ChalkLit - Mobile Platform for teacher Capacity building

Teacher Quality is the most important determinant of student learning outcomes in schools, however, teachers are in short supply, not trained regularly, isolated, and not supported to provide updated, relevant teaching and learning which will not allow attainment of SDG4. Traditional offline trainings have several inherent disadvantages - availability of budgets, personalization, quality trainers, infrastructure, logistics, remain focused on scholastics, and are unable to provide breadth, scale, quality, convenience, or frequency required. Teachers are not trained to impart  problem-solving, critical thinking, SDGs - skills important for the future.

We have developed a collaborative mobile app platform- ChalkLit, to impart scholastic and co-scholastic trainings ensuring short-term improvements in pedagogy and lesson planning, and long-term skill building among teachers through deep pedagogical training while also building a community-driven continuous learning infrastructure. This can be scaled to train every single teachers of Bangladesh thus impacting the life and learning outcomes of every child in Bangladesh

The specific problem we are working to solve is providing equitable and cost effective access to education by offering a mobile app platform to enable lifelong learning of teachers which will contribute to improved life and learning outcomes of bangladeshi students. On the ChalkLit platform teachers will be provided continuous capacity building on both scholastic and co-scholastic topics including problem solving skills, critical thinking skills, and vocational skills Teachers will also be trained to introduce relevant sustainable development goals in an age appropriate manner explaining a students role, their family’s role and their communities role in solving the large pressing problems of the world. This will impact the life and learning outcomes of 19.5 Million students through the continuous capacity building of more than 450K teachers of Bangladesh. In India where we work we are working with 6 states where 220K teachers are using the platform impacting 13 Million students.  The major contributing factor to the problem is lack of quality trainers, budgets, infrastructure, logistics, focus on scholastics, and the inability to provide breadth, scale, quality, convenience, or frequency required.The use of technology can ensure continuous capacity building at the scale required. 

We work with teachers to help improve their quality of their delivery in the classroom by providing them scholastic and co-scholastic trainings and content on our platform. We designed the platform and our content approach in close collaboration with several educators after interviewing close to 300 teachers and educators and studying the learning and development approaches followed by corporates. We continue to  perform user studies and seek user feedback regularly and follow a collaborative approach that allows the state, other NGOs, and Content Providers to upload their content on ChalkLit and learn from their individual approaches. This solution will provide teachers very comprehensive capacity building opportunities, allowing them to access both scholastic and co-scholastic trainings and content. The platform provides well structured content to ensure both short-term improvements in pedagogy and lesson planning, and long-term skill building among teachers through deep pedagogical training. It will also build a community-driven continuous learning infrastructure. The platform allows interaction amongst the various participants allowing greater engagement and sharing. The platform captures a lot of data which allows personalisation and also allows authorities to encourage their teachers from time to time and offer them official state mandated trainings. 

Million Sparks Foundation has developed a Mobile Application platform called ChalkLit for continuous capacity building of teachers. It started operations in October 2015 and launched the first iteration of the ChalkLit product in March 2016 and we have been improving the product and services very regularly. The platform is very mature and stable. ChalkLit offers the following three intervention-

• Enhanced curriculum-aligned lesson and annual plans

• Pedagogically focused topic based trainings on both scholastic and co-scholastic topics. State education departments provide their official training through this. Trainees receive official certificates on successful completion of training after completing evaluations, online interactions, and feedback. Communications and processes ensure high completion rates. Other NGOs and Content partners also provide their trainings on the platform. 

• A peer-to-peer personalized social microlearning network where educators are provided an AI-driven personalized feed on best practices, new pedagogical and conceptual knowledge, interesting ideas for activities in classrooms, opinion polls, education news, and content to reinforce learning from previously attended trainings.

In India we work with 6 states and enable them to offer trainings to their teachers at scale. We have several processes in place to ensure all teachers register for their trainings, and complete them. During each training all teachers participate in online interaction opportunities, and trainings include a pre-test, several module level tests, and a post test to ensure training content consumption and measures progress. Each teacher has to provide a detailed feedback for their training. Once the teacher has performed all required tasks and has secured a minimum pass percentage an official training certificate is provided to the teachers online which in India are considered for their subsequent promotions and hikes. We also allow participants to ask questions which are directed to teachers who have been volunteered to us by the state that answer them on the platform itself. We also have a call center to answer any queries that the users might have. We provide access to several detailed reports to the states which use them to plan their annual training schedule.

ChalkLit is available on the Web, Android and iOS platforms. We use Java, MySQL, and PHP on backend. It’s integrated with enterprise messaging and notification engines, and a call center with human agents augmented by volunteer mentor teachers that continuously engage with trainees, and respond to queries in real-time. A highly interactive gamified experience ensures completion rates as high as 90%.

