Mobile iLearn

The iLearn program has been equipping learners in underserved communities in Nigeria with strong foundational literacy and numeracy skills with a special focus on children in a correctional homes.

Basic education has an important role to play in every human's life. An individual without basic literacy and numeracy skills might find it difficult to navigate through the world.  

Globally, it has been reported that children have poor foundational literacy and numeracy skills. According to The State of Global Learning Poverty 2022 update, 70 per cent of 10-year-old children in low and middle-income countries cannot read a simple text with comprehension- World Bank 2022. This problem is evident in Nigeria as many kids do not have basic literacy and numeracy skills, especially those in marginalized areas - those who don't have access to education due to so many factors, such as socio-economic factors and those who appear to be unreachable - like those in the correctional facilities and refugee camps.

Socioeconomic factors are an integral part of an individual's life. Socioeconomic factors, such as income, education, employment, community safety and social support can significantly affect how well and how long we live. These factors affect our ability to make healthy choices, afford medical care, and housing, manage stress, and even educational advancements.

Most children the end up in correctional facilities and refugee camps tend to miss out on learning opportunities posing a problem upon their reentry into the community. They find it difficult to cope with their peers, and miss out on the current waves/trends in educational matters, reducing their chances of becoming productive members of the society 

In Nigeria, some cities are affected by insurgency thereby limiting children’s access to safe schooling and inability to attain basic literacy and numeracy skills through the traditional education route. Hence, the need to come up with innovative ways to provide access to basic literacy and numeracy skills to this category of children.

What can they do without basic numeracy and literacy skills? Literacy and numeracy skills are needed everywhere including for day-to-day conversations, societal engagement, peer interaction and more. Numeracy skills are needed for basic daily activities such as purchasing something in the store. Daily and self-esteem-boosting activities are centred on both numeracy and literacy skills.

The consequences of the lack of the aforementioned skills include the lack of inability to navigate the world. These children are all behind and might never catch up.

Due to the high need for basic literacy and numeracy skills, the mobile iLearn idea was born.

It is proposed to be sustained and scaled through a mobile classroom - trucks, vans, and movable containers stationed in marginalized areas - rural communities, internally displaced people's camps, correctional facilities and so on.

The lesson contents will make use of low-cost educational technology such as educational applications, and software, as well as audio and visual technology.

Here, the mobile iLearn serves as the classroom equipped with all the necessary resources needed for quality learning activities. The mobile classroom will be stocked with digital devices with pre-installed video recordings of the literacy and numeracy content.

Children who do not have access to traditional schooling will be able to build their basic numeracy and literacy skills with the help of professional educators who will be on the ground to guide and support them as these learners navigate the learning materials.

The mobile iLearn aims to bring "Education" to the target audiences’ "Doorsteps".

The target population for this innovation are children who don't have access to basic education, such as kids in marginalized areas, kids affected by war or natural disasters, and children who seem to be unreachable (Correctional homes) to traditional educators and education.

Additionally these children lack numeracy and literacy skills, and this inhibits how they navigate through life. Most of them cannot perform easy numerical activities or even read and comprehend simple sentences.

Mobile iLearn will equip them with basic numeracy and literacy skills by using the TaRL (Teaching at Right Level) approach. Mobile iLearn will make learning closer, more accessible, inclusive and easier for the target population.

The iLearn team consists of professional individuals with the skills and knowledge needed in the education system. We currently run a nonprofit focused on making education accessible for children in marginalized areas.

We have worked with children across different communities, and have discovered the difficulties the children face in gaining equitable access to quality education. As a not-for-profit organization, we have several programs centred around education access allowing us to identify different issues faced by our target population and to serve many of them at a go. We have worked with children for over six (6) years reaching over 5000 school-age children and it is paramount to say that we have been able to identify the area needs of marginalized kids and innovation to address their needs at scale.

