Bettre Institute

As the challenge overview says, it's evident that the skills taught—in school or via other informal pathways—have not been able to enable people to thrive in a rapidly changing world. With the recent fast-paced advancement in AI and discussions around adult workforce reskilling, it's more important than ever to find innovative and sustainable solutions for youth upskilling that will be on par with the rapidly changing employers' demand, macroeconomic trends and resource efficient mechanisms.

According to UNICEF, nearly three quarters of young people (around 3 in 4) aged 15 to 24 in 92 countries with available data are off-track to acquire the skills needed for employment. In developing countries, where the education budget is disproportionately low in terms of GDP percentage and higher education often suffers from an endowment crisis due to being predominantly public-funded, we believe that businesses can be the best learning service providers in the youth skill development space. This is important because business-led skill development programs are expected to be more locally relevant, community-centered, experiential and driven by industry insights. In addition, businesses tend to respond faster to adoption of new skills and technologies to remain in the competition and therefore, are better equipped to train future employment seekers on the skills they need to have.

Our team interviewed 42 students (from middle school to undergraduate) and parents to understand the current EdTechs' role in helping youth develop employment skills in Bangladesh. The pain points we learned mostly fall in three key areas:

Instructor-Student Interaction: The interviewees reported the lack of effective communication, approachability, personalized support, and synchronous programs. 

Instructor Background: A significant number of interviewees are not happy with the instructors’ qualification and relevance of the course with their backgrounds. Most of them expressed interest in learning from top business leaders.

Content: Many interviewees complained about the lack of up-to-date and specialized content, which indicates the necessity of better curriculum design, continuous iteration and coverage of a wider skill spectrum.

We are running a controlled pilot to test some of our hypotheses and in 6 weeks, we have received 86 enrollments for three carefully chosen course topics, which shows that we need to rethink how we design skill development programs, who teaches them, what content we cover and how we ensure that they provide real value.

A team from Harvard Graduate School of Education recently published their findings from a research on why there are huge numbers of unemployed university graduates. The causes include the lack of industry-academia interaction, lack of scholar practitioners in universities, skill mismatch between what colleges teach and what industry wants, low entrepreneurial skills, lack of teachers training and slow economic growth. Their ultimate call for action was to widen access to hands-on internships before graduation because it doubles students' shot at finding full time jobs. (Source: Ezza Naveed)

Our solution is to enable businesses and business professionals to use their resources to help bridge the youth skills gap. The solution has two key components:

1. A systems innovation model that rethinks how stakeholders in the education industry can collaborate for bigger impact and how it can create value for everyone in a financially sustainable way.

2. Building the right technology to make (1) efficient and scalable.

How we are rethinking the system:

We run four 3-month terms a year and onboard businesses as our education partners on a renewable annual basis. Each term a business can nominate its top employees as instructors for six-week (a 1.5 hour class per week) synchronous courses. Each course covers a specific (set of) skill(s) and at the end of each course, students complete a final project, designed to be a skill assessment process based on the respective company's recruitment method. Students with the best final projects (usually top 2-5%) are nominated for an annual six-week internship program offered by the company and paid by us. Thus businesses get skilled interns at little to no cost for recruitment & compensation.

This model is a win-win situation for all the three primary stakeholders - students get a wide range of job specific course topics to choose from and can avail well-paid internship opportunities; businesses get a new marketing and CSR funnel at little to no cost for recruitment and intern compensation; course instructors (full time employees at those companies) get an additional income source that pays hourly compensation higher than the local industry standard.

How we are leveraging technology:

The technology component of the solution include two key products:

A. The learning management system that businesses will use to offer their educational programs to students

B. A Generative AI model that business professionals can use to design course curriculums. The model will be trained with insights on industry-specific skill demand, current skill supply, participating company-specific data, national economic sectors & policy interventions, role of technology like AI, advanced & inclusive educational pedagogies, global skill trends and other macroeconomic factors. The objective is to create the highest possible value for students while maximizing revenue through meeting market demand.

