Notunboi, an online & mobile based learning platform.

Millions of students in Bangladesh are getting poor and draining learning-experience in the over-crowded classrooms of primary and secondary schools. Most teachers are not skilled or equipped with focusing on all the students individually. Therefore, most of the students are seeking out-of-school private-tuition, which is currently the only available alternative resource. More than 95% students are spending additional 3-to-4 hours everyday in those tuition; which in fact, is another large and crowded out-of-school commercial classroom system. Hence, the students also don't get there the personalized educational care.  Consequently, once a student fail to cope with the average learning-pace, they become literally back-benched, treated as poor-student, and left overlooked by the traditional system. 

With thirteen years of experience, we are preparing an online- and mobile-based learning platform with extensive academic diagnosis system and large number of video and online-quiz with self-assessment system, which  allow our platform to select-and-supply academic-contents tailored for individual student. 

We are providing an complementary learning system to the students to help them learn adaptively, which most of the students lacks from the over-crowded classrooms with poorly-skilled teacher in most part of Bangladesh. 

Currently there are 13.5 million students in the primary education (Grade I-V) and 14.6 million students in secondary and higher secondary education (Grade VI-XII. Our online solution and all-day-long mobile- and internet-based direct support will provide the much-needed academic support to these vast number of student learning new content and recovering from falling-back. 

The following components has made our solution highly potential to solve the current problem of learning system in Bangladesh.

1. The government has recently connected every primary and secondary school in Bangladesh by high-speed broadband connection and equipped them with one or more computers and projector. Thereby, students are now ready to learn further using computer and cellphone. 

2. Every family in Bangladesh has mobile connection and the call-rate is extremely cheap. 

3. The broadband with unlimited internet has became widely available in the urban and suburban areas. 

4. In last three years, the high-speed 4G-mobile internet has became widely available in every part of Bangladesh and become more than 10 times cheaper than in USA. 

We have been working on technology based education in Bangladesh for 12 years. We have been directly testing our system with two schools in Bangladesh at two different districts in Bangladesh, Sonali Primary School in Kotchandpur, Jhenidah and Saldha Primary School in Mohammadpur, Magura. We have created more than hundreds video on math, English and science. We are continuously updating our website with video, quiz and logical algorithm of sequential learning. We have interviewed hundreds of teacher at different school to understand the drawback of he current system and the solution the teacher and the students needs. Our team includes experienced teacher, local content developers and instructors, graduate students of educational research, and electrical engineers with extensive teaching experience in Bangladesh and USA.    

We have identified the mathematics, English, Basic Science, Chemistry, Physics are the key subjects where the lack of sufficient number of quality teacher is affecting the most.

We are identifying the every steps of difficulties in the learning-path in those sequentially and logically organized analytical subject from hundreds of students learning pattern and building video and interactive contents. We are observing the factors that inspire a student and factors that bore students, and updating contents accordingly.

Our solution includes:

1. An website filled with academic contents for the grade-I to grade-XII students. To develop the website: 

• We are identifying the learning-sequence and learning-difficulties of the analytical and highly interdependently-organized subjects, such as  science, math, English, physics, etc.
• Collecting available academic online contents, YouTube videos, documents, supporting diagrams, interactive science learning tools, etc., and organizing them following the same structure and flow of the textbook. 
• Identifying the content-gap, the additional content required to make the learning smooth and seamless, and developing those content in-house and filling that gap.  
• Developing self-assessing online-quiz (using Hotpotatoes and Moodle) for each stage of learning, interactive tools for physics
• Logically connecting the video and the quiz-results, to identify the student's skill-gap and provide them the individualized content and guideline. We are assessing the implementation of artificial-intelligence for this stage. 

2. Mobile and online-based direct academic support to the students for 7 am to 9 pm. 

We are developing team to providing a phone- and online-based academic support. We have extensively evaluated the system, and found both the system are highly effective. The phone-based system lacks visualization, and making it challenging to communicate while staying on the same-page. However, we have found that this gets easily overcomes, when we talk literally on the same-page of the same standard-textbook. We have developed a method to reach the specific textbook-page in less than 30 seconds when a student asks question about. 

