Gradient: Hope for Millions of Youth in Indonesia

Higher education learning platform that combines the best teachers with technology to democratize access, reduce cost, and improve learning experience.

The return on investment of higher education is clear. What’s not clear is how we are going to provide 13,6 million youths in Indonesia that graduated from high school but can’t go to college. We found that these are the main factors contributing the problem:

1. Limited access to the best education
The current higher education system filters high school graduates based on a one time event test or school reports that determine the fate of the rest of their lives. Why? Because our systems have limited resources and can’t mentor every single student one by one. So the easiest thing to do is to set a minimum threshold of intelligence that happened to be measured with selection tests and high school reports. 

We disagree because by implementing technology, we could solve the resource problem and cut the cost significantly. That’s why we believe everybody deserves the best education and everybody deserves to get another chance! Everybody means people at the top and also at the bottom bracket of intelligence.

2. Rising cost of higher education
In Indonesia, the average wage raise for parents that graduated from high school and university are 3,8% & 2,7% per year. Meanwhile, the rising higher education tuition cost is 6,3% percent per year. 

That means, for parents that are graduated from high school and university, if they save 20% of their wage since today for 18 years (since their child was born until finish high school), in 2040 they won’t have enough money for their child to finish higher education. Parents that are graduated from high school and university would only have 41,2% and 69,6% (sequentially) of what’s needed for the full tuition. (Research from Kompas Investigate)

3. Learning Experience Quality Gap

The covid-19 learning loss, the different ways and speed of each student's learning, to the disparities between teachers' quality between institutions. That’s what we heard every time we ask struggling students and here’s just a few of them :

“When I graduated high school, I immediately took a job because I don’t have the financial to continue higher education. After working, I continue my education, I took Mathematics major in (censor). In my university, it’s purely learning by myself because we don’t have any face to face teaching and they only give teaching materials. It became a really big problem for me, that’s why I’m willing to pay more to learn, please help me, thankyou ?“
- HF, student

“I don't really fit with how professor in my class taught the lesson. Sometimes my professor don’t use slide and only show a screenshot from books and paste it in microsoft word file. So I really need to pay extra attention. And if I go to toilet for a second, I miss everything. Some of my friends are ambitious but turned down because of our professor.”
- DA,  student

Gradient combines the best teachers with technology to democratize access, reduce cost, and improve learning experience (currently focusing on higher education). We use processes and utilize technology such as:

1. Beautiful prerecorded on-demand cinematic courses and motion graphics. 

2. Interactive exercises with active learning principles (backed by latest cognitive science research)

3. Personalized assistance using artificial intelligence to provide 1 on 1 on-demand mentoring

All of them can be accessed in one platform, website or mobile applications. 

1) 6,9 million college students are struggling to follow their classes because every students learn with different pace, ways, & needs and there are huge disparities in teachers' quality between institutions. 

 Here’s what our students said on how our solution serves them: 

a) “I’m not sure if I tell you, you’ll be familiar with the name of my current university, it’s in rural areas.. Sometimes, I still haven’t move on from UB and ITB. I saw Gradient on Instagram, and waw I’ve always had a dream to be taught by the best teacher and I can’t believe I still have the opportunity.” 

-TA, student

*context: both UB & ITB are top 10 university in Indonesia

b) “I’m very thankful that you created Gradient. It really helps me to understand the calculus concept because in college they didn’t teach the subject completely. But in Gradient it covers all. Overall gradient is very cool!” 

- MV, Student

c) "Joining Gradient is very helpful for learning calculus. Especially if the lecturers on my college are not clear/too fast on delivering the material, or when I don't really understand the material, I can play learning videos in Gradient. Apart from the lecturer's  great teaching, the quality of the videos is also really cool. Thanks a lot for Gradient.”

- YH, student

*context: our first course is calculus

2) 13,6 million high school graduates that couldn’t enter college because of limited access and expensive tuition cost. 

