StudyLab360

For students in Anglophone West Africa who need to access teacher mandated resources and activities offline, and for teachers and schools who have inadequate skills and resources needed to continually create high quality eResources, Studylab360 is a Learning Management System that provides a library of interactive lesson resources and standard assessment items that teachers can use to engage their students offline and online. It provides both out the box content but also the tools to help teachers create and publish their own resources for students to use as 'current learning activity' or as reference and extra reading in a library format. 

Over 40% of students in Nigeria were completely disengaged from online learning due to internet costs or poor network. Others used WhatsApp as a school sanctioned platform to engage their teachers and school work. 51% of teachers reportedly found this experience very difficult or fairly difficult  primarily due to the difficulty of creating rich resources due to a lack of skills or equipment or both. 

StudyLab360 will bridge this gap by providing a platform rich in out-the-box content tailored to teachers curriculum needs while still providing tools to create interactive content.

Lesson Library:  Our lesson library provides an excellent space to filter, find and share lesson resources with students. Educators can find community contributed lessons and evaluate them before sending to their class.

Lesson Studio: StudyLab provides a lesson studio to help teachers create rich interactive lessons themselves. 

Question Bank:  Educators get a very rich set of questions in the question bank, where they can filter by subject, e.g Physics, publisher, e.g WAEC, IGCSE, or topic e.g Thermometry, for use within a quiz or CBT.  

Mobile and web channel for students: Students can use the mobile app or the web app online or offline to interact with content.

Reports and analytics: StudyLab has a detailed performance metric and diagnostic system, that shows the teacher how the students performed from topic to topic, so the teacher can help the students where they are weak. 

Local access: StudyLab provides a one-click installer that allows schools to install the application on a local network and use it offline 

Our focus is on secondary school systems in anglophone West africa, 76% of which recently tested a digital learning platform for their first time due to the pandemic but found them difficult to work with and 69% of which are willing to continue blended learning in some fashion. Over 90% of schools in this region use a similar curriculum and write the same final exam published by the West African Examinations Council.
With out-the-box content, we are able to support teachers to do their best work engaging their students without the hassle of creating all content from scratch. We also help schools develop a lesson and activity library for themselves that can be used year round with little updates when necessary

The pandemic exposed a skills gap that teachers had in creating their own digital resources. We will Support teachers to adapt their pedagogy using the out-of-the-box resources we are providing as well as tools to create resources for themselves.
Also, the analytics reports we provide to teachers will facilitate personalized instruction.
Finally, there is a messaging feature available to teachers that enables them communicate with students and their families in remote and hybrid setting.

Since our customer understanding and solution validation phase  revealed some of the elements we needed to build, we have had a long development process to reach this stage. In recent months we have run beta tests more robustly with multiple schools from 5 states in Nigeria. 

What makes StudyLab360 innovative is primarily the way the concept of 'lesson objects' is implemented. Here we favour the development of re-purposeable and lessons designed with enough material to achieve just one learning objective within a larger topic or module. This allows a teacher to easily find (or create) a lesson that targets a specific learning objective and can sequence it with other lessons to make a learning path. Very significant also, is the lesson studio that allows a lesson creator, incorporate in-lesson quizzes in flush with the text or video content. This allows a lesson author to embed interactive questions at any point in a lesson – as an ice breaker, as a reinforcer or even as an end of lesson quiz. The more interactivity a lesson has, the more engaged students are and the more likelihood of knowledge transfer. 

2021: 7000 students

2022: 25000 students

2026: 1000000 students

We track our progress by
1. No. of school accounts
2. No. of students
3. No. of teachers
4. Daily active users
5. monthly active users
6. number of lesson views per month
7 number of assessments done per month
8. average session time per student

Full time - 7

Part-time - 3

Our team is made up of 10 staff - 3 part time engineers providing the core engineering support and 1 product manager, with over 10 years experience in the elearning industry as an instructional designer, trainer and researcher, 2 staff in charge of content and 4 field sales staff.

The engineering team who give a combined  70 hours a week is led by an experienced fullstack engineer with an MSc in AI and supported by other experienced back and front end engineers whos CV's have seen them work for International companies.

The team is highly motivated and knowing we are a small team they give their very best to the cause for which we exist.

In an increasingly polarized Nigeria, our team is made up of people from literally all the regions of Nigeria and across the two major religions. Going forward we will maintain our commitment to recruiting team members from all backgrounds without recourse to their tribe or religion. 

Solve will provide the visibility and resources that our organization needs to push into the market, attract partnerships and business.   If chosen, we plan to use the $10,000 to expand our content library and build a community of teachers on the platform. 

We have been in R&D mode for a long time, and as we emerge into the market any support or partnership we can get to help us scale and deepen our technology is needed. 

One Million Teachers and similar teacher organizations will help us create the communities of practice and validation needed for the product. 

Multilateral organizations that work with the national governments of the region would also make good partners in cases where they need a technology solution to deploy for an objective.

Of All the teachers and students that have used or shown interest in StudyLab360 STEM teachers and students have shown the most desire.

This is because the content and pedagogy deployed for STEM subjects fits their need excellently. In the lessons we are able to combine well written text, with embedded videos from YouTube and embedded simulations from PhET. In the assessment questions we provide explanations to questions in video format (over 7000 videos solving and explaining questions) and in text format. STEM content is where we went the furthest to help the most and we have recorded testimonies to show it is paying dividends. 

Achievements:

In a school that had 1 computer to 150 students, a low flying student was able to move his scores from a perennial F in math to a C by using StudyLab360 in his school during break times. in another instance a school head got his teachers to use the Analytics features on StudyLab to help students improve their performance between two external exams. The teachers consulted the analytics and used it to help improve the students where they were weak. They recorded a 40% improvement in their Math performance

Yes, we will like to be considered for the AI in Humanity prize. AI is a frontier technology and in the field of education its application is immensely essential. Our CTO is an AI specialist and has a masters degree in it. We plan to employ AI to move our analytics from simply descriptive and diagnostic analytics to prescriptive. With AI we will be able to leverage the learning objects in the system to create new learning paths for a truly adaptive learning solution for both teacher and student. We will be able to help teachers creating lessons to select resources, examples and use terms that best transfer learning.

In Nigeria, due to increasing insecurity in the northwest, northeast and north central regions, particularly the incessant kidnappings, students are unable to go to school for fear of being attacked. StudyLab is a perfect solution to help them stay connected with their teachers and school work. It works offline and is easy for teachers from that part of the country to adopt and use given its content library. 

This prize will enable us provide access to these regions for a subsidized amount over a period of time.