TutorsInc.

Our existing education system lacks modern methodologies. This results in children having huge gaps in their knowledge and a weak foundation. This creates a vacuum which restricts them from achieving what they are capable of. On a broader scale this affects our economy and growth. We are committed to solving this.

We propose to improve our education system, where learning becomes easy and fun.  Our panel of experts, aware of the latest teaching techniques, prepare educational content in a way to help a child understand their lessons for exams under both, the national and international curricula comfortably. This content is available from our website and our app(soon to be launched) for schools and individuals.  

Our solution caters to a child’s all education needs. Our goal is to enhance the standard of education across our country and build global citizens and future leaders to take the country to greater heights.

The problem lies in the absence of modern methodologies in our education system. There are over 30 million students in Bangladesh. 90 percent are from rural areas who are denied access to high quality education.

Every year we have girls and boys dropping out of secondary schools.  The dropout percentage of girls in 2018 was 40.19% We have seen the highest dropout of boys in secondary school in the last seven years which is 36.01%

Thus the lack of quality education affects each and every child, adult and family,  directly or indirectly.  

The contributing factors are:

• Obsolete teaching techniques - Our children are being taught with tools and techniques that are obsolete. More than 40%of government primary school teachers have a secondary or higher-secondary school degree, and no university degree.  Therefore scale of the problem is huge because it is leaving around 40% of our student population uneducated.
• Social pressure – This is connected to education. If students fail, the poor parents, who sacrifice their own and the family's wants and needs cannot after a while. Therefore it becomes easier to get the girls married off and send the boys to work and earn. Sad, but true.  

We are mainly working with children coming from all walks of life. Our work is done in three phases:  

• Phase 1: Students: We work closely with the students within and away from the learning environment. We have assessed their needs while taking their classes to see how much they know and where they lack.
• Phase 2: The Teachers: We work closely with the teachers to understand where their challenges lie and how to mitigate these challenges. Many a times, we assist the teachers  in their classroom while they are teaching, to experience their challenges. Quite often we spend plenty of time with them during their training programs and hence find it easy to pinpoint where the problems lie.
• Phase 3: The Management: We work closely with the school management to identify their struggles. This is done via various meetings and brainstorming sessions to identify how to encourage teachers to get the most out of what they have to offer.   

The solution is multi-faceted and can address all the needs that have risen as per our identification. The beauty of our work is that it caters to all stakeholders; the students, teachers, management and parents. 

Our product is the one stop solution catering to all students of our country studying under both, the national and international curriculum, in the form of:

• Video Lessons
• Worksheets to practice
• Answer key
• Notes
• Quiz
• Question bank
• Book solutions
• Podcasts 

Apart from these we are also reaching out to students at real time via  

• Discussion Forum
• Live Classes 

Our services consist of:  

• Teachers Training: We have various training programs designed to assist teachers to facilitate students better in class.
• We plan to assess the school, teachers and students annually based on the content used during the year.  The result of this is that we want to bring all the schools under the same ranking system where the high achievers, students, teachers and schools shall be recognized and honored. This will improve our education system and will help us develop skillful resources which will result in substantial and effective economic growth.     

Process: We have built a team of 32 divided in the following departments:

• Operations Team
• Development & Technical Team
• Teachers Panel
• Experts Panel
• QA team comprising of internal and external experts.
• Animators and Scribers team
• Cinematographers and designers
• Marketing team 

The steps of our work starts from content creation, followed by animation and then uploaded on our website after thorough QA-ing, all done under the roof of TutorsInc.

This product which is a video content is made with Exam specifications and knowledge requirement in mind, it is supported by detailed notes, practice worksheets, answer keys. podcasts and book solutions.  

This is available for the students, teachers, administrators and parents via our website and app(soon to be launched) from any device, i.e. Laptops, Desktops, Smart TVs, Tabs, Mobile Phones and so on at a very affordable price. Our services are not limited to institutions and individuals only, it is for everybody and from all walks of life, the deprived and the physically challenged, too. For all those who want to be educated and have access to a mobile phone. Not necessarily that they have to own smart phones. Those who own can see and hear and learn, those who don’t can still hear and learn as we have a plan to have our lessons available through podcasts.  

Our product and services can be seen at www.mytutorsinc.com. 