Indian education authorities traditionally employ offline trainings that are focused on scholastics. The education ministry of India recommends 21 days training annually, with 13M educators employed, offline trainings cannot be scaled to cover all educators owing to lack of quality trainers, infrastructure, or budgets and are unable to provide regular professional development at the scale, quality, convenience or frequency required. The situation in Bangladesh is similar. 

A few organizations bring content online including NGOs such as Meghshala, TeacherApp, Khan Academy. However, their primary strength is content development and offer online solutions primarily to provide their content online requiring teachers to download multiple applications. There are significant gaps in User Interface, and User experience owing to their limited technical and design capabilities which do not get upgraded.

Our key differentiation is our collaborative platform approach which includes a comprehensive backend, a well researched content framework that allows other entities to upload their content too and each run their own programs and analytics on our well distributed platform. State education departments use our platform to run official trainings. Our generic 11 point content framework is populated by our partners, state education bodies, and other NGOs, we follow a curation approach. Our offering includes integration with enterprise messaging and notification engines, and a call center with human agents augmented by volunteer mentor teachers that continuously engage with trainees, and respond to queries in real-time which coupled with a highly interactive gamified experience with an aimed to ensure 90% completion rates.

Teacher Quality has been identified as the most important determinant of student learning outcomes in schools, in the 2019 report titled "Transforming the Education Workforce" by the Education Commission, however teachers are in short supply, not trained regularly, isolated, and not supported to provide updated, relevant teaching and learning. Our theory of change is that regular exposure of our 3 interventions, explained earlier, to the 450K teachers of Bangladesh will impact the quality of a teachers delivery in the classroom and which will impact the life and learning outcomes of the 14.6M students in classrooms. 

We have made significant progress in the past 3 years with an initial support from Google.org and are now working with 6 state governments - Chattisgarh, Delhi, Goa, Haryana, Odisha, and Uttar Pradesh and have already trained 210K+ teachers impacting more than 13M+ Children. We have partnerships with NGOs like Pratham, Akshara Foundation, SARD, Shiv Nadar Foundation, UNEP, UNICEF and others are in the process with NGOs like EducateGirls, MagicBus etc. With UNEP we are creating content with a focus on SDGs at scale. 

There has been a independent research study conducted by the Delhi State Council of Education Research and Training, with support from Indian Statistical Institute, and the National Council of Education Research and training which has evaluated and found the intervention extremely effective to improve the classroom practise and pedagogical knowledge of teachers.

1. Currently we have trained 220,000 teachers directly on our platform which impact more than 13 Million students each year.

2. In 1 year we aim to train a total of 1 Million teachers directly on our platform which impact more than 13 Million students each year.

3. In 5 years we aim to train more than 5 Million teachers directly on our platform which impact more than 13 Million students each year.

Our goal is to be the platform of choice for teachers, educators or school leaders for their annual scholastic and co-scholastic development needs globally. We have offered multiple trainings to 220K educators across 6 states in India - these educators are teaching more than 13M students each year. Several other states are expressing interest in our platform.  We have successfully piloted our platform in a few countries in Africa. There is an active interest in several South Asian countries. 

In Bangladesh with the help of the Ministry of Education of Bangladesh we would aim to create relevant and localised trainings and content to impact all ~450,000 teachers of Bangladesh. We will partner with the Government, other NGOs, and Content Providers to help scale their teacher trainings initiatives and content reach and provide comprehensive capacity building trainings and content on both scholastic and co-scholastic content. This will help impact the life and learning outcomes of ~19.5 Million students that are in schools in Bangladesh.

Globally educators impact 60-100 children each year and continue to impact these many children over several years. Many co-scholastic trainings and content offered on our platform are aimed at influencing children at an impressionable age to become responsible towards several challenges that the world faces and also become aware of the responsibility of their families and their communities towards them. These include - gender discrimination, inequalities, pollution, conservation of wild life - many of which directly impact SDGs. We hope to significantly contribute to the achievement of the SDGs.

As mentioned we aim to impact 1M teachers by Dec’20, and 10M teachers by Dec’25. The key challenge we will face going forward would be access to initial grants so that we can continue to scale our team, technology and content required to meet our goals. We aim to raise USD 1-2M till December 2020 and raise USD 15-20M till December 2025. 

We want to eventually become self sustaining as an organisation and have successfully done a few paid pilots to ascertain the possibility.

In the next year we would need to employ better technical resources which can improve our architecture and product to help us scale better, in the slightly longer term - five years - we would invest in technology and technical resources who are well versed with Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning to identify and automate processes that could positively impact our scaling. 

