ChalkLit: Mobile App for educator capacity building at scale

There are 1.5M Anganwadis “courtyard shelters - childcare centres” in India manned by 3M workers serving 150M+ children of 0-5 years. Started as part of Integrated Child Development Services program they combat child hunger and malnutrition by providing supplementation to children, mothers, and pregnant women. They also educate them about nutrition and health and provide pre-school activities and education to children. However, anganwadis don’t meet developmental needs of children, there is a dearth of qualified teachers and a need to continuously train them. Our solution already proven in  46,000+ K12 schools impacting 120K+ teachers is a mobile application platform that offers gamified continuous capacity building to educators at their convenience and provides multifarious content, just-in-time solutions, and services allowing improved delivery to improve life and learning outcomes of children. This can be extended to train parents and educators working with children from 0-5 years and more globally.

13M educators teach 300M children in India. The fast pace of changes globally needs continuous training of educators - updating their conceptual and pedagogical knowledge. Educators also need training on topics including problem solving, critical thinking, lifeskills, gender sensitivity - new set of skills- required to succeed in future workplaces. The need for training Educators is more dire in Early Childhood Education since Anganwadis have focused to combat child hunger and malnutrition by providing supplementation to children, mothers, and pregnant women and educating about nutrition and health. Research has shown that brains of children develop fastest before five. While Anganwadi workers require to perform pre-school activities and provide education, they are not trained to meet developmental needs of children, and there is a dearth of qualified teachers. Children end up entering K12 schools without the preparation required to succeed at primary school and without this several children fall back and remain at a disadvantage. Trainings for Anganwadi workers are required to be scaled extremely fast. Traditional offline trainings have several inherent disadvantages - availability of quality trainers, infrastructure, time, budgets, they remain focused on scholastics and are unable to provide the breadth, scale, quality, convenience, or frequency required.

Our target beneficiaries are children from disadvantaged low-income communities enrolled in anganwadis, government schools or low-income private schools. These children belong to 0-15 years age group, and are from highly aspirational communities that believe education will provide much better opportunities. We have conducted extensive visits to anganwadis, schools, interviewed several educators, school leaders, education officials, parents and several NGOs to understand various problems being faced. We observed that educators teaching especially in anganwadis and low-income schools have glaring gaps in their knowledge and understanding - all educators need continuous capacity building so that they can provide better relevant inputs in their classrooms. Modern conceptual and pedagogical approaches and exposure to new age skills were key gaps in educators. They would also benefit from a platform on which they can share and learn from each others best practices. With an objective to ride growth of smartphones we developed a Mobile platform “ChalkLit”  through which we offer educators lifelong learning opportunities. The platform provides enhanced detailed annual and lesson plans, trainings, and a social platform for sharing content and ideas. We partner with state educator departments to offer scholastic and co-scholastic trainings to educators and have already enrolled and trained 120,000+ educators. 

Our solution is a mobile application platform called “ChalkLit”. The vision is to provide continuous capacity building to teachers, educators and school leaders at scale globally. ChalkLit supports multi-state multi-national content and training in multiple languages. It also provides a social network allowing educators to broaden knowledge to deliver relevant and latest inputs to students. It allows state education departments and other NGOs to upload content and run their programs and services in a completely online or blended mode. It provides detailed analytics and user insights to allow complete control. 

ChalkLit aims to help achieve SDG 4 - provide equitable, inclusive education, and lifelong learning opportunities to all. It does this by first ensuring that educators teaching students right from early childhood through K12 have lifelong learning opportunities, allowing them to keep themselves apprised of the latest conceptual, pedagogical knowledge, ensuring that they remain updated. This allows educators to timely deliver inputs relevant for success in the workforce of the future.

ChalkLit provides enhanced curriculum aligned lesson and annual plans, pedagogically focused topic based trainings on both scholastic and co-scholastic topics, and a thriving peer-to-peer personalized social microlearning network where educators are provided an AI driven personalized feed on best practises, new pedagogical and conceptual knowledge, interesting ideas for activities in classrooms, opinion polls, education news, and content to reinforce learning from previously attended trainings.

State education departments provide official trainings. Trainees receive official certificates on successful completion of  training after completing evaluations, online interactions and feedback. Communications and processes ensure high completion rates.

Co-Scholastic topics include criticial thinking, problem solving, prevention of child sexual abuse, eliminating corporal punishment, gender, life skills, financial literacy, and SDGs which are now key for life outcomes. Content is created in close partnership with  government educational bodies, experienced teachers, subject matter experts, and content development organizations. We curate content from >2000 open educational resources. 

