DASARAN's Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool

We witness long-term rising trend in the number of refugee or displaced people (half of them – children under 18), challenging humanity with the task to ensure their safety and integration.

A forced move to a new place is big challenge for anyone and children are particularly vulnerable. Having a tool tracking problems of refugee/migrant schoolchildren and their parents and addressing them to responsible authorities is an effective way to foster integration process. We introduce DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback tool designed to directly connect decision-makers with respective vulnerable groups. Tool is integrated into DASARAN’s online platform, currently supporting 1/3 of entire population in Armenia (over 1 mln schoolstudents, parents, teachers, principals, educational decision-makers). Through the tool Government officials will directly get feedback about current challenges of migrant/refugee school-students & their parents, or create customized surveys addressing specific questions.

DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback tool can help change the life of millions of school-students worldwide.

Migration/refugee crisis is a complex issue globally. Instability in countries with big Armenian diaspora also conditions new flow of refugees to Armenia. Armenia hosts over 18,000 refugees/asylum seekers, majorly originating from Syria, making Armenia first in terms of Syrian refugee proportion to its population.

After initial humanitarian response long-term integration is necessary and education is foundational link toward integration.

The issue of school-age children’s integration, particularly facing challenge of language and cultural barriers, differences in educational systems, is highly sensitive necessitating attention to disallow marginalization of families intending to establish permanent residence.

The biggest problem, though, is lack of instant/direct communication of problems to decision-makers: many problems stay unsolved mostly because one cannot find right place/way to address them.

Simultaneously, decision-makers do not have capacity to reach out to every refugee child/parent and undertake reforms based on general information.

DASARAN, connecting all Armenian 1,484 schools and largely used by national decision-makers, is perfectly designed to be the connecting circle for identifying refugee integration issues in the field of education and crowdsource feedback, facilitating evidence-based solutions.

We aim to give reliable means to refugees for addressing their issues to right people, facilitating their integration into the national educational system.

Our primary target beneficiaries are refugee school-children and their parents who struggle to be integrated into a new environment. We’ll help them raise issues connected to integration in learning and school environment.

Usually refugee students are reluctant to share their experience and speak up on existing challenges in public, not to cause any further alienation from their community members. DASARAN’s tool is specifically designed to address issues directly to the decision-makers, avoiding unnecessary publicity, and will also allow anonymity.

We’ll also hold online campaigns through DASARAN platform, raising awareness of beneficiaries on the tool’s mission and how they’re going to benefit from it.

Secondly, DASARAN platform incorporates extensive data analytics tool provided to State Educational decision-makers as an insight into system of education and efficient way to monitor school operations and student performance. Government representatives are already acquainted with the functioning of the platform and will have no issues using the new crowdsourcing feedback tool for their policy-making.

The Crowdsourcing Feedback system will function as a sustainable mechanism, and with the engagement of new groups of refugee and migrant children in the schools, engage them in the online system and constantly track newly arising issues and challenges of integration. 

DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool for identifying Refugee Educational Integration Issues will be incorporated in DASARAN online learning platform (www.dasaran.net, www.dasaran.am).

The Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool will serve in two directions:

• Feedback tool - refugee students writing feedback on their learning environment as well as current issues and sending those to responsible authorities (government, institutions and so on)
• Survey tool - responsible authorities creating and distributing customized surveys for specific challenges they find important.

DASARAN portal connects all 1,484 schools in the country hence the created surveys can possibly be sent to everyone studying in schools, their parents and teachers.

The system works in the following way. Government representatives, international organizations, and other institutions who are the addressees of refugees’ problems have an access to the platform which is designed to create surveys. The survey tool itself consists of 2 parts: the first one is for choosing the target group from all students, teachers and parents of the country and the second one is for creating the survey itself.

The target choosing tool gives an opportunity to filter students/parents who have the status of refugee, choose an audience based on gender, age, school grade, average grade, quality of survey takers, type and size of schools and so on.

Survey creating part of the tool gives an opportunity to structure multiple choice, open-ended as well as more complicated types of questions.

After creating the survey in a specified time range the interested parties get responses and come up with solutions based on the results.

