TeeSquare

TeeSquare is a socially purposed edTech enterprise dedicated to providing affordable, empowering, and inclusive quality education in Pakistan.

Our mission is to make functional literacy and numeracy accessible to all especially to children between ages 5 to 16 who are out of school. As per ASER’s report, the quality of education available to 52 million Pakistani students enrolled in schools is dismal. Less than 50% of third graders can read a sentence in English, and less than 50% can do 2-digit subtraction in math. Therefore, after 4 years of schooling, more than half our kids are still functionally NOT literate or numerate. In addition, there are 22.5 million out of school children who are between the ages of 5 to 16 years.

Our platform, Team Taleem is especially designed to be scalable with flexibility to add subjects, learners at multiple locations and monitoring based on learning outcomes. We have also designed an accelerated curriculum for functional literacy and numeracy, which is downloaded on low-cost tablets and works offline. Learners use an android app which works as special purpose digital workbooks which do not need active internet or electricity. The app has digitized Urdu, English, and Mathematics courses aligned with the national curriculum, predesigned quality content in lesson plans with flexibility for contextualization of language, lesson plans and graphics. The digital quality content compensates for otherwise compromised instructors in our classrooms.

The learning is done in blended learning environments, where children come into classrooms in each area, and local supervisors moderate effective group learning using an engaging, gamified app for self-paced learning. We do not require a qualified teacher in room, and a supervisor who can guide them to use the tablets and help them login is sufficient. 

Our core values are:

• Education is a right, not a privilege.
• Handing over the reins of learning in the learner's hand
• Technology is the modern day magic
• The cause of education unites us

Ms. Zainab Hameed, CEO and Co-Founder of TeeSquare is the main point of contact for the Solve application.

Zainab is the technical co-founder of TeeSquare. As a senior IT professional with over 20 years of experience in CIO roles, she actively manages product development and technology architecture. Zainab also manages partnerships. Her current responsibilities at TeeSquare include creating a network of TeeSquare advocates, expanding learner communities for the delivery of education, and developing strategic partnerships.

Sadia is the strategic co-founder for TeeSquare, and has driven the strategy of the organization. She is a seasoned Human Resources practitioner, adept in organizational development skills and technology, which has led her to successfully drive transformation and growth in the multiple blue chip corporates that she has worked for in her 18 year career. With her first hand experience of homeschooling her  younger son, she has conceived and delivered the engagement model of the gamified app

Our platform, Team Taleem has a gamified android app with gamified digital workbooks which are downloaded on low-cost tablets and do not need active internet or electricity. The quality digital content compensates for otherwise compromised instructors in our classrooms.

The LEAP project is a priority for TeeSquare to customize the content based on gender and age groups. We want to create evidence to show whether or not interventions work, mainly by doing research and impact evaluation.

Our priorities are fully aligned with the LEAP projects as we are keen to set up a robust data and analysis infrastructure so that we can use regularly collected data to:

• evaluate program effectiveness, and
• continuously improve our product.

Our team is very well suited to do this because we have:

1. tech expertise to set up a robust data infrastructure
2. priority alignment and are open to make changes, if needed
3. a strong and committed team to follow through

First and foremost, our Team Lead and co-founder has extensive experience in tech for social ventures. Prior to Team Taleem, she has implemented state of the art network of 1100+ POS terminals in the rural Pakistan to improve business performance, won local PASHA ICT Award 2011 and regional APICTA 2011 awards for e-Inclusion and e-Community. She has also laureate at 2013 The Computerworld Honors program. She has also led other large size technology implementations. She has also been part of regional leadership teams, worked in global projects and has worked extensively with multicultural teams. Her vast experience in handling large projects ensures that the LEAP Project will be executed with precision and efficiency.

Furthermore, our team members are highly committed to the success of the LEAP Project. We recognize the significance of this initiative and the potential impact it can have on the community. We are passionate about improving educational outcomes and creating equitable opportunities for all learners. Our dedication and enthusiasm will drive us to devote the necessary time and resources to ensure the success of the LEAP Project.

Team Taleem, a gamified app, with digital workbooks used for self-paced learning of literacy and numeracy skills. 