ChalkLit has been developed over 3 years in partnership with Google, PayTM, Final Mile. All aspects of the platform is being continuously upgraded based on observed usage and feedback.  

ChalkLit is available on the Web, Android and iOS platforms. We use Java, MySQL, and PHP on backend. It’s integrated with enterprise messaging and notification engines, and a call center with human agents augmented by volunteer mentor teachers that continuously engage with trainees, and respond to queries in real time. A highly interactive gamified experience ensures completion rates as high as 90%. 

Most education bodies employ offline trainings that are focused on scholastics. The education ministry of India recommends 21 days training annually, with 13M educators employed this translates to 270M training days. Offline trainings cannot be scaled to cover all educators owing to lack of quality trainers, infrastructure, or budgets and are unable to provide professional development at the scale, quality, convenience or frequency required. 

A few organizations have started to bring their content online including NGOs such as Meghshala, TeacherApp, Khan Academy. Their primary strength is content development and offer online solutions to primarily provide their content online requiring teachers to download multiple applications. There are significant gaps in User Interface, and User experience owing to their limited technical and design capabilities and they don’t continuously invest in improving their online solutions. 

Our key differentiation is our platform approach with a comprehensive backend that also allows other entities to upload their multifarious content, run their programs and analytics. State education departments use our platform to run their official trainings. We have developed a generic 11 point content framework that we populate through partnerships and aggregation of both scholastic and co-scholastic content from internet, state education bodies, NGOs, and content partners. Our offering includes integration with enterprise messaging and notification engines, and a call center with human agents augmented by volunteer mentor teachers that continuously engage with trainees, and respond to queries in real-time which coupled with a highly interactive gamified experience with an aimed to ensure 90% completion rates.

The ChalkLit platforms frontend mobile application has been developed on the Web, Android and iOS platforms. The application is available for download both from the Google playstore and the Apple app store.  For the backend we have used Java, and PHP. We use MySQL for the backend database. We use JIRA for bug tracking and agile project management.

The ChalkLit platform backend is integrated with enterprise messaging services, email services, notification engines, and a call center solution. The call center has several features such as text to speech, call recording, time based routing, and analytics. We have deployed human agents to receive calls and they sit with our team and are augmented by volunteering mentor teachers provided by our state education department partners. The joint team continuously engages with trainees, and responds to their queries in real time. 

A highly interactive gamified experience, that includes a chat engine and multiple communication channels, we use to keep encouraging teachers, ensures completion rates as high as 90%. 

We employ AI to personalize the content stream on the ChalkLIt wall and for comment analysis

We have a platform approach with a comprehensive backend, authoring interface and an administrative interface developed in java script that allows our teams and other entities to upload their multifarious content, run their programs and analytics. State education departments are using our platform to run their official trainings. We have developed a generic 11 point content framework that can be populated through the content authoring tool. 

There is strong correlation of teacher capacity with life and learning outcomes of students. This is stronger for students from low-income backgrounds, especially first generation learners. Our theory of change states that impacting capacity of educators and school leaders continuously at scale will result in improved life and learning outcomes for students. Impact of capacitating anganwadi workers to provide meaningful and relevant inputs in the early years would create a foundation which will positively impact complete education journey of a child. 

We partnered with Mission Measurement a chicago based organization focused to measure and improve social impact. In this partnership we developed a tool to observe classroom behaviour of teachers and students to measure the impact of our intervention. It had 4 observational domains with a total of 70 elements. The Delhi SCERT employed this tool after customizing it for their purpose and observed 151 teacher classrooms, 85 of the teachers were exposed to chalklit and 66 were not. The classroom observations findings established the efficacy of our intervention and can be shared on request. Some observations from the released report include

ChalkLit Teachers are 20% more prepared with lesson plans and 30% more likely to address student misconceptions. ChalkLit Teachers are 28% more likely to use multiple teaching strategies and address varying learning styles. ChalkLit Teachers are 22% more likely to connect topics to real life. Students are 10% more likely to participate in class owing to new strategies.

We are now working with JPAL to do an RCT. 

We have signed agreement with 6 states in India. These include Delhi, Goa, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Odisha. The total number of teachers in these state are more than 1 Million. We are inviting teachers in batches to start to get trainings on the ChalkLit platform. 

We have already invited 120,000 educators on our platform and these teachers have undergone one of more trainings. Our survey indicates that each of these impact 80 or more students in their classroom and therefore we impact the learning outcomes of 9-10 Million children. These educators will continue to impact more children in the coming years. 