Our primary target population is undergraduate students, with a potential integration of high school students in the future. The leading undergraduate programs in Bangladesh, being mostly public-funded, often lack necessary industry-oriented experiential learning opportunities. Students have limited opportunity to learn about different career pathways and about topics they are passionate about outside of their major. According to a 2023 source, the number of unemployed college graduates stands at four-fifths of a million. With the AI revolution going on and the rapidly evolving industries' demand, educational institutions are not well-equipped to support their students to navigate this challenge. 

Moreover, the high school curriculum has been recently changed to incorporate experiential learning and it will be introduced in phases till 2027, which makes it an ideal time for education innovation to meet the needs of this unprecedented change. In Bangladesh, the skill development programs offered by the existing EdTechs are mostly pre-recorded (and thus jeopardize connection formation) and do not have experiential aspects.

A simplified model in the context of Bangladesh:

A student pays an enrollment fee x for a course on Data Analytics offered by a local technology company's Head of Analytics in Summer 2024 term. The total number of enrollments in the course in the term is y.

Total revenue from the course in that term = xy

25% of the total revenue (0.25xy) from the course will go to the company’s account to be used to pay interns, 25% will go to the instructor’s account (=0.25xy) and 50% will be Bettre Institute's revenue (=0.5xy).

Using numbers in places of variables in the context of Bangladesh: The instructor spends a total of 9 hours in 6 weeks teaching the course. An industry standard compensation may be 25,000 BDT (~$250).

Therefore, 0.25xy = 25000

A reasonable enrollment fee for the course i.e., value of x may be 1000 BDT.

Therefore, y = 100; which is a reasonable expectation based on market data.

In consequence, the company gets 25,000 BDT to cover the costs of its annual internship program, simply by encouraging its employees to teach courses in partnership with Bettre Institute. This 25,000 BDT may be used to cover a 6-week long paid internship for 2 (out of the 100 enrolled in that term) students, where each will get 12,500 BDT, while the government threshold for internship compensation is 7000 BDT/month or 10,500 BDT for 6 weeks. The other 98 students are also benefited, because the course they took will be certified by the participating company.

The course instructor earns additional income outside of the regular job (much like a Visiting Lecturer), which is becoming increasingly popular in many countries. The company thus offers 6-week paid internships to a total of 8 (2/term x 4 terms) students annually. If the company offers m number of courses each term and there are a total of n companies, a total of 8mn paid intern positions can be created.

Our core team members come from the previous highly restrictive national high school curriculum in Bangladesh, followed by a single-factor college admission process in which extracurricular activities carried no weight. However, we were passionate about a wide range of activities outside of the classroom, which helped us develop a strong extracurricular background. We have the lived experience of navigating previous structural challenges and finding ways of exploring our interests through meaningful experiential activities.

Here we have added short biographies of some of our core team members:

Jahir Islam: Jahir is a rising sophomore and Laidlaw Scholar studying Quantitative Economics and Mathematics at Tufts University. In his junior year of high school, he founded a social enterprise that achieved two highly selective global recognitions for tech-enabled social impact solutions. He has pitched at the United Nations Hub in Expo 2020 Dubai and been invited as a speaker for the World Bank Group Solutions for Youth Employment. He is working relentlessly to transform Education, Employment and (Civic) Engagement for young people, particularly in the developing economies. His strong connection with stakeholders in the education and skill development ecosystem and expertise in design thinking and qualitative research make him an ideal fit to persuade stakeholders for systemic change and to help build human-centered technology. 

Mottaquin Tashin: Mottaquin is pursuing a degree in Business Administration at Bangladesh University of Professionals. He has a rich experience in program and operations management, especially in working with youth from diverse backgrounds and forming deep human connections. He has played a pivotal role as an academic member at Bangladesh Youth Environmental Initiative. He is a published author and has led two funded youth-centered programs on career development and civic engagement. 

