Oroon

Oroon creates data-driven app-based technology to reduce dropout rates in schools and align learning outcomes achieved in schools with global standards of subject specific competency levels. High dropout rates coupled with low competencies of students despite high passing rates in national examinations illustrate the shortcomings in education quality and existing assessment mechanisms. We built an foolproof attendance measuring technology and  performance assessment content packaged into a low-friction app that is feasible to deploy in any part of the country. The data can be used to detect and act upon early signs of dropouts and low competencies. Schools, families, and policy makers can make timely, accurate, data-driven decisions to ensure proper education of students and design necessary interventions to prepare the youngest generations with skills of tomorrow by strengthening their foundation of learning.  Using comprehensive edumetrics for learning is not commonplace anywhere in the world, but Oroon strives to change that. 

Schools in Bangladesh observe high dropouts of students at every stage of their education. In 2018, primary school dropout rates were 21.44 for boys and 15.69 for girls. By accurately measuring attendance in schools at real-time, early signs of drop out such as infrequent attendance and low attendance can be detected and acted upon. In Bangla and Mathematics 23% and 10% of 5th-grade students achieved national learning competencies respectively in 2015 while Primary Education Certificate Examination pass rate was 98.52% indicating that the gap in learning not reflected in the existing metrics. About 2.5 crore children who go to school in a year on average  will immediately benefit from edumetrics for their full learning journey and be capable of identifying conceptual gaps and learning difficulties, and comparing themselves with the global standards. Some examples of edumetrics are level of competence in specific concepts under a subject, the topic he/she is strongest and weakest in, position among the student pool, time series of subject-wise performance and speed of solving problems. Stakeholders of child education can reach satisfactory goals using the metrics. With this data-driven approach to effective learning, generations capable of bringing social and economic prosperity in Bangladesh will be created. 

Oroon partnered with BRAC education which operates over 14,153 primary schools  to take stakeholder interviews and conduct user research. We are working with BRAC education to enhance their process of delivering quality education to children from low-income areas in the country. Their current supply chain for data to monitor education is operated entirely manually with several points of human interference, highly prone to information loss and tampering, and has no scientific measurement criteria. This idea won the competition organized by BRAC to solve the problem of low attendance and performance by designing a low-tech, low-friction app that captures indicative data without adding additional overheads to the system. We are visiting local schools to observe their processes; understand their needs and pain-points; and identify failures and successes of the current mechanism as we are developing the system. At the same time, Oroon is working on partnerships with public and private schools to add edumetrics to their teaching processes and bring all of the 2.5 crore school goers under proper assessment. A product that detects the signs of dropout and low performance will be of high demand at homes, in schools and for various authorities.

Our solution consists of two components: an Android app and a cloud MIS. 

The Android app is the product that will be directly available to the teachers and students. Specifically, teachers would use this app to take attendance, and students would use it answer questions through which their understanding of different topics would be measured. Details of each of these functions are provided below:

1. Attendance Taking: The teacher is presented with a screen with the pictures and IDs of all of her students. All students are considered present initially. If a student is absent, the teacher only has to click on the picture-ID button of the student to mark her as absent. When the teacher is done, an SMS is sent by the app to the cloud MIS with IDs of the absent students. The teacher then takes a group picture of the entire class, and the picture is sent to the cloud MIS whenever internet is available. Our system then detects the number of faces in the group picture to verify that that number of students marked present by the teacher matches actual number of students present. 

2. Performance Measuring: Similar to the attendance screen, there would be a screen with the picture-IDs of all students. Each student will click on her picture-ID to start playing a question-answer game designed to evaluate the grasp of the student on the different topics covered over a week. The questions will be taken from a question bank made by Oroon staff and relevant stakeholders, and will be randomized so that there are no opportunities for cheating. 

The cloud MIS, on the other hand, is for administrators. It could be used for inserting and updating the information of students and teachers, making questions for performance assessments, and overall monitoring of student attendance and performance.

We would develop our Android app using Kotlin or React Native (so that we can potentially easily target iOS in the future as well). For the front end of the cloud MIS, we would use React or Vue.js, and for the backend, we would use Django or Go. Finally, for our databases, we would use PostgreSQL (for managing information of students, teachers, and administrators) and MongoDB (for storing question banks).  

In our solution the process of learning is redefined. Currently learning of young students is a single path towards specific outcomes with infrequent milestones and very little introspection. In reality, learning style of every student is different and requires thorough inspection of current and historical data to identify areas of improvement and create new strategies of learning. We create edumetrics to provide regular indicators of performance and help identify weakness areas. No such tool for monitoring learning of self or for a child exist in Bangladeshi market, or any market at a large scale for school goers, currently. Magoosh provides edumetrics on people who use the content for standardized tests but not for regular school curriculum. Khan Academy also provides some edumetrics on learning, but only the people with fast internet, enough time for a secondary education platform and highly aware parents can access and enjoy the benefit of the indicators. We are making the app compatible with low-cost mobile phones and the question contents culturally aligned to measure competencies of a much larger group of people in Bangladesh. To make this available to the most financially underprivileged we are partnering with NGOs such as BRAC and to make it available to children in locations outside major cities we are partnering with the government. This solution will not only improve learning but provide the right tools to learn how to learn better.