We aim to have 1 Million educators by December 2020 thus covering the majority of the teachers in the states that we work in and will include a few teachers from other states that we will sign in the near future. Some of the states that we are in conversations with include the state of Gujarat, Uttrakhand, Bihar, Punjab, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh. I Million educators will impact close to 40-50 Million students or more 

In 5 years we aim to reach more than 5 Million educators by December 2024. These will include more educators from other states in India. At this stage we will have pupil teachers and tutors also start using our platform. We will be present in at least 5  countries including a few countries in Africa and South Asia by this time. 

The state of teacher education especially capacity building of inservice educators and school leaders is deplorable. Our goal is to be the platform of choice for teachers, educators or school leaders for their annual scholastic and co-scholastic development needs globally. We have offered multiple trainings to 120K educators across 6 Indian states - these educators are teaching 70-90 students each this year resulting in an impact across more than 9-10M students. Several other states are expressing interest in our platform.  We have successfully piloted our platform in a few countries in Africa. There is an active interest in several South Asian countries. We aim to have 1 Million educators on our platform by December 2020 and 5M educators on our platform from across the world within the next 5 years. This will result in an impact on 50-80M children. 

Globally educators impact 60-100 children each year and continue to impact these many children over several years. Many co-scholastic trainings and content offered on our platform are aimed at influencing children at an impressionable age to become responsible towards several challenges that the world faces and also become aware of the responsibility of their families and their communities towards them. These include - gender discrimination, inequalities, pollution, conservation of wild life - many of which directly impact SDGs. Anganwadi workers interact with pregnant women, young mothers and children in their formative years and will have a deep influence and we hope to significantly contribute to the achievement of the SDGs.

As mentioned we aim to impact 1M teachers by Dec’20, and 10M teachers by Dec’25. The key challenge we will face going forward would be access to grants to continue to scale our team, technology and content required to meet our goals. We have completed 3 years of our existence and can now access CSR funds and apply to receive Foreign Funds as per the laws of India. We aim to raise USD 1-2M till December 2020 and raise USD 15-20M till December 2025. 

In the next year we would need to employ better technical resources which can improve our architecture and product to help us scale better, in the slightly longer term - five years - we would invest in technology and technical resources who are well versed with Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning to identify and automate processes that could positively impact our scaling. 

We have started to explore working in other markets such as Africa, Middle East, Asia and South America and are in touch with local partners and education bodies. We have conducted a pilot in Africa and are planning one in Bangladesh and their success will be important for our growth in the next year. Although we do not see market barriers for our solutions we will need to ensure that we have local teams, and content to suit the cultural requirements of these markets for the longer term. We aim to be present in at least 10-15 markets in next 5 years. 

Funding - We have completed 3 years of our existence and can now access CSR funds and apply to receive Foreign Funds as per the laws of India. We have approached several corporate directly for their CSR funds, enrolled with several consulting organizations that advice their various corporate clients around the allocation of their CSR funds, enrolled with central and state NGO databases which are frequented by Corporates to identify useful NGO driven projects. We have applied for the FCRA permit required to obtain foreign funding. We have also approached several foreign philanthropies, corporate and foundations who have shown a keen interest in our work and several conversations are underway. 

Technical Resources - We are partnered with several Universities and corporate volunteering programs who are supporting our technical requirements. IIIT Delhi and IIT Delhi have two faculty who are helping us design our AI solutions and we have two interns for 6 months who are helping us in our development. We however would like to hire a few full time resources to work on analytics and AI. 

International Foray - One of our founders Dr. Abhinav Mathur has done international business development and has approached several of his known associates who are helping him in other markets and there is a pilot underway with AIMS (Africa Institute of Mathematical Studies) which is also responsible for teacher capacity building. AIMS can take us across Africa. We are talking to interested partners in Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Phillipines, and Indonesia.

Full-time staff- 40 - We have teams which include Product, Technology, Content, Measurement and Evaluation, Outreach and Educator support

Part-time staff- 80 - These are mostly teachers who volunteered to us from state governments to help us with interacting with educators undergoing trainings on our platform. These teachers are paid by state education departments. 

Contractors - 10 - We have a few consultants who support our product development efforts and content development efforts as and when required. 

Workers (includes volunteers & interns)- This year 20 interns have worked with us. These have been with us for 6 weeks to 12 weeks.