Another testimonies:

a) “Now I’m taking a gap year. I’m subscribing Gradient because I’m curious. I aspire to take a major where I’m going to need calculus, so I’m also preparing.” -FB, gapyear

With the current range of our courses that we have, our impact are limited to just fulfilling their curiosity. In the short term, we’re committed to extend our scale of impact by increasing range of courses with project based learning and help them to build a portfolio with the hope they can get a better career. In impact goals session, we also explain that in the long term, we are aiming to become accredited to further extend our impact. (most jobs in Indonesia still require formal degree)

3) Others (ranging from teachers, workers that’s just curious, to parents that want to teach their kids)

a) “I’m curious with Gradient’s teaching materials. Because I graduated in mathematics education major and when I was in university I don’t get the calculus in depth. When I saw Gradient’s video, it looks interesting.” 

- ET, Math Elementary Teacher

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We differentiate the impact into 2 categories. First, private return which means the return for the individual. Second, social return which means the return for society in general.

1. Private return

• According to the paper “Are there Social Returns to Education in Developing Countries?” a 1 year increase in average education in Indonesia increases 6-8% in income. This would translate to a contribution in GDP 8.7-9.3B$ per year.

• If we successfully execute this model of higher education, we estimate we’d be able to reduce tuition cost to one tenth from the average tuition now. This will enable massive cohorts of low income families to enroll their children to college and more importantly: have the chance to transition to the middle class.

 2. Social Return

• According to Enrico Moretti, one percentage point increase in college share in a city raises average wages by 0.6–1.2%, above and beyond the private return to education. Education can also reduce crime rates and improve civic participation. But, we believe that it’s hard to quantify the social return of education because of the compounding and spillover effect from every individual. We believe the impact is much more than just what’s quantifiable.  

Three of us graduated from the top national universities. This gave us perspective on how higher education works in Indonesia and networks of amazing university professors. Even then, we realize that we have no experience working as a staff in higher education institutions and probably lack insights on how the system works.

But, from our little experience, we got enough insights on how:

• Students from rurals are having a hard time learning due to not having equal opportunities, 

• A lot of parents want their kids to go to college but don’t have enough money to pay for tuition and cover living expenses.

• Most ambitious students are the ones that don’t have the opportunity to access good education

These insights gave us the courage to do it anyway and challenge the status quo. And also, we have the capability to create and execute products.

Co Founders’ background & experience highlight:

1) Devin Santoso

Civil engineering fresh graduates from Bandung Institute of Technology with experience in geotechnical engineering, finance, digital marketing, and artificial intelligence academic research. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/devin-santoso-a9974a1b2/)

2) Yolanda Lisu

Civil engineering graduates. In college, she’s active on student organizations and led mentor that’s responsible for over 600+ students. She also volunteered on creative works. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/yolandalisu/) 

3) Anggardha Febriano

Computer Science graduates. Experience in the Software Engineering field and research. When in college, he’s active in student organizations and events, and also led research faculty organizations in Web Development fields. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/anggardha-febriano/)

Back when we’re still students, we joined an academic research project that was working on assessing earthquake fragility of houses in Cikapundung (rural areas in West Java Province). Even though it’s unrelated to our project, we took the opportunity to ask the families there to understand how they think about education. What we found is that most parents aspire for their kids to go to college. But most of them are concerned they wouldn't have enough money to pay for the tuition.

We visited one of the biggest private universities in Indonesia and talked with the rector. We learned a lot about the history of Indonesia’s higher education and the challenges of building a university in Indonesia. The rector had a similar insight with us, which is that students in rural areas that don’t have the opportunities are really enthusiastic and ambitious.

We also visited a small university in Sulawesi island. We found that there are huge disparities in all aspects from the infrastructure, the teachers, the curriculum, to student’s exposure to technology and knowledge about the world in general. We also learned that some students have to prioritize work and help their parents pay for the tuition and living cost. 

Lastly, we also talked to hundreds of our users and we tried to understand the challenges they’re facing and how we can help them learn better.

Yes, we expect that it’s going to enable broad positive impact for all by forcing the market to demand great learning experience and here’s why our solution will significantly improved approach to the problem:

1) No startup is tackling the same problem.

