Ask Teacher Kidevu

To Teach Anytime, Anywhere for Anywhere, Anytime Learning

Governments, parents and schools in Africa strive to provide quality education for their children and youth yet over 16 million children are not in school. Every year millions of children are not able to progress to Secondary School and over 60% of those who did, fail their Secondary School national examination. There have been concerns that having access to school does not necessarily mean that students are learning, and a report from the Centre for Universal Education, along with several other calls to action, asserts that we must now shift our focus to demand not just ‘education for all’, but ‘learning for all’.

National budget constraints hinder investments in public schools and low family income levels leave the parents with no option but to take their children to public schools since they cannot afford private schools. Over 70% of teachers are absent in rural Secondary Schools, the schools lack laboratories and libraries and systems are rarely in place to support conducive learning.

Due to lack of Science laboratories and qualified Science teachers in Tanzania, many students never get the chance to enter a science laboratory or perform a single science experiment before their national exams. Many students resort to memorizing experimental procedures and results, but having never performed or seen the experiments, they lack a fundamental understanding of the science concepts involved and the chance to apply the theoretical knowledge that they have gained in reading and classroom lectures.

Though nothing can replace the experience of performing an experiment oneself, we can create a valuable resource by providing students with detailed videos of teachers performing experiments, with added enhancement through animations and computer graphics that can explain the underlying scientific concepts.

Educational technology offers an effective and efficient solution to bridge the educational resources divide by providing access to qualified educational content, available to learn at an individual pace, anytime and anywhere. In the last three years, Shule Direct has had more than 1 million users accessing the local Secondary School curriculum, engaging with a virtual teacher and other learners and testing their comprehension via thousands of quizzes.

Current alternative learning solutions do not provide local content that can enable students to fill the educational gaps due to absent teachers or lack of libraries so that they can do well in their national exams and beyond. Most students therefore resort to tuition classes to learn after school hours, but these informal learning settings are not regulated and there is no quality assurance of the subject matter.

Shule Direct solves these challenges by creating content that is local, developed according to national curriculums and monthly market surveys of users’ learning needs that can be accessed anytime and anywhere on available devices. A student can learn on a feature phone or a laptop from content that is developed by qualified teachers and reviewed by the Ministry of Education. 

Repository technology: Shule Direct’s educational content repository and its Application Programmer’s Interface (API) enables organization and management of potentially massive amounts of information and resources. Content can be added, amended and restructured without messing with the user interface (UI).

Shule Direct launched operations in June 2013, from December 2013 to December 2017, its premier platform www.shuledirect.co.tz has had over 1 million users and more than 12000 registered teachers, its also available as an app for android and iOS. Makini SMS, its next platform, is an SMS learning and revision platform for all types of phones, where over 50,000 students can access unlimited quizzes, short lessons and a virtual teacher.This reach would not be possible without technology.

By January 2019, we intend to have developed a comprehensive digital resource centre for teachers currently prototyped at Teacher Kidevu's platform to enable them to access new teaching skills and pedagogies fit for 21st Century learning, teaching resources and a peer to peer network of support.

This will be complimented by a resourceful Teacher Kidevu integrated with Artificial Intelligence to be able to provide real time qualified responses to questions from students and integrate the feedback to guide educational content creation for the teachers and Shule Direct.

Educational Technology offer more impact per dollar than any other form of alternative or supplementary learning. The e-learning industry in Africa is growing rapidly highly favoured by the growing average mobile penetration rate at 80%.

We are targeting Secondary School students and teachers where the market in Tanzania alone is almost 2 Million, with over 10 million when we include the 5 African countries we have planned to reach. At a conversion rate of just 10%, this provides an opportunity to improve the learning outcomes of over 1 million young learners in the region enabling them to fulfill their potential. 

Mobile phones and any accessible technology enabled web device

Shule Direct launched operations in June 2013, from December 2013 to December 2017, its premier platform www.shuledirect.co.tz has had over 1 million users and more than 12000 registered teachers, its also available as an app for android and iOS. Makini SMS, its next platform, is an SMS learning and revision platform for all types of phones, where over 50,000 students can access unlimited quizzes, short lessons. The virtual teacher was integrated 2 years ago.

We expect to grow by 45% in the next 12 months.

Shule Direct learning platforms develop and provide local content that is addressing market needs and filling an existing gap. We develop content in consultation with the users and the stakeholders involved in the ecosystem. This enables us to always be in demand and retaining users as much as gathering new ones. 

The Executive Director Faraja Nyalandu has vast experience in community development and human rights, Lyric Doshi the Chief Technology Officer is working part time with Shule Direct while working full time with Google in California as a Systems Engineer. Iku Lazaro the General Manager is an experienced Project Manager having worked in Telecommunications in East Africa and Fatma Said the Finance and Administration Director has a Masters of Science in Finance and Tax Administration. Stephen Mmassy who leads our Monitoring and Evaluation has a Masters in Development Studies. 

We are targeting Secondary School students and teachers where the market in Tanzania alone is almost 2 Million, with over 10 million when we include the 5 African countries we have planned to reach. At a conversion rate of just 10%, this provides an opportunity to improve the learning outcomes of over 1 million young learners in the region enabling them to fulfill their potential. 

We hope to improve our solution with relevant technologies and insightful experiences. We also believe we will adopt these practices in how we continue building and solving our social challenges through educational technologies.

Complexities of technology and leveraging our current content repository to build a relevant solution.