Our team is led by a team of experienced and skilled professionals. The founders Dr. Abhinav Mathur and Dr. Mona Mathur have 27 years of experience each and are both PhDs from IIT Delhi with PhDs in Computer Science and Telecommunication, and Machine Learning and Neurosciences respectively. They had long corporate careers where they have lead large teams which delivered large scalable solutions in areas that include mobility, mobile apps, healthcare, education, entertainment and finance. We are a team of 40+ full time people with varied experiences, structured into teams focusing on Product, Technology, Content, Measurement and Evaluation, Outreach and Educator Support. Most people on our team have teaching, content development, or non profit experience and are highly motivated to impact the educator capacity building space.

Our head of operations has 14+ years of experience with the Indian Air Force, Our head of products has 20+ years of product development experience and Our head of technology has 17+ years of relevant technology development experience. 

Dr. Abhinav Mathur has also served as a CEO of a Mobile Application development company which had 150+ million downloads, he was the Chief of Strategy and Technology of a USD 2 Billion MultiNational Company operating in 30 countries and is an angel investor in several startups. 

Through our team members and various partners we have access to several resources, advisors, and individuals who regularly contribute to our work on pro bono advisory and/or project consulting basis.

Million Sparks Foundation currently has four groups of partners:

• Distribution Partners : We have signed contracts with State Education departments of Delhi, Goa, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Odisha for enabling trainings for teachers and educators. We are working to sign up with education associations, education boards, to reach out to more educators

• Content and Knowledge Partners : We are a platform and curate most of our content from trusted established content partners and scaffold it within ChalkLit11 Point framework. We have 2000+ partners and some partners we use for content include Khan Academy, Meghshala, Maths Antics, Akshara, UNEP, WWF, and STIR Education. We develop content and trainings in partnerships with state council of education research and technology of states that we partner. 

• NGO Partners : As a platform we enable other NGOs to scale their offline programs and content to larger audiences. NGOs we work with include Partham, Story Weaver, STIR Education, Language Learning Foundation, Akshara Foundation, and Shiv Nadar Foundation. 

• Technology Partners : We seek technology support and inputs from time to time from leading technology led companies to improve our offerings. We have sought support from Google, JP Morgan Chase, PayTM, Infoedge, and Final Mile Consulting.

Our beneficiaries include the state education departments, educators - anganwadis workers and teachers, NGOs that have content and their programs that they wish to scale. 

State education departments run official training programs online that are hosted on the ChalkLit platform. These trainings are offered to teachers on their smartphones. This allows the states to reach every single teacher employed in schools in the state which was not possible through their existing offline trainings approach.

Using ChalkLit NGOs with proven content and offline programs are able to reach a much larger audience using our robust and extensible platform which has been proven at scale over the past 3 years and is being upgraded and improved continuously. NGOs do not have invest time and resources to develop the expertise required to develop, maintain and scale technology solutions. 

The ChalkLit platform not only provides official trainings on both scholastic and co-scholastic topics, it also provides enhanced curriculum aligned lesson and annual plans, and a thriving peer-to-peer personalized social microlearning network where educators are provided an AI driven personalized feed on best practises, new pedagogical and conceptual knowledge, interesting activities in classrooms, opinion polls, education news, and content to reinforce learning from previously attended trainings.

ChalkLit aims to impact society by improving life and learning outcomes of students and also has a focus to contribute to the achievement of SDGs by making students aware of responsible behavior towards the problems faced globally. 

We do not charge for the platform which is funded through grants.

Our long term strategy is to setup a hybrid with a for-profit and non-profit arm. For the immediate future as mentioned we have just completed 3 years of our existence which makes us eligible to access CSR funds and apply to receive Foreign Funds as per the laws of India. We have approached several corporates with CSR funds to seek their support and we are in the process to apply and receive funds from them. We are seeing a significant interest in our work. 

We have also enrolled with several consulting organizations that provide many corporates with advice on the use of their CSR funds and a few of them are offering some projects to us. We are also enrolled with the NGO databases of the central education ministry and the NGO databases of several states where Corporate go to search for worthwhile causes. 

Two states have approached corporates to secure funds for scaling our work in their states. 

We have started to approach several global foundations that have significant resources at their disposal to seek their support and have applied for FCRA that is mandatory to obtain foreign funding as per the laws of India. 

We are also rolling out paid certification courses in partnership with prestigious universities for educators and school leaders to create a revenue stream.

We are fairly confident that we will reach sustainability by December 2020.

