The Other School

Malaysia is not a signatory of the UN Refugee Convention. That meant that refugee kids are denied into public education.

Hence, the community learning centers are set by the refugees themselves to serve the need to provide education. These centres often face funding issue, hiring dedicated teachers to serve a centre will incur a high fixed cost for the centre. Especially during this pandemic, kids do not also have enough funds to do online learning.

Our solution is to create a Whatsapp chatbot with the purpose of educating students aged 8 years old and above that will allow the teachers to focus on students who need help the most and allow the students to learn at their own pace. Once the Whatsapp chatbot is being developed, centres can adapt a similar modal in order to maintain the quality of education without the need to hire teachers with a big budget. 

As of the end of January 2021, there are some 178,710 refugees and asylum-seekers registered with UNHCR in Malaysia. Malaysia is not a signatory of the UN Refugee Convention. That meant that refugees have no refugee camp to go to, the adults are not allowed to be employed formally and children are denied public education. 

Private education is too costly for the refugees. Hence, the community learning centers are set by the refugees themselves to serve the need to provide education. These centers often face funding issues, hence, they have to give up hiring qualified and trained teachers as that will incur a high fixed cost for the center. At the same time, the students are unable to pay a high amount of school fees to keep the learning centers running. 

During this pandemic, while most of the education institutions opt for online learning, it is challenging for the refugee communities to do so. This is due to the limited access to a device and the internet for the students to learn consistently. They often have to share one device among all the family members. The family faces financial difficulty in purchasing an extra device or having internet access. 

Our solution is to create a learning system by utilizing a Whatsapp chatbot. 

The Whatsapp chatbot will be the main platform of learning. During the dedicated learning hours, the chatbot will allow the students to go through the lessons and complete the assigned exercise designed by the teachers. Instead of having one teacher needing to attend to so many students at one go, now the students can learn at their own pace. The chatbot will be monitoring the submission of homework and the reading progress of the students. 

There will be a daily report generated from the Whatsapp chatbot to summarize what is done for each student every day. The daily report includes how many lessons are completed and if it is within the allocated timing. If the students did not manage to hit the minimum requirement of the correct answers in the exercise or has exceeded the allocated timing, the report will be labeled in the red zone so the teachers can look into it. 

Once the Whatsapp chatbot is being developed, centers can adapt a similar modal in order to maintain the quality of education without the need to hire teachers with a big budget. 

About 20% of refugees are under the age of 18, with 23, 823 school-going ages. Of the 23,823 that are of school-going ages, only 30% are enrolled in 128 community learning centres across Malaysia. 

We have been working with a community from Myanmar in the past 4 years, to explore different ways to help a learning centre to be sustainable.

Throughout the past 4 years, we have hired trained teachers to teach in the refugee learning centre and have seen significant improvement in the English proficiency of the students. 

Over the 4 years, we have been meeting the stakeholders of the learning centre on a regular basis including hosting the parents-teachers meeting and monthly school meeting.

This solution will potentially allow the learning centre to continue running without a physical space and hiring full-time teachers. In other words, it can help the community in saving the need to gather funds for space rental and teacher salary. The children can have the classes wherever they are as long as they have a mobile phone with basic internet access. 

Our solution focuses on creating a hybrid and high-engagement environment for refugee students to learn. Aside from that, the students will be empowered to complete their works according to their own pace. Additional support will be provided to the students when the daily progress report is generated so both the parents and the teachers have access to them. We aim to create a safe space for the students to have quality education, especially during the pandemic time. 

During the lockdown, no physical classes were allowed in the refugee learning centre. We have been running the classes on Whatsapp for a total of 23 students aged between 8 to 15. 

We assigned two teachers to teach at dedicated hours. The students will be grouped based on their grades and join the classes through Whatsapp group chats. 

Recorded videos and audio are utilized to explain a theory or concept. The students will have to take picture of their homework and submit to the group. During this hour, the teacher will monitor the progress of all the students and keeping them engaged with voice notes and pictures. 

The existing learning platforms require the students to install an application but that is an issue among the refugee students as most of them do not have their own device and additional internet data will be needed in order to live stream video calls. Secondly, a new learning platform will take time for the students to learn and get used to it. A Whatsapp chatbot does not require the students to install a new application or spend time getting used to the platform. 

WhatsApp is a part of the day-to-day activities for people. This is the medium that has the maximum chance of getting attention. WhatsApp is a trusted place for people because spammers cannot get inside WhatsApp nor do they show advertisements. In fact, WhatsApp doesn’t collect any sort of user information from users since the messages are end-to-end encrypted.

Once this is developed, it will enable broader positive impact to happen as the other learning centers will be able to adopt a similar model or mechanism as well. If they agree to the syllabus that we are utilizing, they will have full access to it. 

Currently, we are serving a total of 23 students from 20 families. 

In one year, we are looking to serve 300 students from 5 learning centres in Malaysia. 

In five years, we are looking to serve 2000 students from all 50 learning centres in Malaysia. 

1. the number of schools adopting the mechanism

2. the training class organized 

3. the English proficiency of the students 

4. the satisfaction level of the students 

5. the satisfaction level of the parents

We are at a team of 5 with 2 full-timers and 3 part-timers. 

Our team has prior experience in volunteering and teaching refugee students in the past 4 years. Other than that, the team has experience in running a social enterprise that is based in Malaysia as well. 

Throughout 4 years, we have raised a total of 50,000USD from the private network and several fundraising events to run education for refugees. During the pandemic, the physical fundraisers have to stop. The team pivoted to online teaching by having all the students take on a transition to Whatsapp. 

The management team of the learning centre has been assisting the transition to online learning by making sure the students are aware of the timetable. We have managed to convince the parents to support the learning of the students by ensuring the students can learn without any distraction and have full access to the mobile device unless there is an emergency. 

Before the implementation of online learning, we would consult the idea with the stakeholders including the teachers, the principal of the learning center, and the parents. 

In the future, we are looking to establish an education advisory panel - a group that can provide insights and advice on education. The panel should include a multi-cultural and cross-cultural perspective. 

We are looking forward to being part of a community that is bringing sustainable change through technology. Due to our shortcoming of not coming from technology or IT background, we want to learn from more like-minded leaders across industries and sectors. We are also excited to learn how can we do better or be more innovative in offering an impactful solution to the communities who are in need. 

We are seeking support or partners in the IT field who might have prior experience in developing LMS for a specific community or education institution. Other than that, we are also looking for leaders who have had prior experience in working with refugees and have developed solutions in assisting refugees, in any area including livelihood, education, and healthcare. 

I am looking to partner with educational institutions or faculties to work out the most suitable syllabus for the students. Other than that, I am also looking to get advice in technology, in building a back-end LMS that will be suitable for educators and the management team in the refugee learning center so this can help them to monitor the progress of each student. 

We will be using the fund to scale up the solution to the community-based community centre in ASEAN countries, connect to the local initiatives that have started to establish education initiative for the refugee community. 

We will utilize AI in both our Whatsapp chatbot and learning platform for changemakers all around the world.