Agavi

Educational technology (edtech) is overly complex, too expensive, and uncreative.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, the transition to digital education left disabled, rural, and impoverished students behind because existing edtech systems are targeted towards privileged customers.

Agavi is a system designed for use by teachers and students everywhere else in the world, where bandwidth and electricity are often unreliable or unavailable.  In addition to low resource demands, the system is also designed to make science and engineering learning experiential.  Rather than being yet another system for showing videos and quizzes, Agavi allows teachers to utilize phone sensors and GPS location in their activities, making the smartphone an agent in its environment rather than a mere portal to passive content.  Additionally, the system is being designed with artificial intelligence capabilities, using activity performance data from around the world to help a teacher adjust content to be locally relevant and effective.

A key problem in many of the more remote parts of Indonesia is lack of connectivity.  With recurring waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, many students have had to withdraw from school and return home, which can include environments with low or no internet connectivity.  Even within the school ecosystem itself, connectivity is not always a given and can be expensive.  With much learning transitioning to high-bandwidth online modalities (ie, Zoom), this has left a lot of students excluded from continuing their studies.  The root problem here is a mismatch between tool and environment.  This problem stems from a skewed view of the state of global internet technology due to many edtech entrepreneurs existing solely in a high-bandwidth bubble.  They are unaware just how inapplicable their solutions are to most global teaching environments, which includes hundreds of thousands of students.  This mismatch is what our solution addresses, by developing edtech that is designed specifically for low-bandwidth, smartphone environments.  But we want to move beyond simply relaying content to students, which is the worst way to learn.  Our platform is designed to use the smartphone as an agent in its environment to make learning more place-based and experiential.

Our solution serves teachers and students in Indonesia, particularly those working in low income/electricity/bandwidth environments.  Many of these teachers and students have poor internet connections and older devices, ruling out the use of much edtech that has been used as a stopgap during the COVID pandemic.  While working in Indonesia as COVID was breaking out, I was able to personally experience these inequities and see how much they limited my teaching, as well as how poorly students were served by these edtechs.  This became more salient after I returned to the US and was able to quickly work around the bandwidth problems I experienced in Indonesia, but at the expense of making my activities inaccessible to students.  In response, I started a team to begin building an edtech platform that would work in the environments where I struggled with edtech the most.  As we are developing the Agavi platform, we are regularly engaging with our teacher partners in Indonesia to discuss their needs, observe how they interact with the system, and where they struggle.  This helps us drive the system to the least complexity possible in order to help improve uptake by teachers, as overly complicated edtech systems has been noted as a significant barrier to widespread adoption of edtech.

Our solution aligns with multiple aspects of the Challenge.  In particular, we align with improving access to country-specific and vocational skills, and broadening access to underrepresented groups.

Agavi is an adaptive learning system designed for the smartphone, which is a common and widespread internet access tool in the developing world.  Both the teacher and student interfaces are optimized for the smartphone.  The system is designed to have a low bandwidth footprint so that it can be easily utilized over poor internet connections.

Additionally, the system is designed to utilize a variety of inputs to help engage students.  Typical ones include multiple-choice questions, drop-down menus, and numerical inputs.  However, Agavi will go farther, including smartphone sensors and GPS locations as valid ways for students to input information into Agavi in response to teacher queries.  This will allow the development of new kinds of activities ... ones that incorporate a student's physical environment.  There's no better way to engage STEM learners than to have them explore their environment, report on it, and get feedback on their observations and hypotheses so that they can improve those skillsets.

Finally, the system will allow for adaptivity so that the tasks that teachers design for their students to complete can be linear or branching, responding to student answers and skills.  We are working to develop both computerized learning objectives to help teachers understand their students' abilities, and an AI-driven system that will look at global results and help teachers better localize shared activities and lessons.

Dr. Lev Horodyskyj has been working in the education sector for 20 years, and with edtech for 10 years, including design, development, distribution, teaching, and education research.  He has experience living and teaching in the US mainland, territories, and eastern Indonesia, and will be adding Ukraine and Brazil soon.

Agavi is innovative because it is being built to solve the problems of the most difficult learning environments first (this was driven by my teaching experience in eastern Indonesia prior to the COVID-19 outbreak).  Most edtech starts its life in high-bandwidth, high-tech environments, which results in design choices and architectures that are impossible to later modify for low-bandwidth environments.