Our solution is an easy answer to help children learn better. Sometimes the most difficult questions are answered best in the simplest forms. Therefore, our solution to a child’s everyday problems relating to their studies and lessons is something very simple.

The challenge is to make lessons easy for the children. Another task, equally challenging is to make sure that all the lessons are explained comprehensively, while not making lessons boring. Therefore, we teach children keeping a few things in mind. 

Firstly, through video lessons. These lessons are not like the everyday videos we see on the internet or other learning websites. These lessons are fun to watch. We have these lessons animated.

The word and the pictures on the screen in no time come to life in front of the learners’ eyes giving them an experience not easily forgotten. And that serves our purpose of making children remember their lessons by understanding and with enjoyment. Secondly, our video lessons are backed up by Notes for children to study and worksheets for them to practice. These worksheets are further backed by Answer keys to enhance learning.

The best part of our product is that we have book solutions for the children so that they can understand their textbook and its exercises better and very soon we shall be starting our podcast services as well. Our lessons are designed, delivered and QA’d by seasoned and experienced teachers, all excelling in their fields. Therefore these lessons are made to cater to all learning styles.

Our National Curriculum of Bangladesh is one of the most comprehensive curriculum in the world. We believe with all our hearts that if the students of our nation are taught properly, no one in the world can stop them!

Keeping that in mind, we understand the absence of modern methodologies in our education system results in poor conception of the children – in some places more than others. This results in big deviations in the quality of education across our country.

To solve these problems, we decided to make necessary changes in our education system. We are working with the same curricula, same books, same schools, same teachers and same students! All we did was arrange the work in a structured way, using technologies that will help to grab the children’s full attention, leading to sound conception.

Our goal is to provide a platform for all students to avail the same content they learn at school, in a different manner to boost their understanding. This will in time see a wave of students graduating with similar concept and knowledge – who will then bring the country to greater heights.

This believe strengthened when we visited schools around the country. Even though we knew over 93 million people were using Internet in our country; it was when we saw almost all students carry a smartphone to school that we believed that our country truly is ready for an Education Revolution. Among the 93+ million internet subscribers, 87.3 million are mobile subscribers.

As you may know, we are working towards serving both individuals and institutions. We completed developing our website in February 2018. Since then we have been offering a unique question paper service that attracted a lot people from different countries onto our website. We launched our courses for National curricula and Foreign curricula this July. At the end of August, we had over 8,000 visitors from 91 countries. From there, we have around 1,500 signed up users, from which 153 people subscribed to our content.

As for the institutions, we started our pilot project with a school in Banshkhali, Chattogram – called Natmura Pukuria High School. We have been serving around 500 students since July’18. Since then we have been visiting different parts of the country, signing contracts & MOU with a number of schools. So far we have visited 20 schools. We are targeting of serving 5,000 students by the end of 2019.

With our contents been uploaded recently, we believe that in a year’s time we will be able to serve approximately 30,000 students. We are planning on achieving this by widening our product range as well as our marketing activities with our Sales Force, Digital Marketing & other offline activities. As for the institutions, there are a number of schools eagerly waiting to work with us!

In 5 years’ time, we would love to work towards establishing this form of learning in all the schools in the country – reaching 30+million students!

We want to take our content to every corner of the country, based on the subjects that the children have in their schools at present. Our target for the year is to have our digital content in the form of videos, notes, quizzes, etc uploaded as a one-stop-solution for a child’s all education needs i.e. lessons for all classes, grades, levels and boards, for both the curricula, national and international. We aim at making 1 district Digital within 2020, meaning a significant number of schools in that district would be studying using our content.

The next 5 years, we would like to see ourselves placing the following milestones:

Milestone # 1: Reach as many districts as possible to help bring quality of education at par all over.

Milestone # 2: We aim to introduce video lessons for Polytechniques which will help us to develop our resources for the better.

Milestone # 3: Introducing On line Teachers Training Programs to help us reach out to all the teachers at the same time to improve teaching methodologies.

Milestone # 4: Introducing on line programs to develop soft skills of our executives. This is essential to be in a favorable position in the global race.

Milestone # 5: Introducing Spoken English courses which will help us to make our mark in the world as it is the international language.

Our relentless efforts would be to establish these milestones as the stepping stone to the doorway that opens to a new beginning.