The feedback tool, on the other side, is constantly available for the refugee students/parents and teachers, who can directly and instantly address the integration challenges they’re facing to the responsible national decision-makers. The latter will receive both individual requests and aggregated statistics on challenges refugee children/parents are facing in terms of integrating in the learning environment and educational system in Armenia. DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool is developed based on tailor-made UI/UX, ensures great end-user experience. Most importantly, DASARAN ensures high-level data protection through end to end encryption, web application and networking firewalls, isolated and containerized environment, as well as aligns with the national and international personal data protection norms and legislations. 

To start with, it’s the proven experience in policy intervention mechanisms for achieving SDGs’ education targets, leveraging the power of user data to inform educational decision-making and resource allocation. The proven model of the DASARAN platform and its already-existing large user-base (over 1 million users) lay foundation for the efficient functioning of the presented tool. Given the existing user-base, no effort should be made to reach out to the target groups of beneficiaries.

Also, the platform is unique and competitive in the following sense:

• Easy-to-use & tailored to the needs of diverse groups of beneficiaries & stakeholders,
• One of a kind software which combines all of a country’s schools in a single platform, thus building up data and analytics for evidence-based decision-making.
• No advanced or complex technical skills required for usage,
• Easily customizable and localized services to customers, adapting the program features to the language and specifics of the given educational system
• Reduced time of data collection and processing and improved resource management,
• One of a kind software which combines all of a country’s schools in a single platform, thus building up data and analytics for evidence-based decision-making.

DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback/Survey Tool is largely built as a digital solution. It is interconnected with DASARAN’s School Management System and safe networking platform, thereby ensuring verified data collection.

The Tool utilizes survey building and response gathering methodologies aligning those to DASARAN’s data analytics tool – E-STAT Diagnostic Tool on Public Education.

As the Tool deals with sensitive information, high level of data protection is ensured through:

• End to End Encryption,
• Network isolation of all backend servers.
• Web application and networking firewalls,
• Isolated and containerized environment where each service is running within its isolated environment,
• Network isolation of all backend servers.

There is a growing focus on data and data-based decision-making both on individual, community and national levels. And digital platforms nowadays are best designed to facilitate data-gathering process up to cutting it to seconds. This is what we have achieved through DASARAN’S E-Stat and this experience will be transferred to the Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool as well.

Furthermore, most of the concerned beneficiaries – refugee/migrant school-age children are attending public schools in Armenia, and DASARAN, having connected all of the public schools of the country to its platform with individual profiles for every school-student, parent, teacher and principal, is best designed to build and operate the mentioned Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool.

DASARAN’s products and e-solutions are actively used by the majority of its users, ensuring 5,738,230 monthly average visits of DASARAN platform (over 600,000 unique visits per month).

DASARAN is also already used by the Government authorities, and they are familiar with its data analytics tools and methodologies applied, which facilitates their involvement in the current process as well.

More importantly, DASARAN has proven track record of working toward refugee children integration in Armenia, one of the recent examples being the collaboration with the Save the Children International and US Embassy in Armenia and the development of a gamified module on the topic of tolerance and integration. Officially launched in September, 2017, the game has been played by 38,669 students for more than 103,000 times – these results speaking of the high demand and understanding of the importance of integration. 

DASARAN currently supports over 1 million users – including school-students, parents, teachers and principals in Armenia, of who - 393,185 school-students and over 150,000 school alumni.

Armenia is host to over 18,000 refugees and asylum seekers, majority of them originating from Syria (over 14,000), thereby making Armenia 1st in terms of the proportion of Syrian refugees to its population.

Most of the people with refugee status or migrants are users of DASARAN platform (being school-students, parents or family of school-age children, or in some cases – teachers). Therefore, currently we serve major part of the 18,000 refugees/asylum seekers in Armenia.

DASARAN user-base incorporates all new beneficiaries of school education system both at the start of the academic year and during it, thereby ensuring all newcomers (school-students and their parents/family) to Armenia also get engaged into the platform. No exact number can be anticipated.

The Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool has already served around 3,000 people, within 1 year direct outreach is planned to over 10,000 people (refugees) in Armenia.

The Tool will be replicated to other countries along with entire DASARAN platform’s international scale (currently in negotiations with Nigerian partners), therefore upon success, during the upcoming five years the people benefiting from DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool will multiply, including the refugee/asylum seekers in Nigeria (host to around 30,000 refugees and around 2 mln IDPs).