We have started to explore working in other markets such as Africa, Middle East, Asia and South America and are in touch with local partners and education bodies. We have conducted a pilot in Africa and are planning to scale in Bangladesh and their success will be important for our growth in the next year. Although we do not see market barriers for our solutions we will need to ensure that we have local teams, and content to suit the cultural requirements of these markets for the longer term. We aim to be present in at least 10-15 markets in next 5 years. 

Funding - We have completed 3 years of our existence and can now access CSR funds and apply to receive Foreign Funds as per the laws of India. We have approached several corporate directly for their CSR funds, enrolled with several consulting organisations that advice their various corporate clients around the allocation of their CSR funds, enrolled with central and state NGO databases which are frequented by Corporates to identify useful NGO driven projects. Our business model will include a cost of USD 1 per teacher per month. 

Technical Resources - We are partnered with several Universities and corporate volunteering programs who are supporting our technical requirements. IIIT Delhi and IIT Delhi have two faculty who are helping us design our AI solutions and we have two interns for 6 months who are helping us in our development. We however would like to hire a few full time resources to work on analytics and AI. 

International Foray - One of our founders Dr. Abhinav Mathur has done international business development and has approached several of his known associates who are helping him in other markets and there is a pilot underway with AIMS (Africa Institute of Mathematical Studies) which is also responsible for teacher capacity building. AIMS can take us across Africa. We are talking to interested partners in Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Phillipines, and Indonesia.

Our founder Dr. Abhinav Mathur has lead an organisation previously which had a significant business presence in Bangladesh and he has several connects in Bangladesh. 

We will explore the option of partnering with a local partner and with the government directly to offer the services to teachers and school leaders in Bangladesh. With the help of the Ministry of Education of Bangladesh we would aim to create relevant and localised trainings and content to impact all ~450,000 teachers of Bangladesh. We will partner with the Government, other NGOs, and Content Providers to help scale their teacher trainings initiatives and content reach and provide comprehensive capacity building trainings and content on both scholastic and co-scholastic content. This will help impact the life and learning outcomes of ~19.5 Million students that are in schools in Bangladesh.

As per our business model in which we will charge USD 1 per teacher per month in which we will provide 4 trainings to teachers annually, provide access to the various reference material such as annual plans and lesson plans, and varied content that will be posted daily on the social wall. 

After an initial focus on these we will start to create specialized content and offer our platform to other content provider, NGOs, campaigns which can use our established reach to provide and received inputs from the wider education workforce of Bangladesh.

Full-time staff 40 - We have Product, Technology, Content, Measurement and Evaluation, Outreach and Educator support teams

Part-time staff 80 - Mostly teachers who have volunteered to us from state governments to help us with interacting with educators undergoing trainings on our platform. These teachers are renumerated by the state education departments. 

Contractors - 10 - We have a few consultants who support our product development efforts and content development efforts as and when required. 

Workers (includes volunteers & interns)- This year 20 interns have worked with us. These have been with us for 6 weeks to 12 weeks.

Our team is led by a team of experienced and skilled professionals. The founders Dr. Abhinav Mathur and Dr. Mona Mathur have 27 years of experience each and are both PhDs from IIT Delhi with PhDs in Computer Science and Telecommunication, and Machine Learning and Neurosciences respectively. They had long corporate careers where they have lead large teams which delivered large scalable solutions in areas that include mobility, mobile apps, healthcare, education, entertainment and finance. We are a team of 40+ full time people with varied experiences, structured into teams focusing on Product, Technology, Content, Measurement and Evaluation, Outreach and Educator Support. Most people on our team have teaching, content development, or non profit experience and are highly motivated to impact the educator capacity building space.

Our head of operations has 14+ years of experience with the Indian Air Force, Our head of products has 20+ years of product development experience and Our head of technology has 17+ years of relevant technology development experience. 

Dr. Abhinav Mathur has also served as a CEO of a Mobile Application development company which had 150+ million downloads, he was the Chief of Strategy and Technology of a USD 2 Billion MultiNational Company operating in 30 countries and is an angel investor in several startups. 

Through our team members and various partners we have access to several resources, advisors, and individuals who regularly contribute to our work on pro bono advisory and/or project consulting basis.

Million Sparks Foundation currently has four groups of partners:

• Distribution Partners: We have signed contracts with State Education departments of Delhi, Goa, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Odisha for enabling trainings for teachers and educators. We are working to sign up with education associations, education boards, to reach out to more educators

• Content and Knowledge Partners: We are a platform and curate most of our content from trusted established content partners and scaffold it within ChalkLit 11 Point framework. We have 2000+ partners and some of the partners we use for content include Khan Academy, Meghshala, Maths Antics, Akshara, UNEP, WWF, and STIR Education. We develop content and trainings in partnerships with state council of education research and technology of states that we partner. 