Following are some of the barriers we have been facing in our journey to enhancing the quality and reach of education through technology:

• E-learning: E learning is a new concept and many of our teachers and parents may not be too familiar with it. But the children are quite apt with this way of learning and have welcomed and accepted our contents with much enthusiasm.
• Payment: We have the option of paying through debit cards, credit cards and bkash. The problem that we face is that the children who may want to connect do not have their own bkash account. This results in them depending on their parents to pay which can prove to be a lengthy process.
• Financial:  Our content is vast and creating it is time consuming. It takes a number of months to bring out one syllabus. This proves to be expensive and also slows down the revenue substantially.  Another point here is that we would like to give this content as a very low cost solution as 90% of our mass is living in the rural areas and may not be monetarily sound.
• Marketing: Due to limited funds and slow revenue, marketing for the product becomes challenging as our people are yet to believe in e-learning.

We believe in solutions, which are as follows:

• E-Learning: Marketing is the best approach to create awareness. Therefore, we feel our product should be marketed with much ado. This will help us reach the parents. As for teachers we reassure them every step of the way that a video or anything else cannot replace a teacher’s physical presence in class. We try to eliminate this barrier by taking demo classes to show them that teachers can never be replaced.  Our demo classes show the teachers that this product can be used as the perfect teaching aid for the teacher to enhance their classroom teaching and learning.
• Payment: The solution to this is to be able to use the payment gateways of Telcos; or better still, have our own payment gateway. Another  solution to this would be to set up booths at convenient places in order to receive payment in cash.
• Financial: Win Tiger Challenge.   
• Marketing: We want to market for our product with a bang. We want to open the flood gate of familiarity with this product by reaching out to all. This is only possible if we win the Tiger Challenge.

We started with 4 of us, in a single room. Two years down the line, we have a team of 32 members! Our full-time & contractual staff members include 5 in our Operations Team, 15 in our Teachers & Experts’ Panel & 2 Developers. We have two further members as QA Experts. Now as for our creative teams, we have 3 animators & 3 scribers. We have 1 cinematographer and 1 designer as well as a team of 2 strategists in the marketing department

Apart from them, we also have a number of mobile sales force working as part-timers!

Our team is built on two pillars, Experience and Youth. The senior part of the team, the chairman and myself are the experience. Our Chairman, Mr. Syed Noor Alam is the founder and former managing director of M&H Informatics BD Ltd. – A global IT company, a concern of IQVIA (Quintiles & IMS Health). He is  a member of Basis since 2004 and is the former Chairman of Outsourcing Committee. He pioneered the concept of Clone Computers and worked with Dell, Gateway 2000, Micron etc.  He started the revolution of offshoring model in Bangladesh. In the IT Sector for 30 years, he has been a winner of many awards in the field.

I  am Maryam Noor Yunus with 20+ years in education.  I am the Principal of a school in Dhaka. I am also a British Council Leadership Counsellor. I have been a student of the National Curriculum and have great love and respect for it. My work has been recognized by The International School Awards as follows: 

• Best Principal Award 2017 
• Best Principal Award 2018  
• Outstanding Contribution to Student Community 2017  
• Award for Contribution to Education Community 2018 
• Award for Lead Role in Academics 2019, Education Icon Awards, 2019
• Woman Entrepreneur Award; Education Icon Awards 2019

Another big aspect of our team is the youth. We have young directors, Mahmudul Hassan and Razi Uddin Ahmed recently graduated from Universities working with us. our experience and their energy have proved to be a winning combination so far. 

We have been working day and night for 2 years now, to create content with quality as our priority – that will better educate the children of our country. We spared no cost, both in terms of money and time.

Our work attracted a number of companies, wanting to collaborate with us. The one we decided to pursue was a Telecommunication company. We understood that making the content was step 1, next would be to take this to every nook and cranny of the country – and what better company to partner with than a leading Telecommunication Company?

To further make our case of taking our content to all parts of our country, we are developing a state-of-the-art Application. Together, we believe we will be able to reach each and every child in our country.

Apart from them, we also affiliated with British Council IELTS – making us an official registration portal. Under our Foreign Curricula, we are providing IELTS content as well. You can find our free IELTS Foundation Course on our website while our Full Course is being prepared now. With this affiliation, we became a one-stop solution to all IELTS needs – from exam preparation to registration.

