Skalo

In Colombia 1 in 4 children faces an educational barrier or disability. Institutions are obliged to accept every student despite difficulties they face. However, schools lack methods for managing diversity and different learning paces within a classroom, consequently their approaches are outdated and dreary for teachers to implement. Getting personalized aids entails expensive doctors which few can afford, leaving the vast majority of children with generalized accommodations. For this reason, Skalo facilitates every student’s navigation through the educational process. It’s a social LMS for schools, teachers, and families with children in K-12 education that personalizes and monitors optimal accommodations for students who face permanent or transitory educational barriers or disabilities, according to their characteristics and needs. Skalo was created under UDL framework, meaning it can be implemented to any educational system around the world and if scaled globally we could transform education and give access and participation to every student.

Skalo aims to solve the existing issue of lack of personalized aids and accommodations for students with permanent or transitory educational barriers or disabilities. In Colombia 56 out of 100 students don’t graduate. These students face barriers from permanent disabilities to bullying or domestic violence and with the right tools and guidance, most of them could find their own way to successfully achieve their full potential and continue with their academic journey. Skalo hopes to create a path for every student, and with the help of parents, teachers, and institutions, create a community that works towards inclusion of every child despite any barrier or disability they face. In addition, we aspire to be a system that is affordable, innovative, straightforward and personalized for every stakeholder. This way we will contribute to education and make it accessible and equitable for all.

Skalo is Waze for education because it facilitates navigation through the educational process despite any barrier or disability a student faces. It’s a social learning management system for schools, teachers, and families with children in K-12 education that personalizes and monitors optimal accommodations and aids for students who face permanent or transitory educational barriers or disabilities, according to their characteristics and needs, while integrating the family and teachers in the student’s educational process. With the help of our algorithm, we have created an effective way of transforming the challenge of an educational barrier to the opportunity of developmental achievement. Skalo creates value for everyone involved in a child’s educational journey by addressing their pains and giving and easy-to-use tool that truly motivates teachers, institutions and families to engage in every student’s process and transform their education to personalized inclusion-based methods. With our learning system, teachers will be able to manage diversity within a classroom whilst gaining skills and improving their knowledge on class diversity management, families will find a place for guidance and support, institutions will become available for any student, and students are given an opportunity to learn in their own way and pace and reach their maximum potential.

Skalo’s targets every stakeholder involved in a child’s educational journey. Our current target population is based in Colombia, and we work to improve the lives of teachers and parents with children that face permanent or temporal barriers, and students who are not able to graduate school because of these barriers. Currently, our target population lacks the tools to guide children who face any type of barrier or disability, for this reason, not only have we started our pilot stage which will lead us to further understand our user’s needs and pains, but we have also organized workshops for parents and teachers where they tell us what they expect, the difficulties they currently face and what the ideal solution would be. In Skalo we are fully committed to each stakeholder individually, which is why we have created an algorithm with specialized and personalized content for every type of user.

Skalo is an innovative tool that aspires to enable access to quality education for children of all backgrounds despite the difficulties they face with traditional methods of education. We have created the tool that facilitates aids and monitoring for teachers to include every student and allow them to participate and access the curriculum. In addition, by allowing every student to participate and learn, we are providing the tools for them to reach their potential, become holistic human beings and be able to commit to an academic journey that will take them to better opportunities in the future.

We are currently on the pilot stage of development. We are testing Skalo with 7 institutions in different parts of Colombia, both rural and urban areas, adding to approximately 300 students deploying Skalo. In addition, we are holding meetings and workshops with parents and teachers form 2 different institutions to further understand their individual situation and the general aspects of our community.

Our solution is a straightforward system that allows a holistic view of every student in order to develop personalized accommodation plans for each. For Skalo, each student’s strengths, weaknesses, expectations and preferences are important and are determinant factors for each personalized plan. What makes Skalo innovative is the personalized guide that every user gets when they become a part of our community. Students are given a way to actively learn and participate while families get full access to their child’s education and simultaneously learn about the best methods to help their child learn and develop when at home. In addition, with Skalo teachers and institutions are encouraged to engage with every student’s process with the help of a straightforward tool that allows them to monitor each learner’s process while incrementing their abilities through experience and advancing their careers with the possibility of participating in courses, webinars and more. Our solution will not only transform education for teachers, families and institutions but it will also enable students to recognize their strengths and further on expand their opportunities to learn and become holistic professionals.