Sababa Ahmed: Sababa Ahmed, a rising sophomore double majoring in Computer Science and Data Science at Connecticut College, is interested in innovative AI-powered solutions to streamline daily challenges. Complementing her tech prowess, she has a keen interest in finance and marketing. Her past experiences showcase a commitment to social impact and diverse exploration. She has engaged with numerous non-profit organizations and high school clubs in leadership positions. She has led the Marketing and Finance departments of a Bangladeshi EdTech startup, while being a mentor to 50+ students who are interested in pursuing higher education in the United States. She co-founded the first Bangla-based astronomy knowledge platform in Bangladesh.

Mohammad Hasibur Rahman: Mohammad is studying Computer Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has been exploring different fields of AI including NLP, CV, and Deep Learning. He is an undergraduate researcher and submitted papers to international conferences on the topic of spectrum sharing for LTE and 5G networks. He created the Students in Computing and Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) club, which soon became a hub for students to get involved in the development of AI based applications. He has participated in hackathons, delivered workshops on machine learning and contributed to open source projects.

For our first term, we are offering three courses taught by renowned public and private sector professionals. We have received 86 enrollments and we are currently analyzing our data to find insights on which topics we can cover and which type of professionals we should bring in our next term. Although according to our main model, the courses need to be offered in partnership with the companies the instructor professionals are from, we were not able to do it in our first term, which may be a reason why we did not get a higher number of enrollments. We are planning to partner with two to three high growth businesses in Bangladesh over the summer so that we can fully experiment with the model we have mentioned in this application. It will enable us to track how enrollment data evolves as we recruit instructors through their employer companies, not on an independent individual basis.

In terms of technology, we have designed what the learning management system may look like and hope to start our technology building process in the fall. But we will not develop the Generative AI course curriculum design assistant till we gain significant traction and it’s needed to scale rapidly.

Moreover, we are planning to start our fundraising process over the summer and close a pre-seed round before fall 2024. Thus we hope to move to the pilot stage from the prototype stage in 6 months.

We believe that MIT Solve can be a major launching pad for us through its support in fundraising, legal, branding and technology support. MIT’s strong capacity in technology and AI may enable us to explore new opportunities. Since making our solution widely adopted will require convincing the stakeholders and offering the best financial prospect and technology tool, we cannot think of a better place to be in from the very beginning. MIT’s recent work on workforce development (e.g. through Global Opportunity Forum) in the changing technology landscape may help us expand to new verticals in the future.

From the perspective of the skill learning market in Bangladesh, our solution is disruptive as it maximizes resource efficiency and brings a new stakeholder i.e., businesses into the game apart from the instructors and the EdTech companies. It can catalyze broader positive impacts from others in the space by freeing students from the limitations of pre-recorded and often outdated content. Our solution can be considered analogous to open source projects, as we are creating space for more professionals to share their insights by expanding content breadth and by increasing the frequency of updating content.

Most importantly, our solution can create a new Corporate Social Responsibility pathway for businesses and help make significant progress toward the achievement of SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth.

Our LLM will be divided in two modes, one section focused on generating course modules based on certain criteria of instructor’s professional expertise and the business they represent. The other section will be focused on market insights including a wide range of micro and macroeconomic factors that may help maximize revenue i.e., sale.

Instructors will fill out the course proposal form on our LMS to provide necessary information for the LLM to help them prepare the most relevant course module suggestion based on instructors’ background analysis and the data about the businesses they come from, besides our own unique parameters in training the model.

Another source of training data for our LLM will be student feedback. We will use sentiment analysis to analyze the feedback and integrate it on the model for continuous iteration which will validate our choice of synchronous, instead of asynchronous, learning method and ensure the most up-to-date and effective content.

We have been awarded the Entrepreneurial Initiative Fund $1000 grant from the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts University. In addition, we have already started generating our own revenue.