Teach It (Pvt.) Limited

‘Teach It’ brings a solution in the form of an eLearning platform that enables any individual with skillsets, experts & professional teachers to teach online and earn passive income as per user consumption. On the other hand, the users of the platform will get access to all contents by only paying a weekly/monthly affordable subscription package. The solution would not only create more access to quality education and make users employable, but also ensure equitable and cost-effective access to quality education for anyone sitting at their homes and teaching/learning at their own time and pace; and then spending their teaching-earnings as learners to subscribe to others in the community. Hence, the platform aims to change the lives of many through providing a platform to earn passive income, get skills to be employable at an affordable weekly and monthly flat rate (starting from just $ 1).

We are still struggling with ensuring uniform quality education for all in all levels. Prominent factors are: high cost (approx. 29% of average-income goes to education), lack of teachers/ teacher-options (due to low incentives and motivation), under-resourced schools, low teacher-student contact-hours (high teacher-student ratio and unnecessary external work), and poor teaching-learning practices. Only 46% of Grade 3 students in Bangladesh can read with comprehension (World Vision). Globally, the recognized threshold of reading-comprehension is 80%. One-in-ten of Bangladesh’s 44 million youth, faces unemployment. As a result, there is scarcity of skilled-workers in any industry. Schooling is more emphasized rather than providing other skill-building opportunities. Because, 72% of Bangladeshi youth are interested in receiving vocational training to gain employment opportunities. On the other hand, getting quality skills is costly and are accessible to few.

Shared learning practices can be part of the solution. In Bangladesh, about 8 million university, school/college, non-academic, and vocational students (among which we find private tutors/ teaching-enthusiasts) can take part in this (MoE). It has become necessary for a solution that provides equitable and cost-effective access to all the 21st century skills in an affordable rate and helps increase youth employability.

‘Teach It’ is a community-driven eLearning platform that enables experts, teaching-enthusiasts & professional teachers to teach in return for community-exposure and monetary incentives. It can enable all users to access all content and learn using a weekly/monthly affordable subscription package. Teacher exposure, monetary incentives, rating and reviewing , and more will make the product more quality-controlled and inclusive, leading to what we are aiming for: to provide equitable access to quality education. The target group of Teach It is now school-going students and University Students, but later on, it will scale to other segments. The private tutors/ teachers/ teaching enthusiasts can earn passive income from the platform and gain exposure from their profile. On the other hand, the students get access to quality teachers, teacher-options, and then study contents, creating equity in education in a cost-effective way for everyone, including: rural people, students from low-income families, and people from minority groups.

A primary research was done with 200 participants for demand-supply and price validation. In that research, 91% of the respondents were willing to learn from Teach It under our model and 76% of the respondents are willing to teach and learn using our platform. 

Teach It is an crowd-powered social e-learning platform that benefits teachers, students & schools from all social groups & communities. Teach It aims to be an enabler platform, that focuses on instructors’ skillset and teaching skill rather than just academic certification, and eliminates price-discrimination between content and subject matters. Teach It is a shared platform that facilitates quality competition among content creators and enables self-financing of users’ own learning via the amount of earning made by sharing user’s existing skill set. The quality competition is set by the weighted distribution system through a ‘Royalty pool for content creators’ feature that is calculated by the cumulative minutes watched of an individual content creator’s content within a set time period. It is a practice ground for teaching enthusiasts to hone their existing skills by taking part in the competition of quality of content-making, and it is a platform for enthusiasts, experts, and professional teachers alike to gain exposure. Students who earn a passive income by commuting long distances every other day to provide tuition services can be largely benefited if they can simply teach online by competing with quality content which they teach their students.  Teach It therefore delivers features like video posting, live-class hosting, forums, assessment, leader-board system, tutor-finder system, user profiling, social networking, payment gateways etc. to ensure engagement and to make learning of academic & non-academic accessible, easy, and fun, in a common platform for all citizens. The product can be adaptable to embrace VR/AR contents and aim to include machine learning to provide better user experience to its users.

For the technology stack, we have chosen React for frontend and Laravel for Backend. We have chosen React because the interaction is more fluid, it feels more natural as a user. Laravel allows us a codebase that is simple and powerful at the same time and provide us the advantage of getting more coders with a global and local community when we scale up. We are using MongoDB for database, Docker and Kubernetes for deployment and scalability and integrate Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Portwallet and BKash (the leading mobile payment gateway in Bangladesh) to run the platform and analyze each activity in the platform.

We want to incorporate VR, AR, and Machine Learning down the line to make the user experience far more better.

We are creating a platform where anyone let it be university students, school teachers, university teachers, artists, musicians, coders, anyone can create a profile and teach. On the other hand, anyone can subscribe for a limited time watch hours and get access to all the contents in ‘Teach It’. The key features that we are providing are Learning Videos, Slides and Documents, Categorization & Topic Forums, Royalty Pool-based Revenue distribution, Encouraging Bangla and Multilingual Content, Personalized Learning Planner, Teacher’s support & Teacher Finder, Community-run Rating & Ranking Engine. These features are yet to be introduced in Bangladesh. 

