Virtual Trainer Assistant

Building efficiency into blended learning programs, one data point at a time

A mismatch between skill-sets of job aspirants from socio-economically weaker sections and employer requirements in India has led to grave unemployment and underemployment in the country. Archaic pedagogy and limited access to opportunities in small town and rural India are major contributors to the issue. The conventional classroom methodologies, which fail to develop horizontal skills, are unable to motivate students, resulting in a workforce that, at worst, is unskilled and at best, skilled for opportunities that are irrelevant today.

With the growth of the internet, various e-learning platforms which use creative and engaging content have come up. But they alone aren’t enough to teach students new lifelong learning skills that prepare them for relevant job opportunities. Classroom teaching is essential for providing mentoring and building skills such as teamwork, critical-thinking, creativity, and problem-solving.

Teachers, especially the ones working in underserved institutions have limited awareness of the industry needs and need training in how technology can be married with in-class learning to develop students’ workplace skills.

We are committed to bridge this gap between educators and students through generating awareness, delivering high-quality training, and creating access to various job prospects. Our blended learning program, Propeller, which won MIT’s Inclusive Innovation Challenge, 2017, combines in-class training with mobile-based learning which makes our program accessible and affordable for our target community.

We now propose to support our skilling programs, like Propeller, with a tech-enabled platform that will assist our trainers and  program developers in designing student-centric curricula and providing our strategy and operations team access to informative business intelligence. Learning patterns of our target audience may vary completely from student to student which necessitates an objective tool that can identify gaps in content delivery and consumption. This would further advance the impact of a teacher’s work. Our solution is a Virtual Teacher Assistant that builds efficiency into blended learning programs, one data point at a time. The following are its unique features -

• Knowledge and Learning Platform: Providing a portal for students to access class updates, content and track their learning curve which helps build self-learning attitude.

• Independence: Eliminating dependencies on external platforms which will reduce cost and give us higher control over effective content delivery.

• Intelligence: Reducing manual data collection and creating accurate data backed insights.

• Effectiveness: Digitizing processes to focus trainer time on learning and quality assurance

• Profitability: Enabling scalability by achieving real-time strategic inputs, contextualizing curricula and eliminating operational inefficiencies.

• High Impact: Making our programs affordable and accessible.

So far, we have completed and are piloting the first phase of this solution—it provides real-time monitoring of student activity data and generates triggers for teachers, design team, and strategy team that guide the decision making and content delivery process.

17 million people join the workforce every year in India, but lack the requisite skills to succeed. This employability challenge cannot be addressed without empowering our educators who play  a vital role in a students’ personal and professional development. Our solution amplifies the work of teachers which directly impacts our underserved youth.

Currently, the technology being used in the education sector provides limited flexibility to educators to deliver customized assistance to students. Such technology lacks focus on student-centrism and teacher-enablement. We understand that students, especially the underserved ones, need individualised teacher-focus. This is the guiding principle for our solution. We have created a centralized platform for educators, program designers and business teams to identify learning-patterns.What makes it unique is its ability to integrate quality guidelines, content delivery and content consumption to generate data-backed interventions. Hence, our solution is an innovative process which facilitates collaboration and increases operational efficiency.

Every aspect of our solution utilizes technology to guide our decisions ranging from articulating learning objectives to streamlining processes and guiding business decisions.It acts as a companion to trainers and improves their training efficiencies through its ability to save time and provide data-based interventions. Our solution has an in-built quality success metric which automates the analysis of student activity data. This in turn helps educators create innovative content and deliver relevant skills training. The use of our platform eliminates manual operational inefficiencies. It provides business intelligence which helps guide strategy and save operational costs while facilitating growth and scaling-up.

The precursor to the  platform was already being used in Propeller for content delivery and assessments. Now our platform seeks to enhance the scope for utilising technology in attendance tracking, content customisation, monitoring student progress and providing a detailed report to the teachers which can help them in understanding the best way to help the students in improving their performance.We seek to cover 7500+ students in the next 12 months whose learning curve will be assessed to analyze the efficacy of our tool in moulding the trainers to adopt teaching methods which are most suitable for our students.