Some of  the programs we execute as a nonprofit  focused on making education accessible to children in marginalized areas are

 Back to School Program

The Back-to-School program is a program that seeks to assist students in underserved communities through the provision of  Back-to-School supplies such as textbooks, school uniforms, notebooks, pens, school bags, etc to ensure a smooth transition into the new academic session. 

●     iRead Program

The iRead program provides educational equality by ensuring that school children in underserved communities learn how to read and understand effectively. Through this program, we keep moving a step forward in closing the literacy gap between rural and urban students' performance in terms of literacy.

●       Scholar Program

The Scholar program empowers secondary school students with fewer opportunities and inadequate access to quality education, the platform to access an equitable education.

The program provides secondary school students with adequate skills and preparation for ease of transition into universities.  Students who are selected receive an award to the tune of a Million Naira.

●       iLearn Program

The IQRA Foundation - Access to books through her iLearn program was born with the vision of providing quality and equitable education to young learners in the most vulnerable part of Nigeria. The program is set out to equip the learners with a strong literacy and numeracy foundation. This year, TIF will be advancing its iLearn program by providing mobile classroom learning centres fully equipped with modern learning devices like laptops, phones, and tablets containing our pre-recorded e-learning materials. The mobile learning space will move from one location to another within our partner communities with a facilitator on board to guide and instruct the learners on how to use these devices. Through this innovation, we will be able to gain access to more kids in the most remote parts of Nigeria and provide them with the rare opportunity to build their literacy and numeracy skills.

 iLearn empowers children in Nigeria's most vulnerable communities with the fundamentals of numeracy and literacy skills.

The organization has tested this initiative with kids at correctional facilities in Nigeria. The team has worked with kids across two correctional homes in Nigeria in the last three years. We had physical interaction with the kids during the program and the idea of a digitized and mobile iLearn came up when we realized the positive effects of the program on the kids we have worked with.

An evaluation was carried out and it was recorded that the kids improved greatly in both numeracy and literacy skills but there is a need for the sustainability of the project. Hence, the iLearn program as a mobile classroom

The iLearn program which has been equipping learners in underserved communities in Nigeria with strong foundational literacy and numeracy skills with a special focus on children in correctional homes in Lagos and Ogun state will be digitizing its content to reach even more learners across Nigeria and Africa.

Through the TIF platform, the iLearn program Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) curriculum will be gamified to cater to the educational needs of learners in low-income communities. The content and lessons will be tailored to equip our users with the requisite knowledge needed to build strong literacy and numeracy skills.

-          Aims and Objectives

● iLearn will increase the literacy level of our learners.

● It will improve the learners' chance of climbing out of poverty in the communities.

● At an individual level, our learners will be able to read and write properly and solve basic and intermediate math sums.

●Contribute to bridging the digital inequality gap that exists between learners in high and low-income communities.

●Provide access to quality and equitable digital education to children in rural communities.

● Learners will be engaged in a fun way as learning will become as fun as play through their engagement with the platform.

In the next year, the TaRL curriculum will be produced and converted to lessons that are suited to meet the learning needs of our users at various foundational levels of literacy and numeracy competencies. These lessons will be digitized using animated game-based methods of teaching and learning. Specifically, the proposed intervention will:

●          Create acceptable Numeracy and Literacy TaRL curricula.

●          Convert the curricula to gamified lessons.

●          Transform gamified lessons into interactive animated lessons.

The iLearn program will be employing the use of mobile classrooms fully equipped with digital learning tools like educational tablets each moving from one assigned location to the other.

-  Effectiveness of the Intervention Approach

The self-paced, interactive, and gamified nature of our intervention approach makes it an ideal one for our targeted learners. The World is evolving, and digitizing is the order of the day. The demand for e-Learning companies grows daily as the world sees it as a better, affordable, and easy platform to learn. We could tell from the transition from offline paper exams to computer-based exams.

Hence, this project will be an improvement of tested and acceptable interventions that will achieve the desired objectives of equipping learners in underserved communities with literacy and numeracy skills as well as digital skills that will prepare them ahead for the digital world.