People in the US are familiar with Coursera, EdX, Udacity, Khan Academy, etc. Indonesia is a country with 280 million people who mostly have low english proficiency (Indonesia’s English Proficiency Index ranked 81 out of 112 countries), and unfortunately we don’t have our own Higher Education Massive Open Online Courses. Most Edtech companies in Indonesia focus on K-12 and vocational. (We had a MOOC called IndonesiaX in the past but it had permanently closed. We talked to the insider and found that it was closed because the founder had an accident.)

2) Focusing on the critical areas: hard science.

According to Edtech in South East Asia paper by Solve MIT, less than 15% of Ed Tech companies in Indonesia offer content focused on mathematics, science and reading. We focus on hard science because that’s the area where Indonesia performed poorly in PISA international tests. In fact, our first course is Calculus I and we’re planning to complete course selection on hard science (Calculus, Biology, Physics, Probability Statistics, & Chemistry) by next year.

3) Different partnership model give us flexibility.

The biggest bottleneck of edtech is low engagement. We decided to partner directly with lecturers instead of universities. This gave us the flexibility to custom the whole learning experience. We don’t create the typical boring one way lectures. We’re creating beautiful cinematic courses, collaborating with the lecturers to rethink the pedagogy for example: geometric illustrations with motion graphics for calculus courses, and we’re implementing an interactive exercised based with active online learning principles that’s backed by cutting edge cognitive science research.

4) A more inclusive & equitable high quality education. 

All this time, Indonesia’s higher education institutions have been performing with minimum internal feedback & without any external feedback. We believe that by providing far better learning alternatives that’s more equitable for all of the students in Indonesia, it’s going to change the whole education system. We’re seeing a trend that some students enrolled in the universities prefer to learn with Gradient for the better learning experience. And what this is going to result is, it’s going to create a healthy competition amongst higher education institutions to create a better learning experience. Because, students will have the option of where to learn and they’re going to demand a better learning experience. And, ultimately it will accelerate the transition to a more inclusive and equitable high quality education. 

Lastly, we think of our startup as a movement. We’re obsessed about being student centric by continuously taking feedback and improving the learning experience.

At the time we’re writing this, out of 470 students subscribed to Gradient, 59% of them are the underserved students. For the next year, we’re aiming to enroll 100.000 students in which 80% of them are the underserved students. 

*For simplification, we’re distinguishing college students from top 10 universities (Ranked by Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology Indonesia) vs the non top 10 universities. The underserved students are students from non top 10 universities and high school graduates that can’t enter college.

And here’s our plan :

1. We’re planning to create fundamental courses that’s needed by a most majors by next year (Probability & Statistics, Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, and Biology, Philosophy, & Psychology). 

2. We're partnering with a key lecturers that have strong credibility and exposure. This will allow us to leverage their networks of followers as organic marketing channels. 

3. Invest all the profits to increase course selection and improve learning experience by:

• build mobile applications , so students with unstable internet connection can download teaching materials when they have access to the internet.
• investing on teaching properties, visual illustrations, further research on video on demand technology.
• improve our artificial intelligence personal assistance (using the latest large language model) to provide better seamless 1 on 1 on demand mentoring.

And one day, we’re hoping to become an accredited online university that provides the best education with one tenth of Indonesia’s average college tuition. (most jobs in Indonesia still require formal degree)

If we win Solve MIT we’re going to use the fund to improve our pedagogy by investing on teaching properties, visual illustrations, further research on video on demand technology and improving our personal assistance technology. If we don’t, we’re planning to risk our personal savings and keep improving the student's learning experience.

Overall we are using existing technology that empower our learning platform so all of our users can access and learn in Gradient from anywhere and anytime. 

We are utilizing cutting edge web technologies and enhanced video encoding (HLS protocol) so our users can watch our video on demand with minimum internet bandwidth. We are also using programmatic math animations & motion graphics to better illustrate certain subjects like calculus to enrich users’ learning experience which is only possible through online learning.

As internet infrastructure in Indonesia is still a challenge for us or even other Edtech in Indonesia, we aim to develop learning platforms that consume less internet bandwidth so we can reach all Indonesian people that live in rural cities with bad internet connection.

