FreeEdu

FreeEdu offers 1 hour/day of online education, free of charge. The app is the first to combine nudges for student engagement with free earmarked connectivity. Based on reverse billing, FreeEdu is powered by co-branding and educational ads, and only requires (cheap) smartphone ownership. FreeEdu offers equal learning opportunities for all.

The Internet has huge pedagogical potential. The problem is: such potential is only available for those with access to connectivity. And it is not obvious that, in most of the developing world, connectivity is significantly less unequally distributed than high ­quality education. In a developing country like Brazil, it is increasingly more so that children and teenagers have access to cheap Android smartphones, but those phones are not online -­ 3 out of 4 Brazilian SIM cards are prepaid, and the country has the most expensive data plans in the world.

By providing free educational videos to public school students and encouraging access to it, in the short term, students will become more and more interested in watching them and discover that they can learn in a different way, becoming more motivated to learn. In the medium term, students learn more, which leads to better school performance and greater student engagement in education, increasing their likelihood of completing basic education and their building the skills the 21st century workforce requires. In the long run, they’ll become better prepared adults in the labor market and with higher quality of life.

Granting access to online educational opportunities is expected to produce sizeable impacts on student outcomes such as attendance, test scores, and dropout rates, and ultimately on future economic opportunities. FreeEdu will benefit public school students wherever free earmarked connectivity can be made available (currently in all Latin American countries, through a partnership with a carrier). We deploy FreeEdu with the help of school systems, responsible for enrolling students, by offering in return the ability to offer this resource as well as to survey students daily through the app, both at no cost.

Track sign-in statistics;

Track in-app usage statistics

- 10,000 people in Brazilian public schools using FreeEdu;

66% of sign-ups systematically studying with FreeEdu

Randomized Control Trial, in partnership with Prof. Eric Bettinger (Stanford University), using school system’s administrative data - At least 0.2 standard deviation increase on FreeEdu users’ standardized test scores

Randomized Control Trial, in partnership with Prof. Eric Bettinger (Stanford University), using school system’s administrative data

- At least 2 percentage point reduction on FreeEdu users’ retention rates

FreeEdu can bring online education directly into students' (cheap) smartphones. It is novel for taking an unprecedented approach to solving a complex problem that, otherwise, requires bringing connectivity to schools, building computer labs and training teachers - most of which have been tried for the last 10 years with very high costs and limited success. Its model is unique: by offering audience-specific earmarked connectivity, it differs from airport Wi-Fi (location-based) or reverse-billed apps (vendor-based). By combining nudges for student engagement with the right technology, FreeEdu has the potential to bring online education to those who need it the most.

While smartphone penetration has been rising steadily in Brazil, connectivity has not: 70% SIM cards are still pre-paid. The exception is apps that carriers offer at no cost - WhatsApp and Messenger, installed on over 85% of smartphones in Brazil. Khan Academy has reached 1,000,000 views in Brazil last year, but none of the top-10 cities with respect to views is a low-income municipality. Combined, those figures show that users have huge repressed demand for connectivity, while there are huge opportunities for online learning currently unavailable to those whom it could benefit the most. FreeEdu is based on real needs.

FreeEdu is available at no cost. We are building it as a website, such that users do not even need connectivity to download it. Its revenues come from a co-branding and ad-based model, similar to airport Wi-Fi. It counts on school systems’ support to enroll subjects, along the lines of how MGov currently operates, by offering them incentives to do so - in the case of FreeEdu, the ability to offer its students 1 hour a day of free online education and the ability to survey its students daily through the app, both at no cost.

To mitigate risks during prototyping and growth stages, FreeEdu is hosted by MGov, a five-year old startup with other consolidated or ready-to-scale products. We offer smart communication products for evaluation and civic engagement, targeted at social development, across diverse areas such as education, rural development and government transparency. Our products use the right technology and provide easy access to establishing channels of communication with the population. All interactions are free to participants, who do not need to have credit on their prepaid cell phone / data plan. We seek to contribute to the quality of democracy by offering tools for the design of policies that reflect the needs and preferences of citizens.

In the next 3-5 years we plan to achieve the figure of 500 thousand, 250 thousand and 335 thousand paid users for EduqMais, Rural Connect and Poupemais, respectively, which are our most mature and consolidated products and services.

If students do not systematically use free connectivity to learn or if that does not affect student outcomes, we will have to review the assumptions behind FreeEdu. Even so, we’ll have learned something useful in the search for the most cost-effective tools to improve educational opportunities for those who need them the most.

We believe our co-branding and ad-based model can make FreeEdu sustainable, and allow it to be scaled up globally.

http://www.innovatorsunder35.com/innovator/guilherme-lichand

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/leading-way-innovation

https://drive.google.com/a/mgovbrasil.com.br/file/d/0B-qvb67FEyVqMzQ3UTBOcjRNaEE/view?usp=sharing

We hope that FreeEdu can benefit from Solve through the resources available for those who are part of its community. We want to be connected to the top experts and mentors to learn as much as we can for maximal impact, ensuring that we can grow sustainably. We believe that the MIT Solve brand can boost our ability to secure additional funding and strategic partnerships, key elements for growing to scale as fast as possible - when it comes to education, we cannot afford to skip the generation currently in school because funders weren’t ready to take on groundbreaking ideas.

We have ongoing conversations with UNICEF to pilot FreeEdu in Latin America in the context of discouraging child marriage, and with the Lemann Foundation to pilot FreeEdu among 50,000 Brazilian students in 2018.

Other companies in similar space are Syafunda and BYJU based on South Africa and India respectively.