TheTeacherApp

Every Teacher will learn and grow anywhere, anytime at zero cost

There are 12 million teachers in India. Every year we add close to 900,000 to this pool. Year after year 6 out of 7 teachers fail the teacher eligibility test that the government conducts. There are widespread reports which suggest that teachers in our schools don’t have conceptual clarity themselves. Progressive ideas of teaching and latest know-how of teaching is not reaching our teachers continuously. Our current teacher training infrastructure is just not providing continuous support to our teachers who like doctors and lawyers require constant update of how the practice is evolving.

This is a major challenge considering 250 million poor children in India completely depend on teachers for better learning outcomes.

At TheTeacherApp we are keen to re imagine this situation by connecting teachers to high quality training directly on their smartphones and helping state governments to re imagine teacher support in a world where teachers have anytime, anywhere access to high quality content.

Hence our mission is to:

• Break barriers between teachers and quality professional development content by leveraging technology
• Create an ecosystem to enable and accelerate the digitization of existing non-digital teacher development solutions

Our Approach

We follow a unique approach towards building education technology solution for teachers in India. Great content will only reach the last mile if it is engaging and accessible. Similarly, content that is aligned with teachers’ motivations will encourage them to consume it.

Hence, our approach involves carefully looking at four key pillars - Content, Engagement, Access and Motivation-  in cohesion.

Our team has carefully prototyped rich teacher development content which is

• Constructive in nature
• Interactive
• Delivered in a local language
• Consumes less than 100 MB to access on a smart phone
• Downloadable and offline
• Here’s a sample of our learning experience: TheTeacherApp-  Sample Course Content

For more sampling, download the App from the playstore by searching for TheTeacherApp or visit our website www.theteacherapp.org

TheTeacherApp is using existing MOOC technology to solve the teacher training challenge in India. We have innovated both the MOOC format and technology to work for Indian rural context where the users don't have continuous internet. Our MOOC format uses a unique sweet spot format where we ensure high quality content is delivered in an interactive audio visual format, done in local language yet each 1 hr long content consumes less than 50 MB data and works offline.We have customized OpenEdx, to meet the India requirement 

Technology is integral to our solution. We want to reach the last mile with high quality interactive audio visual content which takes less data. Hence we chose HTML5 as format to package our content. So for content creation we make use of rapid authoring tools like articulate. 

In order to marry users to our content and learn continuously we require a Learning management system with sophisticated analytics. We have built the same  by customizing opensource platforms like Openedx, Kibana, wordpress  to create a solution that can work for teachers in India

Since our launch in August 2017, we have seen rapid growth in consumption of our content. We have over 1 lakh teachers who are already using the app and its content. In the next 12 months : We would create over 100 hrs of content ourselves and partner with 8 organizations to create content. We would continue our work with the 3 states we have partnered with and increase our user base and usage. On tech front we aim to improve our platform with gamification and UI/Ux enhancements to help adult learners.

We are working towards what we call vision 2022. We are keen to create over 1000 hrs of content and connect the same with 1 million teachers by 2022. We strongly believe if we do this we would be able to learn and create a vantage point from where we can clearly see answers to the below questions

1. Does digital learning actually change behaviours of teachers and impact outcomes for students?

2. How does the existing teacher support system change for better when a lot of high quality digital content is available?

3. How can we make opensource content creation viable?

Our strategy of acquiring customers is by working with the government. We partner with state governments and work closely with SCERT( a body responsible for teacher training). We integrate our content as part of the teacher training calendar and get the SCERT to drive the usage among the teachers and teacher students in each state. So far we have partnered with 3 states in India and in next 5 years we would partner with 5 more states to reach our 2022 goals

Currently we are serving over 1 lac teachers in the 3 states we working with. We serve them by providing them access to courses, podcasts and toolkit videos which we produce. Teachers are served in the following ways

1. Self paced : where they learn on there own

2. Monthly meeting : We work with States where their master trainers use TheTeacherApp content to lead monthly learning meetings with the teachers

3. State driven mode : State identifies 12-15 courses which teachers have to complete every year. These courses are chosen basis need assessment of the state

In the next 12 months we are expecting to double our user base to 2 lac. We would continue to the serve them by working very closely with state and integrating the content within states support infrastructure. 

In the long term, we plan to partner with over 8 states in India and scale to 1 million teachers in India.

Academic Skills : We have a robust group of academic specialist who work full time to spear head high quality content creation

Sector Skills : Our founding team have over 10 years of sector understanding with experience of working non profits like Teach for India, JPAL, STIR Education, Going to school etc

Management Skills : Founding team are Alumnus of Harvard ed school, Delhi School of economics, Lehman Brothers, Nomura, Paypal etc

We are a not for profit and are grant funding driven at present. For our vision 2022 we continue to depend on this stream to perfect our model, theory of change and distribution. 

We are keen to attempt few revenue streams to sustain our operations like ad revenues, consultation fee for our content creation abilities etc in the next few years.

For our vision 2022, we are keen to fund raise from US philanthropy circles and are keen to build awareness of our work globally. We also believe what we are learning in complex markets like India can be replicated globally in other geographies like Africa, refugee hit communities to support outcomes for children. We are keen to explore ways we can enable other organizations who are looking at similar solutions by accelerating their journey.

We believe our Theory of change has many levers like creation a community of content creators, using behaviour science to drive usage, preparing existing systems to change to adopt digital solutions.All this requires wider discourse and support. We are expecting Solve to help us 

1. Build awareness of our work globally

2. Connect us to individuals and organizations who can shape our thinking 

3. Help us fund raise to achieve our vision