Agavi is also innovative because it will treat the phone as an agent in its environment, rather than a portal to videos, text, and other passive content.  With the ability to access phone sensors (compass, barometric pressure, accelerometers, thermometers), wi-fi/bluetooth sensors, and GPS location, Agavi will allow teachers to build custom activities that have students using their phones like Star Trek's tricorders, something that is not currently done.

Finally, through the unique data architecture surrounding the tasks, Agavi will be able to identify and track "mutations" in content as it is shared and modified by other teachers.  This will allow research into how teachers adapt content that has never before been possible.  By identifying and harnessing these unique insights, Agavi will be able to identify common modifications and changes associated with specific learning environments, allowing other teachers to benefit from these insights as they prep content they find in Agavi's library for their unique classroom challenges.  Imagine having a system that automatically swaps continental examples for island examples if it knows that you live and work on an island.  Currently, that all needs to be done manually by every island teacher.

The core technology for Agavi is web-based, with app functionality planned for when necessary to work offline.  We are not interested in using anything cutting-edge, rather, we want to focus on "lowest common denominator" web technology so that we can have the broadest impact.  The less power and bandwidth that it uses, the better.

The novelty will lie in the low-cost tech ecosystem that surrounds Agavi.  For example, Agavi will be capable of running on SolarSPELLs (solar-powered Raspberry Pis distributed in impoverished areas to act as digital libraries).  Agavi's sensor ecosystem will also have an API to enable a "maker" community to develop around Agavi that we hope will build and extend Agavi's capabilities with sensors and tools that we haven't conceived of but that Agavi will, nevertheless, be prepared to handle.

Teachers have been stuck with poor edtech solutions for so long that they have an expectation that any new edtech will simply be a variation of the past 20 years.  They often have difficulty articulating what exactly they want because they have gotten so used to learning management systems, videos, and quizzes that that is the only way they can conceive of online education existing.  When asked to imagine differently, they leap to VR, AR, and other high-tech solutions that have a lot of novelty, but not a lot of practicality.  There is a gap in thinking of what may come in-between.

Agavi will take a step sideways, creating a system that prioritizes simplicity and novelty.  Simplicity will yield an easy-to-use interface and low costs of use (in terms of time, money, bandwidth, electricity, and equipment).  Novelty will yield new possibilities for activities that utilize coordinates and environmental sensors.  Together, these will empower teachers to quickly create imaginative interactive activities, and entice them to continue doing so as a result of the simplicity of the system.  This will have downstream effects in classrooms by making it easier to incorporate active learning approaches, which should consequently engage students.  Because teachers and students globally will be interacting within the same digital ecosystem, this allows the identification of common motifs and patterns that can be harnessed to help teachers connect with and benefit from the work of other teachers in the Agavi ecosystem.

Our impact goals for the next year are to begin selling low-cost subscriptions to a fully functional system and cultivating a dedicated user base.  We are currently working through volunteers who are building the first iteration of the system.  Through crowdfunding, bootstrapping, and partnerships, we anticipate being able to pull in enough funding to get us to launch.  Post-launch, we expect to grow via word-of-mouth.  Additionally, we will be developing strategic partnerships to gain users and add quality content to the network.  These will include working with the SolarSPELL project, which has a distribution agreement with the PeaceCorps for global deployment.  It will also include working with science education and outreach groups, such as the International Geoscience Education Organization, the International Astronomical Union's Office of Astronomy for Development, and the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science.  Each of these organizations works with teachers and learners at all levels, with a focus on teachers working in difficult environments.

We are monitoring progress according to the functionality of the system

and enthusiasm/usage of our early testers.  We are also monitoring
community interest in the project through Google analytics on Agavi's
website, contributions to crowdfunding campaigns, conversations with
strategic partners, and the number of new partners who approach us about
the project.

In the next year, the primary challenge is taking the system from

prototype to a launched product.  Our fundraising base is weak and we
have had a difficult time raising startup funds since we are operating
as part of a small nonprofit and our target teacher population tends to
not have a lot of money to contribute to the project.  As a result, the
work is done by volunteers who have limited time to develop the system. 
Additionally, because we are a small group, we will likely have
difficulties navigating an international marketplace and all the related
regulations.  We anticipate that the system will be popular based on
reception to non-functional click-through concepts and early prototypes,
and because it meets an unspoken teacher demand, which can potentially
stress the team if demand scales before the team can.