First & foremost, we want to serve the 4 main stakeholders in any Education Industry; Students, Parents, Teachers & Schools/Institutions.

Stakeholders & Our Products & Services

• Students: We have developed a website & on our way to developing an App, that will host the contents we are preparing at TutorsInc. Students from all parts of the country will be able to access our contents at extremely affordable prices; anywhere, anytime.
• Parents: Education is one of the biggest expenditures for parents. With our low cost solution, parents will find it a lot easier to educate their children, that too from the ease of their homes or anywhere else!
• Teachers: We are working towards developing our teachers through relevant teachers’ trainings as well as providing them with crucial resources.
• Schools/Institutions: Along with students, we are also serving institutions with our content that they use to conduct digital classes at their schools.

Revenue Streams:

Upon creating value for these crucial stakeholders, we have mainly two streams as our Revenue. First is the Subscription Model – where individual students subscribing through our website, teachers’ availing our trainings and schools implementing our content in their digital classes – will pay us a subscription fee for our services.

Furthermore, we also have an online platform serving students aged 16-20, which is an attractive target group for companies wanting to market. This will allow us to earn from advertisements on our platforms, acting as another revenue stream for us.

We are a For-Profit Organization – which means our primary path to Financial Sustainability is through Revenue. We mainly have two revenue models in the forms of Subscription & Advertisement.

We earn through subscriptions when students pay for our content from our website or app that is being prepared, teachers’ pay for training sessions & resources & schools pay for the content that they use to conduct digital classes every month. For people who pay through our platform, we brought in a unique coin’s concept. Instead of only having the option of buying courses, with our platform you can buy individual Course/Chapter/Video/Notes/Quizzes/Worksheets & more. You simply buy coins in available/Customized packages at a go and pay as you wish.

As for the advertisement model, we serve a group of people whom most companies would love to reach with their products. Let it be restaurants, clothing lines or any company from the entertainment industry – our site would be an ideal platform to place their advertisements. This will act as another revenue stream for us.

However, it is important to note that we are on our way to develop & nurture the future of our country. This will take funding. We've invested our savings on this cause of building the nation but it is depleting fast. This is why, we hope that Tiger Challenge would look favorably upon our vision of developing our nation – not as a speck on the map but a beacon on its own.

Tiger IT Foundation can help us overcome two of the main barriers that we have encountered, which are Finance & Marketing – as mentioned in our answers above.

For our financial barrier, as our chairman is the only person investing in this project, his funds are depleting. We  have just skimmed the surface in order to create content as the content is huge.  If we win this then the first thing we would like to do is increase the number of animators to help create content faster.  This will help to roll out more subjects and will result in more students connecting faster.

Secondly, we would like to utilize these funds to market this product.  It is important to create awareness for learners to benefit from it and nationwide marketing is the answer to this.

Thirdly, we want to keep a chunk aside from the grant to sponsor meritorious students. We have a plan of bringing all the schools under a ranking system and give recognition to the meritorious students. In order to do so we would like to announce scholarships for these children who are perfectly deserving of such support. 

Lastly we plan to establish our own digital schools in order to teach students using our content.  Our motto for those, are to go paperless and bag-less. In today’s world where AI and IOT are the future, why should our children be left behind because after all, education is what one is left with when one is  done studying.

Any big change that we want to bring in, requires team work and collaboration. There is no way that we or anyone else can work on their own and bring in a change as it is too huge a task. We need to unite to bring the change that our children deserve.

We are partners with British Council to provide IELTS from our platform. We are in the process of collaborating with one of the biggest telcos in the country.  We would like to collaborate with companies that are involved in carrying out CSR activities like, Dutch Bangla Bank, IDLC, Orion Group, Anwar group, Square Pharmaceuticals and so on. We would like to partner up with these organizations and encourage them to sponsor one school for a couple of years. If these big names can sponsor schools in this manner then educating the mass will change the shape of the future.  

One big game changer in this kind of work is working together with schools. If we are asked to partner up with any institution, we would ask to partner up with all the schools.  If the schools in our country, big or small, rich or poor,  established or new, can all get together and partner up with us to use this content in their everyday teaching and learning activities, we can achieve our mission of standardizing quality education all around. It helps to realize our vision of seeing our children at the epitome of success!