In the near future, we’re planning to implement personalized assistance using AI from OpenAI API with the help of human assistance. We will collect the data before we develop our own AI so we can set our own criteria of limitations of what can be asked and what can’t, to prevent bias and cheating.

To date, we’ve helped 470+ students all across Indonesia and we managed to get 1600+ registered users on our website. We plan to serve 100.000 students and get 500.000 registered users by the end of 2023.

Financial: 

We don’t have enough money to pay for the initial investment on equipment purchase and place for production. This turned into a big operational challenge because every lecturer has a different location and we have to find equipment and place rental every time we do course production in different locations. 

Network of Lecturers:

Since we’re still new and we still have low brand awareness and credibility, we don’t have enough networks of lecturers outside our own universities that fits our criteria.

Infrastructure: 

Even though our internet infrastructure are keep improving, we are still facing unequal quality of internet across Indonesia especially in rural areas. This has become one of the biggest challenges we are facing to provide high quality content to our users, especially the ones in extreme poverty.

To reach our goals, we chose to partner with lecturers directly so we can have more control with the learning experience especially on curriculum and pedagogy. We seeks partnership with:

• University professors

• Magister / PhD/ Post doc students

• Professionals

We’ve partnered directly with 6 university professors to create course and collaborate by planning the curriculum & pedagogy together. 

And the interesting part is: all of them don’t want to get paid. As insiders, they know that Indonesia’s current higher education systems need help. They’re partnering with us because they’ve been waiting for this kind of initiation for years and they genuinely believe in our mission.

Key Resources

• Access to network of lecturers
• Production equipment
• Brand Trust

Partners + Key Stakeholders

Lecturers with good storytelling capabilities

Key Activities

• Course production from video taking to editing
• Customer relationship: managing group members and providing personal assistance

Type of Intervention

Product: Video on Demand + Interactive Exercises + Personal Assistance + Group Discussion with Members

Channels

• Website and Mobile Application

• Social Media: 

  • Tiktok, 

  • Instagram, 

  • Youtube, 

  • Twitter

Beneficiary Segments 

(who your beneficiary segments are -- even if they aren't paying you)

We believe that high quality human capital will ultimately benefit society as a whole, from companies, institutions, research & development groups, NGOs, to the student’s family.

Customers Value Proposition 

Overall better learning experience such as: Cinematic video, broad range of course selection, credibility of lecturers, different pedagogy

Social Value Proposition 

(rationale that will drive your customers to buy without forgetting about your impact on society)

Encourage lifelong learning and to develop their full potential.

Impact Measures 

(what kind of social impact you're creating and how it could be measured)

• # students 

• We ask “How likely do they want to learn more from scale 1 to 10?

Cost Structure

High initial investment for course production mainly for equipment rent, place rent, and lecturer’s fixed fee.

Surplus 

(what happens with profits and where you aim to reinvest them)

We’re obsessed to become the most student centric learning platform by prioritizing great learning experience. We’re going to reinvest our profits to further increase course selection and improve learning experience by:

1. Create more courses

2. Develop mobile application to provide students with unstable internet connection

3. Improve and scale our personalization technology to help more underserved students that need one on one assistance

4. Arrange live offline public lectures to create unique learning experience and meaningful interaction with our users

Revenue

Direct to consumers subscription freemium model.

Since launched we (3 co founders) have only raised 640$ per person from our personal savings. From that we’ve sold our minimum viable product and generated 2800$ in revenue with a positive net profit margin that’s enough to fund our next production. We managed to reduce our biggest cost (which is production cost) by 90% compared to other businesses with similar production models. 

Expected production course at max would be 1000$/course

Current pricing: 6,4$/month

Course maintenance : 100$ per year

Assuming our net profit margin stays roughly the same (30%), we only need at least 550 students/course to break even. Next production course, we’re collaborating with lecturers that have huge exposure (millions of following in social media). If we only get 0,1% of their followers, we would be profitable. We’re optimistic we can maintain our sustainability in the long run.