Current number of people we’re serving: 300

One year: 2,200

Five years: 18,000

Skalo works in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, specifically goal number 4: Quality education, and number 10: Reduced inequalities. Our measurable indicators are based on the number of institutions who are benefited by Skalo, the amount of students who receive Skalo and the number of these students who are able to advance in their academic journey and continue in school despite their difficulties. In addition, with our algorithm we measure qualitative data about learning barriers in an institution, as well as at local, regional and national levels. On the other hand, with gamification, we are able to measure each individual teacher and their level of expertise and advancement, this way we are able to know how our teachers are using Skalo and how they benefit from our LMS.

Full-time staff: 3

Part-time staff: 4

Contractors and others: 3

Skalo was built as a solution to the pain felt by the founder when trying to get her child with educational barriers through school. As a mother of a kid with cerebral palsy, she experienced the pain of trying to find the appropriate aids to ease her child’s school experience while also helping him maximize his abilities. Since her son was diagnosed, she began a journey to help him and others by turning her experience into an opportunity to create a non-profit (Fundación Cero a Tres) that has been helping more than 350 children from low-income families for more than ten years. Throughout this process, she’s met lots of families, teachers, and institutions who want to include their children in school, but the tools for doing this are scarce and the process can be exhausting and emotionally draining. In Skalo we understand the importance of integrating the student, the family, the educational institution, and the teacher for a coordinated management of the child with temporary or permanent learning barriers since the first day of kindergarten. For this reason, by creating a team of experts who are involved with each of Skalo’s stakeholders, we are able to understand and create value for everyone involved by addressing their pains and giving an easy-to-use tool that truly motivate teachers, institutions, and families to become inclusive and transform their education to inclusion-based methods.

In Skalo we seek to create a diverse, equitable and inclusive leadership team through our values and our mission to make education accessible, equitable and of quality. Our team is composed by people of all expertise and all backgrounds which allows us to have a greater perspective on where we stand and what we stand for. In addition, our ideation methods through the whole creation of Skalo have been based on human-centered design and solutions which has led us to fully understand our stakeholders by having first-hand interaction and involving all those who will be the beneficiaries of Skalo in the future. We believe that Skalo must reflect all its core values starting from its leadership, which is why we seek to create a team that is accessible for all, open to everyone and upholding the principles of integrity and mutual respect.

We are applying to MIT solve because we know that if selected, we will be able to join a network of leaders across various industries and sectors which will allow us to see Skalo from different perspectives and further develop it. In addition, since one of our barriers and goals is to have a greater reach in order to give access to more students, we know that with MIT Solve we will gain exposure and media coverage that will not only allow us to expand Skalo in Colombia but to start expanding globally. Finally, MIT Solve will give us access to mentoring that can allow us to find solutions to our barriers and to continue growing and developing Skalo.

We seek advice on these areas because these are the bases for Skalo to grow and be successful enough in order to help students with learning barriers or disabilities. As it’s been mentioned, we need advice on how to expand our client base and how to develop our marketing strategies to improve our public relations. In addition, we seek to improve our pitches to investors and our methods to access grants, prizes and out accounting practices.

One of our potential partners is MIT’s initiative, the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL). We believe that in partnership with them, we could expand our networks and promote and transform education worldwide. In addition, they could allow us to scale Skalo to more places worldwide and give us access to collaborations, workshops, research and events that would allow the leadership team and our users to further expand their knowledge on inclusive and equitable education.

Another potential partner is the MIT institute or data, systems and society. With them as a partner we would be able to apply methods that generate masses of data that would allow us to gain more understanding and insights of our context. Additionally, this potential partnership would mean an important step to scaling globally as it would allow us to understand and develop methods to manage a great amount of behavioral, informatic and statistical data and convert it to knowledge that will expand and develop Skalo even further.  

In Skalo we will use the GM Prize to implement our solution in more vulnerable communities in Colombia. With the help of this grant we can get Skalo to more students around the country who will not only give us feedback and insights on what to improve, but will also allow us to work towards our main goal of decreasing school dropouts and having more students graduate and become holistic human beings. With Skalo we give students the opportunity to excel at what they like and what their passions are. 

Skalo's technology was created in order to allow us to use AI and Machine Learning in the generation and monitoring of optimal accommodations for students. Skalo creates a path towards equitable education for every student who faces any type of barrier and our core technology is what allows us to create this path. With this grant we will continue improving our algorithm and code in order to be able to scale Skalo globally and hopefully amplify our impact to students, families and teacher around the world.