In terms of business model, we are trying to execute a monthly and weekly subscription package for learners providing access to all the contents, personal profiles for everyone to gain exposure and new passive income model for tutors/ teaching enthusiasts in Bangladesh, unlike free platforms where all the contents are under one umbrella and not open to everyone to create a profile and create educational content or course selling platforms where users do not get access to all the contents.

Right now, we do not have any users as the platform is not launched yet. But, we are onboarding content creators who are making contents and whose profile will be created once we create the platform. WE are working with 40+ content creators who are trained and who are prepared to create content. By the year-2020, we aim to have 50,000 users as we aim to launch our MVP within 2019. In five years, we aim to serve more than one million users covering diverse topics that will value different segment of learners making them skilled to be employed  and create passive income opportunities to many private tutors, teachers and teaching enthusiasts.

The goal in the next year is to onboard teachers, private tutors and teaching enthusiasts of O/A Level and IB curricula, Bangla Medium and Music and Performing Arts. This will help to build the foundation of the users so that they can excel themselves in academic and non-academic domain. We aim to sell subscription and advertisements once we have enough content in our platform. After next year, aim to onboard the professionals who aim to provide tutorials based on skill sets and scale it to other countries as well. We aim to incorporate technologies like VR and Machine Learning soon so that we can provide better user experience to the users.

The biggest of all challenges consist of scarcity of resources, especially human resources, due to lack of funds. A cultural shift demands multi-level approach that requires extensive piloting, validating, programming/coding, marketing, training, mobilizing and communicating that takes place simultaneously. The biggest challenge therefore is to mobilize the movement, in order to instill the belief and trust that may give rise to the practice that will establish the culture. Before all of this, it is also very important to derive the need, as social imbalances exist due to information gap amongst communities. And to get all of this all going, infrastructure is also key. Even at an organization-level, a cultural shift requires an innovative approach to structuring an ed-tech team.

To overcome these barriers, we need to hire human resources (programmers/ coders) to develop the infrastructure. Also, we will need funds to market and communicate with potential users because with out awareness and targeted marketing, a cultural shift will not happen. Right now, we are trying to develop a Facebook group community (https://www.facebook.com/groups/askandlearnOAIB/) to attract the students and teachers to get connected with us and so that it helps us in the long run. We are now looking for grants and funds to overcome all these barriers. The grants from Startup Bangladesh and Queen’s Commonwealth Trust is helping us to overcome the barriers but we know that we will need more funds to go to market traction: acquire users and retain them.

People working on solution team: 2 (Full time Employees), 2 (Part Time Employees)

Other than the solution team:-

Number of Full Time Employees: 3

Number of Part Time Employees: 2

Number of Volunteers: 6

A passionate group of Curriculum Experts, Tech-project manager, Community-project managers, Development Professionals and business developers with 2+ years of experience on average.

1. Queen’s Commonwealth Trust: Grant Support to run 100 online tutorial content in schools.
2. Startup Bangladesh: Grant and Mentorship support to make the MVP and communicate with potential users.
3. Banglalink: A Telecom giant in Bangladesh. They are incubating and mentoring us as part of the top 6 startup projects in the country. 
4. Bangladesh Hi-Tech Park Authority (BHTPA): A concern of Ministry of ICT. BHTPA is providing us with an office space. BHTPA is also a partner of the incubator program with Banglalink.
5. UNDP and Citi Foundation ‘Youth Co: Lab Accelerating Bangladesh’: ‘Teach It’ is a part of the top 9 startups receiving mentorship, training, networking and partnership opportunities.
6. Teach For Bangladesh: A life-long partner/supporter through their Alumni-impact program.

The business model of Teach It is shown in the following Social Business Model Canvas:

Teach it earns revenue from the different weekly/monthly subscription packages, advertisements on the platform and sponsorship of different videos. In terms of expenses, part of the subscription amount will go towards marketing of the platform and content creators and overhead costs for maintenance and other teams to sustain Teach It’s steady growth. Hence, Cash InFlow of Teach It will depend on these factors. On the other hand, 50-70% (based on market demand) of the total Subscription Amount will go to the Content Creators on a monthly basis based on views of videos, reviews and user ratings. The Cash OutFlow will mainly depend on the total amount paid to the content creators, salaries of the human resources, marketing, advertisement and training expenditure and hosting and servers. We have different strategies like affiliate marketing and referral programs to have steady growth in Cash InFlow. Considering revenue and expenditure  and growth strategies, we are going to break even in the fourth year of operation.

The USD $200,000 will vastly help in lowering our scarcity of resources, especially building a large team of experts considering the scale of the project that includes platform development, content development, content-creator support services, media lab facilities, market and promotions, financials and accounts, and research and development teams. Receiving mentorship and operational support from a network of professionals and seasoned entrepreneurs can helps us better strategize in disrupting the market and understand a better product-market fit, and help in expansion and setting an efficient road map. Office support will help us reduce costs as we have to start off traction with large initial investment in onboarding and marketing. Again, a cultural shift demands multi-level approach that requires extensive piloting, validating, programming/coding, marketing, training, mobilizing and communicating that takes place simultaneously.