We are addressing the lack of funds by working slowly and steadily, focusing on quality over speed.  Additionally, we are building partnerships with other organizations so that we can serve as vendors for their edtech needs.  Currently, we are developing a collaboration with the Etelman Observatory in the US Virgin Islands, as they have shown enthusiasm for the project and have a stronger record of winning grants that can be used to fund our initial efforts.

To address the challenges of working in the international marketplace, we have a board member at our nonprofit with business expertise who can assist us.  We are targeting specific countries where we have strong working relationships so that we work with just a few international markets at a time.

Regarding the scaling challenge, we believe that our approach of limited distribution to select partner countries will help us manage our growth so that it doesn't exceed our team's capabilities.

We have six people working on our team on a volunteer basis.  The lead is currently working in Ukraine (current location), Brazil, and the US Virgin Islands.  The back-end developer is located in Arizona.  The front-end developers are located in Romania.  The analytics experts are located in California and Pakistan.

The team lead has been working in the education sector for 20 years, and with edtech for 10 years, including design, development, distribution, teaching, and education research.  He has experience living and teaching in the US mainland, US territories, and eastern Indonesia, and will be adding Ukraine and Brazil in the next year.  He is trained in astrobiology research and education at the PhD level, and as a result, excels in making unique linkages between people, concepts, and cultures.

Our back-end developer has 20 years of coding experience and hails from an Indigenous background and community.  He has firsthand experience with the challenges of education in Indigenous community settings, which informs the design of the Agavi's back-end functionality and user experience.

The front-end developers are enthusiastic Romanian students and recent graduates.  Growing up in post-Soviet Romania has given them deep insight into educational inequities and the patchiness of current edtech solutions.  Their recent experiences in education inform the design of Agavi's front-end functionality and user experience.

Our analytics experts hail from a disadvantaged backgrounds, having to work
through difficult community and school settings to complete their degrees.
 They have strong backgrounds in informatics, machine learning, and AI.

The approach for building the Agavi leadership team is to deliberately

recruit from the communities we are seeking to serve to ensure that
their perspectives and priorities are reflected in the final product.
 The team lead comes from a dual-culture household (American and
Ukrainian) and actively seeks out lived experiences that help him
understand the groups he is working with (hence living and teaching in
Indonesia, US Virgin Islands, Ukraine, and Brazil).  The co-lead is a
young woman from Romania well-integrated in the Romanian start-up tech
sector.  The back-end developer is US Indigenous with connections to
many Indigenous groups in Arizona and North Dakota.  As the team
expands, we plan on continuing to draw leaders from the communities with
whom we are working most closely.

Agavi's umbrella organization, Science Voices, is currently partnered

with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science.  BMSIS provides student
interns and institutional review board access, while Science Voices
provides prototypes to support BMSIS' educational endeavors.  We are
also working on developing a partnership with the Etelman Observatory in
the US Virgin Islands to test Agavi in a public outreach setting, as we
think this is a critically underserved market by current edtech.

We plan to offer Agavi as a subscription service to teachers for as low a

price as possible.  Subscriptions will be discounted for the developing
world, with the option for a developed world teacher to sponsor another
teacher's subscription and build a classroom connection with them as
well (sharing content, co-developing content, shared classrooms, etc.). 
Only teachers (or their schools) will pay, rather than the dominant
model of having students pay.  We will also offer a paid service for
researchers to access data with consent and cost-sharing with teachers
and students who share their data.

More than funding, we need experienced guidance as we start on our

business journey, especially as we expand our operations in Indonesia. 
Most of us are trained teachers and programmers with little business
experience.  We are learning as we are growing, but the challenges of
growing and scaling call out for expert guidance, especially in
navigating the international market.  In my previous job, I watched our
intelligent tutoring system provider mismanage their business and
eventually be forced to sell their technology to their competitor. 
After the sale, teachers were cut off from the system.  I want to plot a
more successful trajectory and implement the change we promise.

We are currently a small group of volunteers, whose previous experience

has been teaching, scientific research, and programming.  We are
confident that we can build an excellent solution.  We are less
confident that we will be able to build a successful business around it.