Million Sparks Foundation was created with an objective that we will be able to spark a Million teachers who will then impact the life and learning outcomes of student igniting a whole generation of children to contribute to solving the world's pressing problems. We are applying to solve since we completely align to the objective of solve - empower all citizens of the world of ignite transformative change. We are doing this through our work in capacity building of educators and school leaders. We believe that after being selected at Solve we will be able to benefit significantly by learning from the several innovators and funders that we will be able to access. While we have been able to successfully scale with our efforts we believe to scale from here we would need a lot of advice and support. We are extremely keen to receive the mentorship and strategic advice from the Solve and MIT networks and scale our work globally. We are especially looking forward to the 12 months of personalized support with an introduction to the various highly accomplished members of Solve’s cross-sector community. We believe we need them to accelerate our work, validate our impact and align our business model to scale our solution

We would like to partner with 

1. Content development Organizations 

2. UN organizations with educational initiatives and content for SDGs

3. Consultants that can help us by reviewing our vision and helping us drafting the strategy to achieve the same. 

4. Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that have offline presence, credibility, content and want to scale their work

5. Regional organizations that are focused on teacher, educator and school leader capacity building. 

Pratham/Vedanta Foundation/Shiv Nadar Foundation/LLF/Akshara Foundation/Azim Premji University/UNICEF - To obtain content for early childhood education and create training programs for educators and certify them to fill teaching positions

JPAL - To conduct Measurement and Evaluation

Google/Amazon/Microsoft and other organizations working in AI and UI/UX  - To improve our technology, architecture and UI/UX. We would specifically want to seek support for our requirements in AI   

TED/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/TikTok - To promote our work on social media and popularize our approach to help in our global acceptance

State Governments/Large Education bodies/Education Ministries of other countries - To use our platform for building capacities of educators 

UNEP/UNDP/UNFPA/UNICEF/UN - We strongly believe in supporting sustainable development goals. We fundamentally believe that to have any chance to ensure achievement of SDGs educators have to educate every one of the 850 Million children that will pass out of school about responsible behaviour towards these global goals. These organizations have education initiatives and have content that can be deployed to introduce SDGs and the right responsible behaviors to children across various grades. 

BCG/PWC/McKinsey/Sattva - To help us craft our strategy and achieve our vision

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Larry Ellison Foundation/MacArthur Foundation/Rockefeller Foundation/Porticus Foundation/UBS Foundation/Michael Susan Dell Foundation/Omidyar Network and other Philanthropic Foundations, HNIs, corporate with CSR budgets and initiative - To help us obtain resources and grants required for our work

We have started to use AI to automate the personalization of content feed on the wall of our peer to peer social micro learning network. We have identified several other applications for AI that can automate and improve the efficiency of tasks that are done manually or not done presently and can help us scale. 

1. Curated teachers and team members manually answer queries of trainee educators and this will limit scale as we grow. Often the same questions are asked which AI can identify and provide answers to without human intervention.  

2. Personalization will enable us to improve user engagement. We would like to:

   1. Target the content offered to educators based on Individual and community signals

   2. Personalize trainings to teachers

   3. Suggest related content topics

   4. Intelligently gamify the learning experience 

   5. Predict training completion risk of educators undergoing training with an objective of personalize the experience to improve completion rates

3. We want to use ML to discover, classify and curate relevant, level appropriate content for educators to use and improve classroom interactions and also enable discovery of related content.

4.  We need seamless translation across content types (text, voice, images, video) enabling us to produce content scalably across the many vernacular Indian languages and also languages that are used in other countries.

5. One long term objective is to use classroom voice transcriptions to automate review of teachers classroom practices and suggest improvements.

We expect more use cases will be identified as we scale our solution and start to improve our AI capabilities

Million Sparks Foundation is focused to impact SDGs in addition to impacting academic outcomes. One of the first few trainngs developed were - Gender Awareness and Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. On our wall we regularly celebrate achievements of women. We recently did a series of posts around menstrual hygiene as a part of the Delhi Government Initiative. We are presently celebrating women athletes on the wall with Hima Das as a key highlight for having won 5 golds in 18 days

We are also in detailed discussions to offer our platform to Educate Girls which works towards enrollment, retention and learning for girls and reduce gender gap by leveraging government infrastructure. Educate girls has impacted close to 5M beneficiaries and is looking to scale its work using technology and wants to now focus on ensuring better learning outcomes. 

If we win this prize we will be able to accelerate our women focused work and speed up the creation of content that will help educators improve their understanding of how can they improve enrollment, retention and literacy for the girl child and make the anganwadis and schools a safe place for them. We will partner with other NGOs such as Educate Girls working in India and in other countries who have content and programs to support this work and that can be scaled. 

Pregnant women and new mothers will benefit significantly from content around personal and child health and nutrition that the anganwadi workers can use to educate them.