MARKODING

If I am selected as a winner, I will use the Elevate Prize funding to improve our current Digital Innovation Challenge (inovasi.markoding.com) program so we can empower more underprivileged youth to be job-ready digital talents through Markoding – Mari Kita Koding! (Let’s Coding!).

In regard to the above mentioned, the Elevate Prize funding will be utilized for:

• Developing a powerful “offline-first” mobile version of our social learning platform that can be accessed without internet access in remote locations.
• Digitalizing all curriculum and learning content by creating video lessons and online modules to teach design thinking, product development, UI/UX, coding and entrepreneurship.
• Developing online training and certification programs for teachers to be 21st-century skills facilitators.

Amanda started her career as a programmer, then began her entrepreneurial journey began as a co-founder of Kolibrii Commerce, a leading e-commerce consultancy firm, where she often had to outsource client projects to programmers overseas because of digital talent scarcity in Indonesia. Meanwhile, high school graduates make up a significant portion of the unemployed workforce in Indonesia. Thus, Amanda co-founded MARKODING to bridge the talent gap and skill mismatch facing the digital industry in Indonesia.

The journey of Markoding started in 2017 when she volunteered at a shelter in Cilincing, a low-income community in a fishing village in North Jakarta. Seeing how adolescents are tech-savvy despite their severe poverty level, she recognized a clear opportunity to transform them from technology consumers to technology innovators.

The first Markoding workshop was at an Internet shop in Cilincing by teaching 20 high school students to build a simple website. Four years later, Markoding has trained more than 5,000 adolescents who created more than 1,000 digital innovation ideas, 300 teachers from 120 schools and recruited more than 150 mentors.

She envisions Markoding to close the technology skills gap and stop the youth unemployment crisis by creating a generation of job-ready digital workforce.

Indonesia will need 17 million digital talents by 2030 and will experience a shortage of 9 million talents (World Bank, 2019). Meanwhile, the unemployment rate among adolescents in Indonesia is 14%, and finding the first job is a challenge for many young people. Furthermore, education access is a major issue; 29% of adolescents aged 16-18 drop out of school, while 23% of adolescents aged 15-19 have never received any formal education or training. (UNICEF Indonesia, 2016)

Clearly, there is a skills mismatch between high school graduates and the industry’s needs.

Markoding solves this problem by empowering underprivileged youth with free industry-relevant skills education that enables them to get better jobs with better salaries, improve their livelihood, and can be a way out of poverty. To achieve this, we are:  

• Developing 21st-century skills (Our 5Cs: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, and Compassion) through the process of learning on-demand skills (design thinking, entrepreneurship, UI/UX, product development, and coding) 

• Training the teachers to be 21st-century skills facilitators to build a sustainable learning ecosystem for their adolescents.
• Developing industry-relevant curriculum by recruiting industry professionals as trainers, mentors, and curriculum developers
• Building a scalable and accessible solution by building a social learning platform and blended learning method.

1. Challenge-based Learning

Instead of using a traditional learning model, we use challenge-based learning where the adolescents were given challenges to solve social or environmental problems around them, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, remote learning, violence against women, hoax, mental health, etc. Throughout the program, adolescents will be equipped with design thinking, product development, entrepreneurship, and coding skills to build a prototype of their digital solution idea. Mentors, supporters, teachers can give feedback and vote for their favorite solutions. This year, we had more than 1,000 idea submissions from 5,000 adolescents. 

2. Innovative dan Data-driven Learning Model
Technology and innovation are at the core of our learning process. During this pandemic, we innovate to build more scalable education solutions by building:

• Social Learning Platform (inovasi.markoding.com) 
  An online platform where adolescents can learn using MOOCs, showcase projects, discuss, get feedback from peers and mentors, and a slack-style discussion forum
• Blended Learning Method
  A combination of mentor-led learning (live workshop & online mentoring), self-learning using MOOCs, and peer-learning through an online discussion forum

• Learning Analytics & Gamification
  Each adolescents’ activity and learning process (quiz & project score, login frequency, ask & answer questions, etc) will be measured with points to monitor adolescents’ learning performance.