Four essential components of our solution makes it innovative and highly promising to bring substantial improvement in the learning experience of grade-school students in Bangladesh. 

1. We are developing new academic contents, as well as accumulating and organizing the available and oncoming open-sourced educational contents from other developers to make a complete and coherent educational platform. Those contents include videos, diagrams, explanatory articles, self-assessing online-quizzes, interactive software, etc. [Beta version available in www.notunboi.com].
2. We are connecting all those complements logically and building a system to understand a students strength and weakness, and supply him/her with related academic contents to overcome the weakness and foster their strength. While our solution makes a comprehensive  archive of educational contents, at the same time, it focuses on every student individually, supports directly, tracks their progress, and provides personalized feedback and solution. [beta version available in amar.notunboi.com]
3. We are extensively working with the students providing them direct support through online platform and phone, understanding their needs, and identifying the content requirements and improvement scopes of our platform. 
4. Finally, we are implementing and testing our solution directly working with the local schools. 

The need and realm of educational content for our our is vast and the learning method of each students is different. Therefore, we are connecting with students through all the channels available to understand their problems and needs in-depth and accumulating all the resource available to solve it with the cumulative understandings and resources. 

In short term, our goal is to support uplifting the educational quality in Bangladesh by enhancing learning experience, and fostering students motivation toward math-science-English.

In long term, supporting the process of building skilled and knowledge-based generation.

1. Approximately 700 students online and 100 students in two primary schools onsite.
2. 100 thousands students online and 500 students onsite.
3. 5 million students online and 100k students over phone and 10k students onsite. 

In next year we have two goals: 

1. To further develop our system:

We shall finish developing all the contents on the math and science from grade-I to grade XI and expand our online and mobile based live support system.  

2. To lead the progress in this area:

We shall connect and make a forum with all the individuals and groups who are currently developing the educational contents. We shall share the current status of the content development and the future needs. Based on those, we shall set a goal, and provide them with  the necessary tools and technology. We are also working to organize a conference with these teams.

In next five years:

1. We are looking froward to bring every student in our online system and provide them a completely new learning experience, with integral diagnosis and learning.  We want to make the complex concepts of math-science easy for not only the traditional-brilliant students, but for all students, coming from any family, economical, or geographical background.

2. We want to build a country wide online- and mobile-based live academic support system, to help develop an extremely high-skilled generation bottom-up. 

3. Going beyond school: we want to develop network of knowledge-sharing and skill-building utilizing the significantly large unemployed but skilled generation. 

Currently, the learning content requirement is vast, while the available content for Bangladeshi educational curriculum are only a few and those are scattered. Developing quality content with skilled manpower requires large initial investment or long time. It requires more people and resource to accelerate the development. Until we can develop a substantial amount of digital content to make a significant difference in learning experience, the students will not be seriously interested to believe it as a truly alternative system that can solve their learning challenge. Therefore, it requires financial support to develop contents as well as bringing all the academic content developers in an common road-map. 

However, as the content development is not financially profitable in Bangladesh, the pace of these system is very slow. It requires a government support or angel-donors support to bring the accelerate the content development. 

To overcome the financial barrier, we are accelerating our development and expansion plan of subscription based online and mobile supported live-support. That is our shortest path to become financially sustainable, and focus on accelerating the content development. 

At the same time, we are fundraising from local donors, seeking government fund, and looking for to participate aligned global initiatives. MIT Solve is such an opportunity for us.  

Our current work includes:

1. Sequentially creating academic videos based on our academic content-gaps between the available and required resource (available in https://www.youtube.com/channe... ).

2. Accumulating all the academic videos from other sources and organizing those in our Mediawiki based website http://notunboi.com/. Once beta version is ready and complete, we shall further seek for volunteered-development-program similar to the development model of the Wikipedia.

3. We are developing and enriching our individualized website for the students, with vast academic contents including video, online quiz, academic-test, writing test, etc., where a students can track his/her progress, and connect with and follow others activities. 

