SnapLearn: Easing Learning

Be it in today's pandemic situation or in a normal time, the education system in India has always been struggling. Uniform online education is not available due to social-economic reasons. Only 8 % of homes and 4 % of schools have internet and computers. Though 400 million people in India use WhatsApp, so we are on the mission of equal education for all in our country through this powerful app. With the help of AI and ML we are enabling under resourced teachers, schools and students by providing a whatsapp number as a platform to them to share their courses, live audio-video classes, assignments, lectures in many Indian languages. People, NGOs, Governments with smart phones can also help under resourced children around them to send or receive their contents to or from their school teachers in single click with AI help.

According to UNICEF "The Indian Education System is one of the largest in the world with more than 1.5 million schools, 8.5 million teachers and 250 million children from varied socio economic backgrounds." Due to this current pandemic of Covid 19, schools and tutorials are closed and million of students are at home. But only 8 % of homes in India have computer and internet so a large population of student are without proper online education. almost all schools, local tutors or tutorials use WhatsApp to provide their services by making one or multiple groups. This seems painful for both tutors/schools and the students and compromises privacy of each other.
 In online education we need 3 Cs for effective learning those are Contents, Communication, and Carrier.  We are solving Carrier and Communication parts in online education. We are easing the movement of contents between educators to learners. 

Using WhatsApp as a tool to reduce disparity in education between rural and urban, rich and poor. We are enabling educators to create courses, conduct live meetings with students, share assignments, exams, reminders, lectures etc. with their students through whatsapp. Parents or students can also submit their assignments or homework to their respective schools on the same number. Students can also search answers to their questions in any language, browse their history, watch video lectures.  It is a simple chatbot system that helps  users to share their contents with each other  and exchange personalized and effective education without compromising privacy of each other.  Although many students do not have smart phones, for them we have developed a system through which a smart phone holder can help children around them to submit children’s assignments or homework or any other content to their respective schools or teachers with just one or two clicks on SnapLearn whatsapp number. With the help of machine learning, system understands the children profile based on the content and sends the content to the respective school or teacher. It also works offline, when it gets into internet availability zone the contents are synchronized in database.

SnapLearn is an Edtech startup targeting Indian teachers and students.  During  COVID-19  and till now we observed that 99 % of local tutors or tutorials use WhatsAPP to provide their services by making one or multiple groups. This methodology is painful for both tutors and the students. Multiple posts and replies in groups made the learning very difficult on whatsapp and compromised privacy of each other. But due to lack of infrastructure, skill, resources and money they had no other options. Keeping this in mind we developed a platform named  “Snaplearn: Easing Education” . Snaplearn provides homework help, tutor search, answer search and doubt solving solutions on WhatsApp for school students in 12 Indian local languages and English. This is a WhatsApp number on which million of students and tutors can join, teach, share and learn without compromising privacy, conflicting interest or disturbing learning/ teaching of any other user. Students can search answers by text or uploading image of their question which is hard to type and they can get the answer within seconds. It works in 13 languages and in handwritten note format also. If its new question or searched answer is not satisfactory to the concerned student, the same question goes to relevant tutors based on class, subject and language with real time whatsapp notification. If a tutor replies to the question the student gets instant notification with answer accompanied with replier’s profile. And the replies saved in database and appeared with tutor’s profile when the same question is asked by other students. A  student can also search and see the profiles of tutors based on their class, subject and language(medium of instruction) and connect with tutors. So SnapLearn  provides business opportunities to local tutors and tutorials to reach million of students through WhatsApp. SnapLearn also gives facility to students and tutors to have private tuitions on whatsapp. So it gives ample opportunities to local tutors to earn livelihood and expand their tutoring business.

SnapLearn also launches "SnapLearn for Schools". Through this platform schools can manage teachers, students, circulars, tests, assignments, live meetings on whatsapp efficiently. So it will help thousands of schools of India which lack IT infrastructure and skills to handle e learning.

Under resourced students or tutors, affordable schools are not enough capable to use existing options due their costs and complexities.   So we are using WhatsApp chatbot as a powerful tool to enabling educators and learners to deliver educational contents, conduct live meetings with one on one or one on many, share assignments and lectures , homework help , live search of answers through image recognition , tutor profile search, single click content share through other’s device, offline submission of assignments through Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. We are targeting educators and learners among 400 million WhatsApp users in India.

We launched our tested beta product in a closed market on 11th March 2021. Since then we have been observing and analyzing a the usage of product by educators and learners. We are getting real feedback from them and updating our system and adding new features accordingly. Users are being enrolled in our system from different corners of India and they are from different backgrounds on using our services on volunteering basis.

We are simplifying the teaching and learning process. In India the education system is like teachers give lectures, clear the concepts of students, make the students do classwork, gives homework or assignments and take tests and exams. But when the school is closed, the conversation between the teacher and the students stops. At that time only online education becomes the only means on which studies can be done in this format. But expansive devices and knowledge of technology are basic requirement in online education. We are facilitating to build strong interaction between the teachers and the students in a very simple way. We are using chatbots and image recognition features to make it happen. The system connects the student to a teacher where they can do live meeting with each other and the teacher can clear the concept of the student. School also can communicate  to thousands of its children individually  on whatsapp  and can share the content with each and every student of its entire class in a single click from its WhatsApp Chatbot. Today most private tutors are also struggling, they can also create and sell their own courses on WhatsApp. The great thing is that each other's privacy is not compromised and there is no disturbance to the users.  In this way easily they can run their online class without any computer, without any technical knowledge with low cost.

We shall measure our progress to observe the usage pattern of our services and the profiles of users. Our main objective is to provide equitable quality education to all. Currently we have many students and teachers in our userbase who do not have expensive devices like computer, pen tablets, or commercial  applications and knowledge of English or IT. We shall measure our progress towards our goals by analyzing the demographical profiles of users and their usage pattern of our services.       

1. Shyam Manohar Singh  CEO, Founder, 
2. Richa Mishra COO 
3. Santosh Singh-  Finance Head
4. Ashish Kushwaha - Contractor

We need mentorship and recognitions so that our product get trust of schools and parents. So we feel that any kind of recognition from institutions like MIT will help us greatly. We also need mentorship from the MIT networks through this event.  

We are using some third parties APIs. We wish if we can get help to develop our own system for a long term sustainability.