It goes without saying that excellent education leads to more empowered generation who then go on to deliver the best for the society and economy. What, however, are the metrics of excellent education and how you measure those is the question Oroon is addressing. We want the people of Bangladesh to be innovative, skilled, capable communicators and great leaders who can compete with the rest of the world with outstanding competencies in all areas that make a bright individual. With the tool made at Oroon, every individual student can measure their core competencies and adjust learning practices to reach a desired level. This way every student gets ownership of their learning, understands their strengths and weaknesses, and becomes a better learner. We believe that the best thing school can teach is how to learn well. Our product can help in creating generations of students empowered by knowledge about their own learning curves. A more empowered, confident, competent generation will be created through this who are capable of learning fast to keep up and pioneer different fronts of development within the country and across the globe. In addition to that, this solution will help create a national database of competence levels and student profiles. With better learning capacity and stronger civic senses, the students of today will grow up to be leaders of social and economic prosperity in tomorrow’s Bangladesh.

As we do not have a deployable product yet, the number of students (people) we are serving right now in 0. In one year, with our pilot project deployed in certain BRAC operated schools in Dhaka, we expect to serve at least 10,000 students. In five years, we hope to reach all the 1.4 million students of BRAC and expand to different public and private schools as well to get an additional 600,000 students. So, in total, we expect to be serving at least 2 million students in 5 years.

In one year, we want to get all of 14000+ schools of BRAC. From the learnings of this pilot, we will produce a more robust iteration of the product with larger question banks and more useful metrics for each stakeholder - student, teachers, parents and schools. Once a number of examples of schools are created who had started out low-performing and after adoption of the Oroon app significantly changed the competency levels of students, many more schools will want to adopt the app. We have recently started the conversation with ministry of education for creating an assessment tool for learning outcome of students between 6th and 8th grade. By the end of the year we want to have a small bank of questions for this cohort of students as well. After the first year, the Oroon app complete with assessment questions for students of entire school career, will scale across Bangladesh. Upon continuous streak of success, the government can be persuaded to adopt the technology for creating edumetrics of all school-going children in Bangladesh. In five years we want each child between grade 1 and 10 in the country to use customized suggestions for improvement of their core competencies. By 2025, we aim to make the Oroon app an essential part of school education and the company database a go-to resource for policy makers to improve teaching quality.

• Building the MVP: 

With the current 4 lakh taka ($4700) as funding, we can hire one software developer and a software architect for 4 months to build the minimum viable product. The complexity of the product demands longer term engineers working on stability of the product. For content, founding members will be building a bank of questions in the first 4 months, however this also requires consultancy from skilled educationalists and child psychologists. Finding funds to hire a team of competent individuals is a barrier for Oroon at the moment.

• Crucial partnerships:

Onboarding government and private partners will require a promising pilot and an MVP. In Bangladesh, this process will involve experience in public-private partnerships and navigating bureaucratic space. 

• Technology adoption:

As the first edumetrics app, Oroon may face a barrier in technology adoption. While new products in logistics and entertainments get immediate customer base in urban Bangladesh, technology to assist education is novel and the awareness of the need for it is limited to a small group of people. With our solution, we have to create the awareness for the need, prove the efficacy of this product very quickly to access a larger market. 

• Building the MVP: 

We are administering multiple fund-raising and talent hunting efforts locally and globally for hiring software developers, software architects, UX designers, data analysts, public and private partnership specialists. For the content development, currently we plan to study research work on this subject and build questions and metrics ourselves while also tapping into out alumni networks of MIT, BUET, NSU, and IUB for short term consultancies on specific subjects which would help in reducing the cost on this front. 

• Crucial partnerships:

We are constantly engaging with and building connections with various ministries for both funding and collaboration. Since edumetrics from Oroon can majorly influence education policy decisions, we see a lot of possibilities of cooperation from the government. We are also looking for an adviser for our company whose network and influence in the space of public and private partnerships will complement ours. 

• Technology adoption:

The questions will be presented in ways that children of the targeted age group find compelling and engaging. Collaborating with school authorities will ensure that our app is encouraged for classroom use and the early adopter volume is increased. The B2B model for expansion will work best at this stage since businesses like school and organizations like NGOs and government will experience the value of the product more directly at this time. Our first priority will be getting more and more educational authorities to adopt this technology. 

N/A

One person for product design and user research.

One person for software development.

And, one person for managing partnerships. 

We have a number of advisers in the NGO BRAC's education program. Since the organization itself is involved in advising, it is not possible to quantify the number of people. 