4. We are testing our mobile-and-internet based direct-support system working with the local students. According to our findings, this system is one of the most favorable educational-technology for current perspective of Bangladesh. We have reduced the initial-setup-time for starting an effective phone-based academic support to less than 15 seconds; which means, once a student call us with question in mind and the context-page of the textbook open in front, our system can open the same textbook-page in less than 15 seconds, helping us to understand the question, getting on the same page and start helping him/her. 

Full time staff: 4

Part time staff: 2

Volunteer: 15

Our team has following members:

Our solution team includes:

• One electrical engineers with 13 years experienced with educational technology,
• one web-developer,
• two graduate students of educational research in leading university USA,
• four full-time content developer who are working directly with local schools and supporting students directly over phone,
• one 27 years experienced math teacher of primary school,
• 5+ international volunteers experienced in technology and 10+ highly dynamic and passionate local volunteers. 

We have a team balanced with technological-skill, website development, advanced researcher in educational-research focusing on science and math education. Currently, we need to significantly increase our local content-developer team to support building the system according to our plan, request from the students, and based on our continuing findings.

LAMP Foundation, Holland is our main partner, who supports us financially. They have been supporting us for the last seven years. 

We are developing a technology-based learning platform and academic support-system for more than 14 millions primary, secondary, higher-secondary level students in Bangladesh. 

School system in Bangladesh is now lacks sufficient number of skilled and sincere teachers, especially of math, science, English, physics and chemistry. Almost all the students are now seeking out-of-school academic support on those subjects. The fear of math-science-English is widely a known problem in Bangladesh, but never been addressed effectively, mainly due to lack of skilled teacher. The problem is worse in suburban and rural are than in Urban area with good school. The problem is far worse for students from a family with uneducated or less-educated parents then a family with well-educated parents. Those trends indicate an extreme need of an advanced individualized academic support system for success in math-science-English, and break the chain of underprivileged background.  

We are developing a platform and support-system to mitigate these lacking and help the students in every small steps of learning by providing them sequentially organized online contents and anytime-reachable mobile- and online-based learning support.

For sustainability and growth, we shall make our online- and mobile-based support a subscription based service. 

As a nonprofit venture with complete new digital content development goal, we have operated with the Grant from the LAMP Foundation and our donations.  With long experience of educational technology, and potential readiness of mass educational system for digital content and support, we are looking toward to the rapid content and team development using potential funding and grant from MIT solve, and stepping toward making our mobile-based system subscription based  for financial sustainability and growth. 

This is one are we shall need support form the MIT solve, if we win the challenge.  

We are in a pilot stage and looking for to implement, test, and develop our solution in wider extend. I we win the support of Tiger IT Foundation, we have three categories for development and expansion in plan:

1. At the first stage, partnering with all the school with well established computer lab. This will allow us to integrate our system more naturally in the traditional system and help the student to adopt our system. This stage require increasing our resources, employees, volunteer, and strengthen our support system with skilled and larger team. 
2. Expanding the topics and increasing the speed of developing required contents (video, test, software in math, science, physics, chemistry and English) as well as the updating website integrating those contents. We shall also start working with other subjects, especially on biology, accounting, economics, sociology, in which we have identified the need, but our team is currently not equipped to work with those subjects.
3. Expanding our online and phone based direct support system to connect more students, which, according to our finding, is the most effective way to implicitly identify the actual need of the students when they learn by themselves with available book and resources.  
4. We shall support different content developers helping them with advance technological support, lending them advance tools for content development, such as digital drawing tools, software for video integrated quiz development, etc and arrange a regular conference among the content developers to establish a road-map of deploying educational-tools and content development in Bangladesh. 

We are also looking for support in expert in artificial intelligence who can support and guide us building our algorithm to improve our individualized learning path. 

Locally, a partnership with the directorate of primary and secondary educational in Bangladesh will provide us a much needed access to the schools, understanding their current technological infrastructure in the school, their future plan, and align our system development accordingly.  

1. Directorate of the primary and secondary education, Bangladesh

2. Institute of the Education and Research, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh