Partners for International Development (PfID)

Purpose: To make quality elementary education accessible to anyone, anywhere. 

Objectives: 

1. To integrate ICT in elementary education in order to attain digital literacy among pupils especially in rural settings
2. To help improve learners' grades through an after-school program that allows them to review digital learning resources in an individualized manner. 

How we serve our target:

The organization's target population for the after-school program are primary school children in the rural settings. 

We pursue the purpose of this program by carrying out the following activities in order to serve our target population: 

• We organize specialized training and professional development to pre-existing teachers in the selected schools who become 1ROOM coaches for the after-school program. 
• We also provide the school with a lockable metallic storage cabinet to store all equipment intended for the program.
• We provide digital education resources that have been locally produced by our content production team as well as resources from open-source schools such as Khan Academy and CK-12. 
• We also provide the necessary offline technology (e.g., a Raspberry pi to store and broadcast the digital content, wireless keyboard and mouse, earphones and earphone splitters, etc.) so that students can access the offline digital library. 
• We provide advice, leadership support and technical expertise on matters relating to the after-school math program.

As the Team Lead for the organization's content production team. Wilson's responsibilities include: 

• developing digital learning resources for primary and secondary national syllabus. These resources include audio scripts, slides, audio recordings, hands-on project descriptions for students and teachers, homework and practice questions. 
• integrating learning resources into information technology platforms provided by PfID (tablets, servers, e-learning library software) and organizing such content in a coherent organized manner. 
• preparing training manuals and other resources for teachers who wish to make maximum use of the learning resources and technology platforms. 
• supporting and co-supervising volunteers and interns who work with the content production team. 
• supporting and co-supervising an after-school math program in two rural primary schools.
• regulating the means of access to the Kisumu office by other authorized personnel in a manner that ensures security of persons and studio equipment in the office. 

Our organization has a team consisting of full time staff of four, part time staff, consultants and volunteers working on this project. We do not foresee a challenge of competing priorities any time in the near future because this is our main focus.

Our core team of four members has been working on the project since 2016. We started with developing digital resources, we run pilot programs and now we want to expand the program to cover a western Kenya in the short run and in the long run cover the whole of Kenya.

We seek to leverage on the core skills and training the core team has developed over the years to make this a success. They have had first hand experience both at the desk level and in the field. This makes them believe they are confident to be project hosts as they understand it deeply. They are confident that with the help of LEAP fellows we will achieve our objectives faster and in a more efficient way.

1Room After-School Program delivers digitized elementary educational resources in a self-paced, individualized manner using technology that operates off-grid and offline. 

Our problem is “Lack of technological support in Kenyan classrooms”. According to “Millennium Development Goals in Kenya: Needs and Costs”, a document prepared by Kenya’s Ministry of Planning and National Development in 2005, education, especially primary or elementary education, continues to experience a number of challenges that inhibit the full achievement of education as a Millennium Development Goal in the Kenya's Vision 2030. Some of these challenges include overstretched facilities, overcrowding in schools, and high pupil to teacher ratios.This leaves the Kenyan pupil always scrambling to get the attention of the teacher which translates to poor overall performance in class. 

The system is not able to cater for the needs of the slow learners who need individual attention, or the fast-paced learners who would wish to learn ahead in the syllabus. 

We believe that these problems can be solved through integration of education technology into classroom teaching which can allow pupils to interact with material at an individualized manner without heavily relying on the assistance of the subject teacher. In 2018, the government attempted to introduce ICT in public primary schools by distributing tablets to some of selected schools in each county. However, the learning resources that had been loaded onto the tablets became obsolete with the introduction of the new curriculum, Competency Based Curriculum. The once well intended program that had been rolled out by the national government became redundant. We at Partners for International Development (PfID) are committed to solve these challenges by introducing ICT integrated learning as an after-school program while putting to good use the tablets, computers and projectors that lie idle in the schools. 