Firstly, we have a collective experience of 25 months in mentoring & teaching students at the primary, secondary and tertiary level. This lends us the unique opportunity of looking at the state of education in Bangladesh through the lens of a teacher. Over time, it has been a painful realization on our part as to how acute the problem is. Additionally, it has equipped us with clear visibility that the problem lies with not having a clear data-driven tracking mechanism for learning competencies vis a vis learning outcomes in classrooms. 

Secondly, we have at least 2 years of experience working across 2 of the most well-funded startups in Bangladesh, which has trained us to conduct day to day operations in a fast-acting tech company. 

Thirdly, we have worked in the field of data science/analytics at some point in our career, making us extremely data-driven and data-savvy. Some of us also have extensive experience in product development, design and user research by training and by professional experience. 

Fourthly, we are active members in the alumni communities of MIT, BUET, NSU and BRAC, the startup community of Bangladesh & multiple extra-curricular non-profits like Bangladesh Mathematical Olympiad and International Exchange Alumni of US Department of State. This gives the ability to tap into a wide network of talented individuals.

Lastly, we are passionate to hold on to this idea to see this vision substantiate and change the scene of education.

We are currently partnering with BRAC Education Programme (BEP) with the end objective of rolling out our product in the 30,000+ primary and pre-primary schools directly operated by them. In July 2019, we participated in Bracathon 3.0 where we emerged champions. Since then, our association with BRAC allows us access to ~4700 USD as seed money. 

BRAC also has an IT department which will provide us with technical support for the upcoming 4 months. 

Fee-for-service model: The first tier of service on the app will be free for all with ads on the screen but to access more questions, detailed metrics, suggestions for improving learning and comparison with the rest of the pool of students at Oroon, customers will have to pay for the extended service. The key customers of Oroon are the schools and parents of the students. 

Schools will be able to use the app to assess daily or weekly learning of the students, but not as an alternative to class tests since the assessment done by Oroon is only on the core competencies. 

Parents of the students can buy a subscription to view, manage and supervise their children’s learning. They will receive signs to indicate if parental attention is required for the child and suggestions for how to approach the problem. 

For ads, our customers will be book and stationery stores, schools, universities primarily with occasional children products such as children puzzles, toys etc. We want to limit our ad customers within companies that have educational products. 

Within the limits of data privacy, certain metrics created by Oroon will be sold to local and global organizations for educational policy making. For example, if there is a higher dropout rates among a certain age range of female students, concerned ministries or NGOs can take necessary intervention after studying the problem on a deeper level using the data.

We aim to bring money through investment capital and selling our services. In the pre-seed stage, we plan to accept and apply for grants as well. Our financial sustainability plan is summarized below. 

The annual expenditure for Oroon in the first year is $130000 if ran in the leanest manner. At a monthly subscription fee of $1.5 per student for the app and services, Oroon needs 7223 subscribers over the span of a year in order to break even. With 2.5 crore students in school per year in Bangladesh and many more education enthusiasts who will want to try the free app for which we will get revenue on ad sales, reaching profitability and financial sustainability within a couple years is very feasible for Oroon. 

In the first two years we want to rely on grants and investments rather than sales because we anticipate the product requiring 6 months to reach a satisfactory level of stability and another 6 months for school partnerships to be finalized.

If we win the Tiger Challenge, we will have the pre-seed funding for building the minimum viable product and run the pilot in the first year. The MVP opens many doors for us in terms of further development in partnerships, better product, more customers and larger impact. With funding we can get some of the best talents to work for us and buy the necessary tools to build the product. In fact as a well-established IT company in Bangladesh, Tiger IT’s network will be an extremely powerful one that can be tapped for finding skilled individuals in this sector. The office space provided as a prize of Tiger Challenge will cut down 6% of Oroon’s expenditure for the first year. Given that our product is very novel in the tech industry, getting IP support after the MVP is built will safeguard the company.

N/A

We would like to partner with Teach for Bangladesh which is already operating in 39 schools across Dhaka to help them and their partner schools in monitoring the performance of their students. We would eventually like to expand this partnership to the Teach for All network because this can contribute to developing an equal amount of basic competency among students of different nations.

 Apart from BRAC and Teach for Bangladesh, there are over 500 NGOs working in the education sector of Bangladesh. We would seek to collaborate these NGOs depending on their willingness and capability of adopting our smartphone based solutions. 

 We are also interested in partnering with Khan Academy to deliver educational content to students and/or teachers in the topics the students struggle most (determined by our collected data). One aspect of this partnership would be circulating the English and Bengali (where available) content of Khan Academy instructional videos so that a greater number of students can get access to quality explanations and teachers can get acquainted with alternative approaches of explaining the same topics. 

 We aim to collaborate with the Ministry of Education of Bangladesh to roll out our product to all government schools across the country and to develop services that can help in raising the competencies of country’s students.