Pakistan has the second-largest population of out-of-school children at the primary level, with 22.8 million children not receiving any education. As per ASER report, 52 million Pakistani students enrolled in schools face learning poverty. Less than 50% of third graders cannot read a sentence in English, and less than 50% can do 2-digit subtraction in math. Therefore, after 4 years of schooling, more than half our kids are still functionally NOT literate or numerate.

COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters have further aggravated this situation further limiting access to quality education and throwing many people out of the conventional school system. For those that do attend schools, the quality of learning is questionable. Significant discrepancies exist in Pakistan's educational system, which mainly affects marginalized people. This includes a lack of access to quality teachers and infrastructural deficiencies that are leaving large populations of people out of the traditional school system.

The inaccessibility of quality education poses significant barriers to socioeconomic and personal growth, perpetuating the vicious cycle of inequality and hindering the overall development of the nation. Without equitable access to quality education, individuals are deprived of the necessary knowledge and skills to thrive in today's rapidly changing world that is increasingly becoming digital and success requires ability to gain knowledge quickly. The education gap disproportionately affects marginalized communities, further exacerbating existing inequalities. Without intervention, this cycle of limited educational opportunities will persist, constraining individuals' potential and impeding social progress.

By addressing this pressing issue and providing an alternative route through Team Taleem's educational technology platform, we can break the chains of limited access to quality education, empowering individuals to overcome barriers to progress at which the first step is attaining literacy and numeracy. Through our self-paced literacy platform, students embark on an accelerated program, achieving class 2 level literacy and numeracy.

Team Taleem, a gamified app, with digital workbooks, which are easy to use. It is preloaded on low-cost tablets, and helps learners to go from K to 2, in English, Urdu and Maths at their own pace.

The platform is built on four key pillars:

• Curriculum Alignment: Our platform offers predesigned quality content in lesson plans in Urdu, English and Maths that are with the Pakistan national curriculum. We prioritize flexibility for the contextualization of language, lesson plans, and graphics to ensure relevance and effectiveness.
• Blended Learning Model: Team Taleem adopts a blended learning approach, combining self-paced learning through an engaging, gamified app with local supervisors in each area to facilitate effective blended learning. The contextualized and structured lesson plans facilitate independent learning through digital workbooks that provide extensive variety and enable experiential learning.
• Scalable Solution: With scalability in mind, our platform allows for the addition of subjects, locations, guardians, and learners. We employ learning outcomes-based monitoring through our extensive reporting, to ensure consistent educational quality.
• Accessibility & Affordability: Recognizing concerns about electricity and internet availability, we have developed special-purpose digital workbooks that operate offline on low-cost tablets and use minimal power and internet connectivity making education accessible even in resource-constrained environments.

Team Taleem is particularly suited to the communities it serves in the following ways:

Our target learners are those in marginalized communities who have not had a chance to go to school. We mainly target children of ages 6-16 who are out of school. We also offer the program to adult women who have not had a chance to go to school.

These communities are in urban slums and pre-urban localities.

- User Friendly Interface: The program is geared towards communities with limited technology access and time constraints; either because they are overaged out-of-school children or adults who just didn’t have the chance to education in earlier. With voice-enabled instructions, intuitive navigation and an easy interface, Team Taleem empowers learners so that even first-time digital device users can easily use the platform.

- Accelerated Learning Program: Any age group can begin learning and practicing using digital workbooks at their own pace. Typically, if a learner uses digital workbooks for 3 hours per day, every day, they can finish their early learning education in Urdu, English, and Math in one year.

- Comprehensive Learning: The learning experience is made complete and totally engaging for students using gamification. Engagement boosters include animated video courses and interactive digital workbooks in the target language. With extensive use of practice exercises, writing tools and   immediate feedback to learners, the learning outcomes are achieved. 

- Immersive Experience: The program's digital workbooks offer students the flexibility to practice, assess themselves, and learn at their own speed.

-Student & Community Level Monitoring: Team Taleem is a subscription-based educational program that tracks each learner's progress through online tests and reports outcomes to teachers and parents. This also assists in identifying areas which need support.

 - Blended Learning facilitated by community supervisors: Center supervisors facilitate the learning sessions and are there to encourage self-paced learning. Multiple students can utilize the same learning kit sequentially with offline content. The availability of the Internet does not interfere with learning sessions.  

We are applying to the LEAP program precisely to demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. Although we have not yet conducted any scientific research studies on our solution, we are now looking to design an impact evaluation, for which we need assistance. 