The 1Room Program is an after-school program that seeks to solve the above named problems. It is a program in which pupils learn using a raspberry pi and a tablet. The raspberry pi acts as an offline library, therefore making it usable in rural areas where internet connection is unavailable. It allows the learners to conduct self-paced learning by selecting what they would like to revise at that particular time. The lessons are in the form of videos that the pupil can pause and rewind as many times as they want. This caters for the needs of the slow learners. At the end of each lesson, there are revision questions that are self-checking and so the learner gets to know whether they are right or wrong as they go along. The device stores the progress of each pupil and we can access this information remotely. This enables us to track the interaction of each pupil with the device, as well as track progress of topics learned. To make the experience interesting to the learners as well, they earn points each time they interact with a video or lesson. We have trained a teacher to act as the 1Room coach. The coach is able to plan and assign lessons beforehand if he wants all the pupils to work on a similar task. Once he logs in, he is able to see the progress of the lesson i.e. learners who have not started, learners who are in progress and learners who have finished the assignment. He is also able to see  learners who are stuck. Thus, he can give individualized attention to the learners experiencing difficulties. Our focus in the last two years has been on the Math Program. We selected 75 pupils per school into our program, and used the rest of the pupils as the control group. We tracked their scores in Mathematics from when they joined the program up to now. Our findings are that there is a bigger positive deviation in the performance of our pupils than the control group. They have done better in Mathematics both in internal and national exams. In future, we endeavor to incorporate more subjects into the program.

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Summative research

Over the course of two years, our team has conducted experimental studies with our 1Room after-school program to determine its effectiveness in improving test scores in mathematics for pupils in primary schools. We selected two rural schools which are understaffed especially in the mathematics department. One of the school, Simboyi primary, for instance, has one professionally-trained math teacher for the upper primary (grades 4-8). The other school, Chavogere primary, has no professionally-trained mathematics teacher for the upper primary. 

We trained a coach from the existing pool of the teaching staff on the use of our technology as well as the 1ROOM teaching and learning pedagogy. With the assistance of the specially-trained coach, we randomly assigned 75 participants (pupils), equally distributed between grade 4 to grade 8. The participants (15) in each grade form the experimental group vis-à-vis the rest of the class (control group). 

Each experimental group spends an hour on average reviewing the content after the regular-day school lessons are over. Participants attempt questions on topics that they would like to improve in or topics they have fallen behind. Participants who want to forge ahead in the syllabus are also allowed to review content that they are yet to learn in class. The participants check their responses and get immediate feedback. Meanwhile, the teacher can track the progress of the learners. The teacher keeps track of the topics that the participants still perform poorly in and report back to the relevant class teachers and the head teacher for further action. 

Meanwhile, the control group undertakes the regular remedial lessons usually organized by the school. 

We ask the coach to retrieve math test scores for the entire class with the assistance of the class teachers for all the grades concerned whenever internal and external exams are written by the pupils. With this data, we are able to compare deviations in math scores and grades for the experimental groups against the control groups. 

Our findings from the experimental study is that pupils that were exposed to our enhanced after-school program posted improved grades in the overall math test scores at the end of the term. 

Strengths

At the start of the project and even in the pilot phase the implementation team was worried about the acceptance of the program as our pedagogy advocates for one coach and one classroom. The research revealed that that the learners and coaches were interested as this approach was more efficient in time of time, labor and cost. More learners were interested in the program hence it is projected that enrollment would go up and teachers would be engaged leaving none of them unemployed. The grades of the learners in the experimental group were also better as compared to the control group showing that our approach works. The reliance on the coach as in the traditional system was also reduced close to none and the learning become more student oriented. To add to this, this approach also reduces the cost of schooling by more than half as the cost of learning resources, uniforms and other overhead expenses are reduced as compared to the current system.