By leveraging the human-centred approach to problem-solving, the production of content will go through rigorous research and iteration processes to ensure it is meeting the needs of our users through the support of our product testers.

-          Key Performance Indicators and Success Metrics

● Completion of the project works and ready to test within the first 3 months.

● Test on a sample size of 10-50 learners yielding a 70% minimum score result for all samples.

● Direct proportionality of score to the number of attempts: Learners will have multiple chances of attempting the gamified quiz questions on the platform and data should show an increase in the score as attempts increase.

● No less than 90% of users will attain intermediate proficiency in Basic Literacy and Numeracy within a year of usage.

-          Engagement Strategy

●          Curriculum breakdown to lessons.

●          Lessons gamified.

●          Creation and addition of interactive quiz questions.

●          Lesson contents animated.

●          Inclusion of quiz attempts feedback.

●          Performance and/or progress summary reports.

As an Edtech solution, iLearn will make use of modern-day technology to facilitate effective teaching and learning processes, such as the Internet of Things, Audiovisual media, Learning analytics and Machine Learning, Mobile applications, Dashboards, APIs, and software.

The mobile learning app will use a hybrid app development because it allows for building apps that are both native and core. Hybrid apps behave like websites but can also feature on mobile devices.

We have worked with over a hundred kids in juvenile centers in Nigeria and the goal is to serve over a thousand kids in the next year.

Financial barriers might limit the impact of our innovation.

Mobile iLearn need a lot of money to run, from the purchase of the vehicles, digitalized lesson content, external cost to keep the vehicle running and others

 However, through adequate funding, we will launch the solution successfully. We will also pursue partnership with government offices to ensure sthe sustainability of the solution.

Location differences among the project execution team members could be a challenge and we plan to overcome this by leveraging the google  work space for smooth and effective communication.

Server and/or Network Issue is another possible challenge, yet we would be ready to prevent or provide solutions by using multiple network providers as well as get novels and other interesting books to keep them engaged in a situation where the internet is completely out of service.

Localization of the lesson contents and the e of indigenes as facilitators to suit every learner in a different region of its reach is another feasible challenge. Nevertheless, we would ensure localized content that is suitable for Nigeria and AfthAfter can context.

The project can run the risk of having an unstable power supply due to its steady movement and rural location, but we plan to overcome this by getting UPS and power banks with the capacity of charging our devices.

Raised for Excellence. The organization focuses on Counseling for Behavioral Change, Empowering, and Advocating for Youths so they can have a better future where young people are equipped to achieve their dreams and contribute to the development of society at large.

Through our partnership with Raised for Excellence, we ensure that our learners in the correctional homes are getting all round reformation in behavior and education.

Our business model is B2C where we provide kids with basic literacy and numeracy skills. Lesson content will be recorded on mobile devices embedded in a mobile van that will be stationed in specific areas in marginalized communities. This will make learning and education accessible to children in low-resource areas.

Our Key Customers/beneficiaries are kids who are out of school, kids in correctional homes, and refugee camps, and kids who are affected by social insecurities. 

Key stakeholders include.

Government

Other educational NGOs

Edtech startups

Counselors

Educators/teachers

Value prepositions

Edtech platform with digitized content in a mobile van makes learning accessible to the beneficiaries and provides them with basic numeracy and literacy skills. This approach will ensure that children in the most vulnerable parts of Nigeria are able to access equitable and quality education with ease.

According to the UN's projections,  by 2050 half of the world’s youth population will be from Africa. This means that the future of work and innovation will be dependent on this population. However, with the rapid growth of technology, many young learners in Africa are being left behind.

The goal is to make sure that our target learners are not left behind and can meet up with the demands of life.

Cost

Learning devices

Salaries and stipends for human resources

Media and publicity

The organization is a non-profit focused on using grants and donations to achieve our goals.  The path to financial sustainability is partnering with the government of the communities we would work with to fund the innovation and through organizations that support our motives