We are well positioned to begin this, now that we are regularly collecting data of student usage, their performance on worksheets, and learning outcome data through assessments. Internally, we closely monitor the following metrics:

• On a weekly basis we monitor attendance, hours spent and lessons completed.
• On a monthly basis we monitor learning outcomes through assessments and community engagement through retentions and dropouts.

 We have observed some preliminary learning outcomes which suggests that our solution is well matched to the problem we are solving, making a difference in our target audience's educational outcome.

These learning outcomes are monitored through monitoring in the following ways:

• Baseline assessment and progress monitoring of learners.
• Case studies by way of short learner interviews are recorded.
• Community interviews are done regularly and recorded for feedback and improvement of the offering.
• Attendance data that we receive from our system.
• Evaluation of our learners against comparative assessments.

The data is aggregated and studied to monitor the effectiveness.

To believe that with help of researchers we will be able to design an impact evaluation model which will help us scale our impact more effectively.

We are committed to contributing to a growing body of evidence in the EdTech space by partnering with researchers and providing a practitioner’s platform with a large user base and a ready data infrastructure. 

What has the research/studies you have conducted revealed about your solution and how did it inform your work moving forward? [200-500 words recommended]

Through continual research as part of early-stage product development and moving forward, the data we have collected gives us significant insights into the challenges that exist in Pakistan's education sector

These findings initially influenced the development and design of the Team Taleem platform.  We designed and developed Team Taleem platform keeping in mind the above challenges and addressed them by designing 

• a scalable solution that can be used by different age groups. 
• an engaging, gamified, interactive digital worksheets, predesigned lesson plans and quality content 
• offline learning session  
• easy to understand instructions in local language
• self-paced learning app accessible anywhere with learning kit
• monitoring mechanism 

We are using these insights to continuously iterate on our solution and improve efficacy.

To enable accessible learning, Team Taleem has done significant rethinking of education delivery to the masses. In the current schooling model, a child once left behind finds it nearly impossible to integrate back to school. Team Taleem has been designed to be used regardless of age. The app provides a safe space for learners of all ages and genders to access our content. The model, enables our learners to join at any age, and through a self-paced program access Team Taleem’s educational resources to learn on his or her timeline. Moreover, our platform is accessible anywhere, and learners can access it using a learning kit. This ensures that education is not limited to traditional classroom settings but can be accessed anytime and anywhere, fostering a culture of lifelong learning.

Another challenge we recognized is the quality of teachers in Pakistan. To overcome this obstacle, Team Taleem offers an engaging and gamified learning experience. Our platform incorporates high-quality content, interactive digital worksheets, and predesigned lesson plans that ensure an enriching educational experience. By leveraging these features, we aim to enhance the quality of teaching and make the learning process more effective and enjoyable.

Connectivity is another significant challenge faced by many individuals in Pakistan. To address this issue, Team Taleem has been designed to work offline. Learners can access the platform and its resources without relying on a constant internet connection. This offline capability ensures that educational opportunities are not limited by connectivity constraints, thereby enabling access to education in remote or underserved areas.

Furthermore, we have studied the importance of language in effective learning. Therefore, Team Taleem provides easy-to-understand instructions in the local language. By eliminating language barriers, we strive to make learning more accessible and inclusive for all learners, regardless of their linguistic background.

To address the need for monitoring and tracking progress, Team Taleem incorporates a system that enables the monitoring of learners' progress. Each user is assigned a unique ID, which allows for individualized tracking and assessment. This feature provides valuable insights into learners' strengths and areas for improvement, enabling personalized support and interventions.

Team Taleem is a growing organization with about 500 learners enrolled at 12 learning centers.

To help us grow faster, we are looking at the following areas where we would like to strengthen the evidence base of our solution. 

• Comparative Analysis of our Solution to other Solutions: Compare the literacy outcomes of students who have used the edtech solution with those who have not. This can be done by selecting similar groups of students and measuring their progress over a specific period. We would also like to gather qualitative data through user surveys and interviews with students, teachers, and parents on their experiences, perceptions, and attitudes toward the solution. This can provide valuable insights into the solution's effectiveness and user satisfaction and also give us insights as to what would be user needs to make our offering better.
• Utilize data analytics techniques to analyze usage patterns, student engagement, and learning progress within the edtech platform. Identify correlations between platform usage and literacy outcomes to uncover insights that can inform improvements in the solution and provide evidence of its effectiveness, particularly with respect to age group and demographics. The results can help establish a causal relationship between the edtech solution and improved literacy skills as well as develop correlation between time and age group. This will enable us to understand better how to address our target market better and segment if needed across variables to identify specialized courses to augment our initial offering.
• External Validation: Collaborate with external researchers or academic institutions to design and possibly conduct an independent evaluation of the edtech solution. This can add credibility and strengthen the connection to evidence by involving unbiased experts who can assess the solution's impact.

How well is my product addressing the needs of my target demographics?

• What are the internal and external factors that determine whether the learner is engaged and on a fast track to completion or disengaged and slower to complete the course or even at risk of dropout.
• What are the prescriptive techniques I can use to improve learner outcomes, optimize the content and learning sessions.

We understand that a 12-week sprint is not sufficient time to conduct a complete impact evaluation study. So, our desired outputs from the LEAP project sprint would be:

-LEAP researchers and  fellows to assist us in designing an impact evaluation model that we can conduct either ourselves or via a third party over a year-long period and beyond.

- Review of our current data infrastructure and help strengthen the metrics we monitor on a regular basis, so that our analytics are at par with global best practices. Research fellows can help us identify whether we need to start collecting any additional data to be able to accurately demonstrate the impact of our solution.

- Review learner assessments and other qualitative instruments to guide that we are getting the data we need in the best possible manner. If time permits, we would like the fellows to suggest how to design and field-test additional instruments (e.g. surveys etc.).

- If time permits in the research, we would also want the LEAP team to conduct a pilot study to test the model and analyze the data collected to identify learning patterns and trends related to age and gender. This will help us run the model for our population of learners.

Following the conclusion of the LEAP Project sprint, our organization plans to the use the outputs to improve the effectiveness of our edtech solution and enhance the learning outcomes of our users, specifically targeting different age groups. The ways we plan to use LEAP study are:
Analysis of Results: The results produced during the LEAP Project sprint will be carefully analysed. We hope that the LEAP Project will provide us with unbiased, insightful information about the benefits and drawbacks of our product as well as point out areas for improvement.
Assessment of Offering: We will be revising our course choices and community organization on the basis of the findings from the analysis. We shall assess whether or not our solution fulfils the learning objectives and is suited to cognitive capacities of various age groups in light of the study's findings. We will be able to deliver a more specialised and efficient learning experience thanks to this personalization.
Course Customization: Based on our findings, plan to evaluate and customize our existing courses based on the age groups of our users. Findings of specific literacy challenges faced by different age cohorts,will be used to  modify the content, exercises, and teaching methodologies of our courses to address the unique needs and preferences of each age group. This targeted approach will maximize the impact of our solution and ensure that it remains relevant and engaging for all learners.
Piloting and Iterative Development: To validate the effectiveness we will conduct pilots with a diverse group of learners from different age groups as a further feedback to optimize its impact on literacy skills.
Dissemination and Collaboration: We recognize the importance of sharing our findings and outputs with the broader educational community. We plan to disseminate the results of the LEAP Project to the wider community.

Following the conclusion of the LEAP Project sprint, our organization plans to use the outputs f the research to improve the effectiveness of our edtech solution and enhance the learning outcomes of our user. The desired outcomes from this study are:

Short-Term Outcomes involve helping TeeSquare understand its learners by age and gender and optimizing the platform accordingly. The desired outcomes can be broken into the following short- term outcomes.

• Research study design
• Design of data collection instruments
• Review data infrastructure 
• Review metrics to meet international standards

The long-term outcomes involve TeeSquare to build better products for improved learning outcomes, personalized learning experiences, reduced disparities, and a commitment to continuous improvement. These can be delivered as following:

• Conduct the study and measure learning impacts, adding to global literature on edtech in low-resourced settings.
• Improve model for validation of learning outcomes leading to continuous improvement.
• Identify areas of improvement where Team Taleem can be optimized for better product market fit.
• Identifying specific needs of learners by age and gender, the research outcomes may lead to the implementation of targeted engagement strategies to enable us to understand which features, interventions, or support mechanisms would increase learner engagement and reduce the risk of dropout.

We will work with local researchers and PhD students at higher education institutes in Pakistan to conduct the research study that will be designed by the researchers and team at LEAP.