Teachers Time

Unleashing teacher-led innovation at scale in Bangladeshi Schools 

Bangladesh runs one of the largest primary education system in the world with over 150,000 primary level schools (Govt., Kindergarten, Private Schools, NGO-run schools etc.). There are over 1 million school teachers in this country. The country will need half million more school teachers within next decade. With such a huge system in place, one might expect that there is a huge system in place for teacher's professional development. Unfortunately, that's not the case in Bangladesh. It's probably the only country on earth where you can join in a school today and will be given responsibility to take classes the next day, even if you no experience teaching children before. There is no formal college or university level course offered for aspiring teachers. 35% of all teachers never studied beyond Grade Standard 12. 

The impact is horrifying with 1 million children dropping out every year. Students those who remain in primary school, 30% of them can't read or write Bengali, 66% in English and 33% can't do basic math problem after they complete primary level education.  

 The root cause is the complete absence of any formal professional development opportunity for these school teachers in Bangladesh. Although the government primary school teachers did get some training on subject matters, there is no professional development opportunity for teachers on leadership skill, classroom management, problem solving and other soft-skills required.

Our goal is to bring teacher-led innovation in schools by providing professional development opportunity to 1 million school teachers in Bangladesh. With a blend of ICT-based online course tied with first-hand learning experience, we are giving teachers an opportunity to take a life changing journey to explore their own potential and develop their skills to bring change in their schools.

By partnering with government and large school networks, INGOs and our own online platform, we are setting ourselves to become world’s largest online teacher portal to develop their professional capacities.

Within next 10 years, we want to provide professional develop opportunity to all the school teachers in Bangladesh to ensure that the teachers can prepare the children for 4th industrial revolution where the teachers will be primary changemakers to provide future skills like creativity, problem solving and emotional intelligence to the students. 

While the technology is helping us to scale, it's not the most unique part of our solution. The course design, method of delivery to the teachers, contextualize international learning for Bangladesh are some of the unique attributes to our solution. 

Our online courses are designed and planned to be distributed to the most remote locations in Bangladesh with minimum cost and data requirement.  

The teachers will be able to purchase the whole course or purchase individual lectures of a course, can take online test and get certificate after completion.     

With 1 million school teachers and counting, physical training set up is never going to give us the scale. That's why we are deploying online course-based professional development for teachers as the integral part to our solution. 

While our partner organizations will definitely enjoy the low cost solution compared to physically train all their teachers, it will also make the teachers' lives easier when a smartphone will help them to develop their capacity. Instead of them coming to cities, stay there for few days which also costs them and take out a chunk of their low wage. 

We are launching our own platform by end of July 2018. We already put one course to Repto - our online course distribution partner. Currently a2i - our partner in Government, putting 2 of our courses on their platform that hosts over 400,000 government school teachers. 

In next 12 months, we would like to put on more courses covering all the basic aspects of teacher professional development, bringing minimum 20,000 teachers on our platform and our partner's platforms. 

We are in discussion with few other partners whom we want to bring on-board. 

In next 3-5 years, we want to establish our courses as the industry standard for any school teacher in Bangladesh. The vision is to create that brand awareness and trust among individual teachers, school authorities and other education-focused organizations. 

In numbers: develop professional capacity to 200,000 teachers and help 50,000 schools to bring teacher-led innovation.

It's also important for us to succeed in being both commercially and as brand to be successful so that younger generation can come up with more innovative solutions and keep the space competitive.

We are currently reaching out through our existing network of schools and organizations. Once we have our online portal ready, we are going to start offering individual schools to get into our platform for free and offer one or two courses for the entire school teachers for free. Getting all the schools on the platform is crucial. Our partnership with Govt., Kindergarten Association, Repto - online course distribution platform, INGOs will play a key role to get more teachers on the platform. 

Teachers can access our platform from their smartphone with internet connection.

We already completed training to 1000 teachers in last one year. These are teachers from different schools who got our professional capacity development course. These teachers are helping their classes and schools to perform better both academically and as an institute. 

On a very specific note, Miapara Govt. Primary school teachers after receiving our training last year, became the best primary school in their entire region. And second-most innovative school in the entire country. 

We are expecting to provide professional development opportunity to minimum 20,000 school teachers in next 12 months through our online courses only. 

In next 3 years, it should be around 100,000 school teachers. 

Besides online courses, we'll continue our work directly with schools and teachers in a physical setting. 

We already partnered up with Government and in process of partnering up with Kindergarten Association of Bangladesh - two largest network of school teachers. 

Light of Hope, through its Teachers Time brand, puts itself as the only and most unique solution for teacher’s professional development. We’re a group of entrepreneurs, educators, ex-teachers, engineers and marketer who are working together. The educators in the team are trained abroad and have first-hand experience working as teachers. 

My work at BRAC taught be how to scale with minimum resources at hand. I started Light of Hope with zero capital and we’ve become the largest education-based social enterprise in Bangladesh in just 3 years. 

We've both B2B and B2C model to generate revenue. We charge individual teachers for our courses. Schools and organizations hire us to provide training to their teachers. Now, we are putting our courses online - through our own online platform and our partner's platform (Repto and a2i are on-board). This is going to be another major revenue source for us. 

As long term sustainability plan, we are focusing on developing industry standard courses for existing and aspiring teachers in Bangladesh (similar to IELTS or GRE). Since there is no formal university/college-level courses and also there is no opportunity for new teachers to develop their professional skills, our courses can set the industry standard. We are now developing a 30-40 hour basic teacher professional course that any aspiring individual and new teachers can complete online.  With Government, we are planning to work on the policy so that this basic course will be made mandatory for any school teacher. For bringing credibility and knowledge, we partnered with Education Changemakers – one of the most innovative company based in Melbourne, Australia that works with teacher-led innovation. 

I'm applying to Solve because of the learning opportunity and access to network that might help me to scale and fine-tune my solution. 

Effective marketing strategy to attract both B2B and B2C client base will be a key barrier. Teaching is not an attractive profession in Bangladesh. People who didn't find any other job, usually come to teaching. It's important for us to understand more how we can inspire the teachers to take pride of their profession and bring the best out of them. 

School authorities often don't keep budget for their teacher's professional development. However with our online course, the cost will be significantly lower to train and develop teacher capacity.