• NGO Partners: As a platform we enable other NGOs to scale their offline programs and content to larger audiences. NGOs we work with include Partham, Story Weaver, STIR Education, Language Learning Foundation, Akshara Foundation, and Shiv Nadar Foundation. 

• Technology Partners: We seek technology support and inputs from time to time from leading technology led companies to improve our offerings. We have sought support from Google, JP Morgan Chase, PayTM, Infoedge, and Final Mile Consulting.

Our beneficiaries include the state education departments, educators and teachers, NGOs that have content and their programs that they wish to scale. Our long term plan is to charge USD 1 per teacher per month for access to our platform to sustain our work

State education departments run official training programs online that are hosted on ChalkLit. Trainings are offered to teachers on smartphones. This allows states to reach every single teacher employed in schools in the state which was not possible through their existing offline trainings approach.

Using ChalkLit NGOs with proven content and offline programs are able to reach a much larger audience using robust and extensible platform which has been proven at scale over the past 3 years and is being upgraded and improved continuously. NGOs do not have invest time and resources to develop expertise required to develop, maintain and scale technology solutions. 

The ChalkLit platform not only provides official trainings on both scholastic and co-scholastic topics, it also provides enhanced curriculum aligned lesson and annual plans, and a thriving peer-to-peer personalized social microlearning network where educators are provided an AI driven personalized feed on best practises, new pedagogical and conceptual knowledge, interesting activities in classrooms, opinion polls, education news, and content to reinforce learning from previously attended trainings.

ChalkLit aims to impact society by improving life and learning outcomes of students and also has a focus to contribute to the achievement of SDGs by making students aware of responsible behavior towards the problems faced globally. 

Our long term strategy is to setup a hybrid with a for-profit and non-profit arm where we will charge USD 1 per teacher per month for accessing the platform. For the immediate future as mentioned we have just completed 3 years of our existence which makes us eligible to access CSR funds and apply to receive Foreign Funds as per the laws of India. We have approached several corporates with CSR funds to seek their support and we are in the process to apply and receive funds from them. We are seeing a significant interest in our work. 

We have also enrolled with several consulting organizations that provide many corporates with advice on the use of their CSR funds and a few of them are offering some projects to us. We are also enrolled with the NGO databases of the central education ministry and the NGO databases of several states where Corporate go to search for worthwhile causes. 

Two states have approached corporates to secure funds for scaling our work in their states. 

We have started to approach several global foundations that have significant resources at their disposal to seek their support and have applied for FCRA that is mandatory to obtain foreign funding as per the laws of India. 

We are also rolling out paid certification courses in partnership with prestigious universities for educators and school leaders to create a revenue stream.

We are fairly confident that we will reach sustainability by December 2020. 

Million Sparks Foundation was created with an objective that we will be able to spark a Million teachers who will impact the life and learning outcomes of student igniting a whole generation of children to contribute to solving the world's pressing problems. We are applying since we completely align to the objective and believe that ChalkLit can make a change. We are doing this through our work in capacity building of educators and school leaders. We believe that after being selected we will be able to benefit significantly by learning from the ground, have exposure in one more country which opens up an opportunity to get a lot of learning which can be very valuable when we expand into more countries. While we have been able to successfully scale with our efforts we believe to scale from here we would need a lot of advice and support. We are extremely keen to receive the mentorship and strategic advice from the Solve and MIT networks and scale our work globally. We believe we need an opportunity to work on this challenge to accelerate our work, validate our impact and align our business model to scale our solution. 

Organizations that work in Bangladesh in the area of teacher capacity building that have content and are willing to scale on a platform like ChalkLit. To obtain content for early childhood education and create training programs for educators and certify them to fill teaching positions

JPAL - To conduct Measurement and Evaluation

Google/Amazon/Microsoft and other organizations working in AI and UI/UX  - To improve our technology, architecture and UI/UX. We would specifically want to seek support for our requirements in AI   

TED/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/TikTok - To promote our work on social media and popularize our approach to help in our global acceptance

State Governments/Large Education bodies/Education Ministries of other countries - To use our platform for building capacities of educators 

UNEP/UNDP/UNFPA/UNICEF/UN - We strongly believe in supporting sustainable development goals. We fundamentally believe that to have any chance to ensure achievement of SDGs educators have to educate every one of the 850 Million children that will pass out of school about responsible behaviour towards these global goals. These organizations have education initiatives and have content that can be deployed to introduce SDGs and the right responsible behaviors to children across various grades. 

BCG/PWC/McKinsey - To help us craft our strategy and achieve our vision

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Larry Ellison Foundation/MacArthur Foundation/Rockefeller Foundation/Porticus Foundation/UBS Foundation/Michael Susan Dell Foundation/Omidyar Network and other Philanthropic Foundations, HNIs, corporate with CSR budgets and initiative - To help us obtain resources and grants required for our work