Opportunities

We also encountered challenges during our pilot research period. Our serves can only support a limited number of client devices. From time to time learners were randomly logged out of the system which slowed down the learning process. The anticipated interest was less than the response we received, more learners at the pilot sites were interested in joining our program and we could not accommodate these requests. Also, since we work in the rural areas, we had frequent power outages which disrupted learning. We also assumed that the technology would work with all types of operating systems and software. This was not the case as some of them broke down and required frequent repairs. We also discovered that we needed a more elaborate data collection tool as the current one had hitches here and there.

Recommendations

As  a team we resolved to 

• Acquire more serves
• Procure power banks to counter the power outage problem and since Kenya has a lot of sunshine acquiring a solar powered solution is in our long term plan
• Acquire more advanced software to support the learning
• We also thought it wise to reach out to partners in the education sector to help design a tailor made data collection tool for the 1Room program.

Right now the impact is limited to randomized control groups of 75 beneficiaries per school in the two primary schools where we are currently running the program.There is a need for us to scale our program to impact 15,000 pupils in the next three years, by introducing our program in more primary schools, and upping our enrolment in each school. The aim is to prove that our program is effective and impactful in not only a small sample of two schools but also in a bigger population. Once we are able to achieve this, the 1Room Program will be able to attract potential partners both at the local and national levels. These partnerships are especially desirable to us because our dream is to prove to the government that ICT-integrated learning should be a necessity and not an option.

Now is the right time to engage in the LEAP Program because we have tested and proven that our program works, and we need the expertise of the LEAP Fellows to guide us as we move to the next phase of up-scaling the program. The invaluable insights that we will get from the LEAP Program will steer us away from potholes that we may get along the way.

1. Does an enhanced after-school education program improve mathematics over what pupils would achieve in regular remedial lessons, as measured by pupils' test scores?
2. Does an enhanced after-school education program affect other in-school academic behavior outcomes, as measured by reports from regular-school-day teachers of learners engagement, behavior, and homework completion?
3. What are the impacts of an enhanced after-school education program for subgroups of students based on their prior academic performance and grade level?

1. A tailored guide on how to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCT) to assess the impacts of an enhanced after-school instruction on children's test scores in math as compared to in-school remedial lessons organized by teachers. 
2. Recommendations on an implementation roadmap that explores the acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, feasibility and sustainability of the piloted program within the school and the wider community. 
3. A series of survey tools and instruments to evaluate the impacts of an enhanced after-school education program is having on students behaviour and  attitudes among themselves and towards teachers. 

Our organization plans to put into action the outcomes to improve the delivery of the after-school education program not only for math but for other subjects offered in elementary education. We are especially keen on the data collection matrix. We envision a situation where this data or evidence will be used to approach education policy makers and stakeholders giving them a clear roadmap on how to incorporate technology in the national school curriculum that will give the best output according the country's vision 2030. 

We seek to engage the LEAP Fellows in developing the matrix that we will use now and in the future to measure both qualitative and quantitative outcomes of our approach. With this evidence ( our assumption being that it will improve on the current results by more than 50%) we plan to approach education stakeholders and the government to integrate this teaching and learning pedagogical approach in the national school curriculum. 

Short-term outcomes

• To develop data collection skills among the full-time members of the 1Room team

• To develop a tailor-made data collection matrix and tool for the 1Room program

• To gain insights on how to tackle expected challenges during the upscaling phase.

• To learn more ways of how best to run the program in the current schools so as to achieve maximum impact on the pupils.

Long-term outcomes

• To gain access to LEAP Fellows from time to time for their advice whenever the need arises. This will be especially useful at the advanced stages of the program.

• To learn from the LEAP Program better ways of expanding the reach of the 1Room program from serving the selected schools to serving the entire country eventually.

• To be able to access either monetary or non-monetary resources, or both to help expand the 1Room program to the national level.

• To contribute to the improvement of the Kenyan National Education policy by helping to incorporate Technology in education and Learning

• To learn more ways of packaging our content for better understanding by the learners. This includes suggestions for digital equipment to acquire, what to maintain, and what to get rid of. 

• to be connected to other LEAP Program awardees trying to solve the same problem as us, for peer-to-peer consultation.