In last 5 years, Leap impacted the lives of 30,000 underserved people including 10,000+women. We aim to generate access to high-quality employment for 1 million people by 2023. The highly adaptable and replicable nature of the platform across all geographies will assist us in lowering our program costs and optimising the performance of all our verticals ranging from training to operations . We seek to fortify our business intelligence by including objective methods of assessment to generate remedial notifications, learning recommendations and incentive system to increase the ease of access of all our students to quality content.

Our solution is an integral part of all skilling programs delivered by Leap. We reach our beneficiaries through direct sales and partnerships with private and government educational institutions. We smoothen the implementation of our programs through the use of our virtual teacher assistant. Educators and business teams are trained to ensure efficient usage of the platform. The platform sends triggers which notify trainers on their student’s performance and the business team on quality assurance. This monitoring allows for data-backed interventions that help us make efficiency gains which translate to more affordable and accessible programs for our audience.

Our solution is currently in its pilot phase. We have used a technology-based platform as a part of our blended-learning program to enable teachers to train over 3000 students who come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This has further been developed into our virtual teacher assistant. Teachers receive training on how to use  the platform to continuously monitor student learning and use remedial measures triggered by the same. It has made the processes of attendance calculation, student tracking and feedback, and operational streamlining easier. These features guide our interventions which directly impact the quality of education received by our beneficiaries.

We hope to serve 7500+ students in the next 12 months by deploying our platform as a part of all our skilling programs. The platform will assist trainers in providing high-impact training and mentorship to our beneficiaries, who belong to under-served sections of the society. By 2023, we plan to provide quality education to  1 million people through scaling our platform. This will heavily depend upon the operational-efficiency and business-intelligence of our solution. The placement rates of our target community is at just 5-10%. Increasing employment opportunities for them will reflect our effect which can be measured in real-time.

My co-founder Megha Aggarwal, CEO of Leap, is an Oxford alumna & a Chevening Scholar. She gained experience in investment banking before coming to India, where she began work as a researcher in the education sector before we founded Leap. I am the COO at Leap and come with start-up experience from tech-based companies like Zomato. The team has skilled professionals across sales, technology, finance, strategy, execution, and research.  By deploying local teams that are well-connected with customer needs, we marry grassroot understanding with industry insights and technological-advancement. This helps us design socially conscious products tailored to the market requirements

Our revenue model will be license fee based where we will monetize institutions and government. We will charge a license fee for the number students enrolled. To equip trainers to deliver tech complemented programs, we will ensure quality through regular audits.

Revenue sources:

Business to consumer: Training students directly through our trainers and tech tool.

Business to Institutions/government: Providing licenses to partner institutions and to government to deploy in Industrial training Institutes and Advanced training institutes. Equipping their teachers to deliver blended learning programs.

Business to Business: As the need for horizontal skills and upskilling is necessary for existing workforce we will partner with corporate HR departments and equip trainers there to up-skill workers through the tech tool.

Long term sustainability -

Institutional: there are 25 million students enrolling into higher education every year and there are over 60000 colleges in India. There will be several teaching jobs created in India.

Profitability - We have a detailed unit economics driven pricing targeted at 5-10% margin per customer.

We will deepen penetration through partnering with state and central governments, deploying the solutions for trainers in schools.

We are applying to Solve because we recognize the need for high quality educators and because our tech-enabled solution is in a strong position to solve the challenge of lack of quality education. We believe that Solve can help us financially, by getting our program off the ground, and intellectually, by allowing us to learn from other innovators. 

As the COO of Leap, I am responsible for product-design, technological innovation, and execution. Complimenting my entrepreneurial experience with relevant exposure on product development and collaborating with like-minded individuals will further help me strengthen the foundation of my young organisation.

Many teachers, trainers, and administrators in the regions we work in often display resistance towards technological interventions in the system, which leads to a devaluation of blended learning and other innovative solutions. Conventional classroom methods are unable to address the employability challenge by themselves which necessitates the need for our skilling programs which can provide teachers with a tech-enabled assistant to refine their teaching objectives. Solve can help by providing us with credibility and financial support which would convince our stakeholders to try non-traditional learning approaches that will help us deliver quality education needed for aspirational job placements.