DASARAN’s replication (along with Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool) is planned to at least 3 countries within 5 years. 

Upcoming one year will be devoted to the full build-up of the advanced Crodwsourcing Feedback Tool and its enactment in Armenia. The following years will see the scale of the tool – full coverage in Armenia and incorporation internationally.

DASARAN has reached a 100% penetration in the Armenian public education ecosystem and has reached its full potential in the country. Upcoming five years will see DASARAN’s international scale-up to at least 3 countries (currently in negotiations with Nigerian partners). The other direction is the integration of Diaspora Armenian schools into the platform, thereby serving Diaspora Armenian communities throughout the world, including refugees and asylum seekers.

What is worth highlighting is the fact that the Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool, being an inalienable part of the DASARAN platform, will not just allow identification of challenges refugee/asylum seekers are facing, and form a ground for their tracking and solution, but also scale to serve non-refugee populations as well. Moreover, after the identification of the existing challenges, DASARAN’s learning platform will ideally serve as a digital means for educating school-students and their parents, raising awareness on the identified topic-matters and providing equal opportunities for complementary and alternative civic education at large. 

The barriers DASARAN is currently facing concern not the functionality or efficiency of its products, but rather the scale opportunities.

Major barriers are difficulties securing necessary funds for the product build-up and scale. Also, when scaling the product in developing states, internet connectivity (land connection or mobile coverage) may be another challenge.

Furthermore, when targeting national decision-makers particularly in developing states, political instability and upheavals in these countries, political changes in local governments and tendency of short-term political goals overriding long-term policy-making are some of the major challenges hindering the process of DASARAN products localization and entry into the local markets.

Another difficulty is forming partnerships with trusted local strategic partners for the product’s localization and follow-up support, which can simply lengthen the process of scale. 

DASARAN has already successfully gone through the stages of ideation, testing and acceleration through its benchmark operations in Armenia. To accelerate the process of scale up and facilitate the initial outreach to potential client countries (or private schools), we’ll be looking for strategic partners (including also our partner international organizations such as UNICEF & World Bank) who can help us establish first contact with relevant governments and state authorities.

The other mitigation strategy we plan to use to overcome existing challenges is the implementation of a pilot phase of the product locally before its full scale. This will allow to test the model locally, make adjustments to the local specifics and based on the data derived from the pilot, demonstrate local value and produce preliminary outcomes.

In terms of ensuring necessary funding, we’re looking for social impact investors, primarily given the fact that the activities we conduct bring social good on a global level, thus making our company more of a for-benefit entity.

As to the internet connectivity/land connection challenge, we’ll rely on the global statistics of mobile coverage, which is significantly larger than the land connection, thereby creating the chance to directly outreach target groups of beneficiaries.

DASARAN - 37 employees - full-time staff

The team of DASARAN has a years-long experience in running innovative projects in the field of education and delivering high-quality products. The young professionals behind DASARAN are passionate about education and strongly believe that technological advances can help create equal educational opportunities for every child and contribute to developing an educated and confident generation of professionals, irrespective of one’s social status or geographical location.

Most importantly, the team of DASARAN has vast experience working with both government institutions, school students, their parents (including diverse minority groups and refugees), as well as with international organizations, having implemented dozens of educational and data analytics projects with and for them.

The user-base that we created and the network that the team has, will be put to service for the successful implementation of the current idea. 

We enhance DASARAN platform with innovative online features developed through extensive collaboration with our partners. DASARAN has formed a wide array of local and international partnerships both with relevant state authorities (e.g. Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Education, Science, Culture & Sports, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Emergency Situations, Yerevan Municipality, Regional Self-Government Authorities, et al.), international organizations (World Bank Group, UNDP, UNICEF, US Embassy, USAID, EU Delegation to Armenia, Save the Children, Counterpart International et al.), private and public companies. Partnerships have also been established with local and international private entities, such as Impact Hub Geneva and the Project Zero team from Harvard University (Graduate School of Education - Massachusetts State, USA).

Thanks to its broad user base and mechanisms for cost-efficient knowledge-delivery, DASARAN has become a kind of virtual hub for the local and international institutions and organizations, targeting school students and related beneficiaries, making it easier for them to deliver their respective educational and development content, and thus creating an equally-accessible education environment.

The Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool will serve two main groups:

• refugee students/parents writing feedback on their learning environment as well as current issues and sending those to responsible authorities (government, institutions and so on)
• responsible authorities creating and distributing customized surveys for specific challenges they find important and receiving aggregated statistics as a report.

The business model is simple – state authorities, international organizations or private entities willing to utilize the Tool are paying a fee based on the number of respondents they anticipate to have for a given on-request survey. These fees will subsidize the maintenance costs of the Feedback part of the tool.

No financial burden will be placed on the main beneficiaries – refugees themselves. Refugees

International organizations and state authorities making use of the tool also receive report in the form of analytics, incorporating the total number of respondents (those who completed the survey till the end) with separate distributions by geographical location, age, gender and % distribution of selected answers per each question, etc..

The advanced development and adjustment of the Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool requires additional funding which we aim to fundraise from our international partners and donors.

Thus, at the initial phases of product build-up and finalization, launch of primary sales and marketing, we’ll rely on project-based grants and donations.

Consecutively, the Feedback Tool will start generating revenue which will cover all related costs and provide for the scale-related adjustments and the actual scale process.

We already have a pilot format of the Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool which has been utilized by several local and international organizations such as Save the Children and Laboratoires Servier Pharmaceutical and others. The tool was made available for a service fee, counted based on the number of respondents (fully completed survey responses: partial completions not included in the count).

Given the scale of the product to serve not only refugees and migrants, the Feedback Tool will in the future target private entities as its potential customers, thereby further ensuring financial stability. 

MIT Solve offers an important chance to articulate and elaborate on the facilitation role of such initiatives in scaling-up and replicating successful impact venture models, also showcasing DASARAN as an example. We believe it will also help find financing possibilities, which will be a great head-start for DASARAN Crowdsourcing Feedback Tool’s scale-up and international replication.

Development of the impact venture at global level will be possible through partnering with both institutional impact investors as well as development partners with global network. 

Besides elaboration of the above showcase, we believe MIT Solve will provide opportunities for us to get to know social entrepreneurs from all over the world, development projects and pioneering approaches (also in education systems) and cultures. This will create an amazing opportunity to discuss new ideas and insights with like-minded people and create an extended environment for the innovative ideas to be shared.

Overall, we intend to partner with state authorities, international organizations working in the field, and private organizations. These are the entities which can largely benefit from the Tool.

Furthermore, it's the organizations which can become our strategic partners locally (in developing countries), helping us advance the product's incorporation into the local education ecosystem and helping bring the benefits of the product to hundred-thousands and millions of disadvantaged people. 

Organizations which can also make important connections with national decision-makers will also be of great benefit.

Having a tool tracking problems of refugee/migrant schoolchildren and their parents and addressing them to responsible authorities is an effective way to foster integration process. We introduce DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback tool designed to directly connect decision-makers with respective vulnerable groups. Through the tool Government officials will directly get feedback about current challenges of migrant/refugee school-students & their parents, or create customized surveys addressing specific questions.

Being integrated with DASARAN’s existing large user-base, the Tool will greatly facilitate the process of reaching out to every single refugee school-child and parent and become the perfect means for the latter to be the drivers of solutions to their challenges, and largely become an inclusive part of the political decision-making process on community or national levels.

DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback tool can easily be replicated to other parts of the world and help change the life of millions of refugee school-students worldwide.

Migration/refugee crisis is a complex issue globally. We witness long-term rising trend in the number of refugee or displaced people (half of them – children under 18), challenging humanity with the task to ensure their safety and integration.

A forced move to a new place is big challenge for anyone and children are particularly vulnerable. Having a tool tracking problems of refugee/migrant schoolchildren and their parents and addressing them to responsible authorities is an effective way to foster integration process. We introduce DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback tool designed to directly connect decision-makers with respective vulnerable groups.

Being integrated with DASARAN’s existing large user-base, the Tool will greatly facilitate the process of reaching out to every single refugee school-child and parent and become the perfect means for the latter to be the drivers of solutions to their challenges, and largely become an inclusive part of the political decision-making process on community or national levels.

The prize will be used to adjust and replicate DASARAN’s Crowdsourcing Feedback tool to other parts of the world and help change the life of millions of refugee school-students worldwide.