business model.
We provide teaching resources by connecting top performing teachers with a marketplace to sell their content. The teachers provide their lesson notes, plans, videos of their teaching which are then licensed under ShortKode and made available to the majority of low quality schools through the wordboxz mobile app.
Target: Private K-12 schools with 0-10 years in operations, with 15 or more students and have not consistently beat national standardized test scores. These schools are clustered in regions with high national exam malpractice reports.
Why schools need wordboxz:
Nigerian private K-12 schools are in a constant flux where either teachers leave or parents withdraw their children due to poor performance.
As more schools lack access to the best teaching content to support their subpar teachers, the top 10% of schools keep making millions by charging a premium for their quality teachers. The low quality private K-12 schools we target which serve low to middle income households and make up more than 70% of Nigeria's 75,000 private K-12 schools are constantly looking for how to stand out in a competitive market.
Selling Wordboxz App Subscriptions:
Wordboxz will rely on selling of teacher subscriptions per semester to schools and individual teachers for sustainability.
1. By offering teachers working in top performing schools access to monetization tools for a percentage cut of all their earnings when other teachers & schools buy access to their content.
2. Wordboxz will also offer a pay per teacher model where schools pay per semester for each teacher who has access to the website's content.
3. For schools with larger than 300 students, wordboxz will use provide an option for a per student model.
We also look to try out a pay per student model as in some schools, as some parents enroll for quality of teaching and some enroll for fulfilling parent duties.
