PesonaEdu Academy

The solution aims to assist long-distance learning for schools in remote area utilizing interactive contents and platform through tandem teaching.

Millions of students in Indonesia receive their education in schools in remote areas . Due to the location, they lack quality teachers on top of learning materials. This creates education inequality between the big cities and the rural remote areas.

Governments and NGOs try to solve this problem by sending good quality teachers to the remote areas for temporary postings/missions. However, due to the pandemic, this has become challenging. Education in the rural areas are halted as teachers are unable to come while there has been numerous school closure and stoppage. This has exacerbated inequality.

Fortunately, some areas still have internet connection and some schools have devices or computer labs even with the lack of educators. PesonaEdu Academy utilizes our Interactive Content ( Interactive Digital Textbooks) and Learning Platform to help good teachers in big cities to conduct remote teaching or to assist local teachers to deliver quality education safely.

This way, students are able to receive quality education and the local educators receive assistance in conducting engaging and interactive lessons. Keeping engagement is a challenge faced by all teachers during distance learning and with our content and platform that has been used and endorsed by various international institutions such as Singapore Ministry of Education and International Publishers such as Oxford University Press, the problem can be minimized. 

We believe this solution if done at scale, can be useful even beyond the pandemic in addressing inequality in education where good teachers and good schools are centered disproportionately in big cities. 

The root cause of the problem faced is education equality due to lack of quality educators and resources especially  in rural and remote areas in Indonesia as compared to the big cities. The good teachers and good schools are concentrated in big cities while very few of these teachers and schools are available in the remote areas.

This problem is exacerbated during the pandemic due to school closures, travelling difficulties, difference in infrastructure. This is especially relevant in Indonesia , a country with numerous islands and gaping inequality in both income and education. While it is a country that wins numerous medals in International Olympiads , it is also one of the worst performing country in the region on literacy, numeracy as can be seen in among other metrics, its low PISA ranking.

This is a big problem in Indonesia because it has 170,000 Primary Schools spread over a very big area full of islands. Data from World Bank shows that about 55% of Indonesians who completed schools are functionally illiterate. Much higher than her ASEAN neighbours. 

Efforts on trying to improve existing teachers and producing new high quality teachers are underway but it is such a massive and costly undertaking meanwhile many students are entering and graduating each year while getting sub-par education.

Our solution aim to alleviate these problems.

The solution aim to serve teachers/schools/students. who are having shortage in terms of quality teachers.

By allowing good teachers in cities to conduct lesson remotely through our Interactive Learning Platform and by equipping them with Interactive Content and Digital Textbooks, they can help the local teachers at remote areas to conduct lessons or even directly teaching the local students.

All the solutions mentioned above aim directly to alleviate the problem of educational inequality during this pandemic and beyond.

Teachers who are struggling to conduct lessons in the remote areas will be helped through tandem teaching by experienced and quality teachers who can conduct their teaching from distance. Making travelling and residence much less of an issue which is important considering the size of Indonesa and how remote many of these areas are. Travelling has also been made much more difficult because of the pandemic.

The students will be able to receive remote learning from good quality educator. Traditionally it is much harder to engage the students with distance learning but we hope that with interactive content and platform, the distance learning experience of the students can be much more engaging and interactive.

Andre Candra-

Head of Partnerships - PesonaEdu International

The solution is based on our Interactive Content which we believe is of very high quality as it has been licensed by Singapore Ministry of Education and we have partnerships to create Digital Textbooks with various International Publishers.

The utilisation of interactive content and interactive platform allow teachers to conduct lesson remotely for students in rural areas. This is not a new concept but one we believe has been accelerated massively due to necessity due to the pandemic. Equipping and assisting good teachers with the know how to conduct engaging long distance lesson is something that is crucial with the many school closures  and stoppages. Once they are equipped with that, the process can be extended towards communities beyond their own schools or cities.

The impact is that the benefit and externalities created by good educators can be spread towards a much more diverse group of students all over Indonesia while we wait for more and more quality educators are being trained to fulfill all the needs. 

The solution has been piloted in remote schools in Nabire and Aceh ( the extreme east and west of Indonesia).

We have good teachers from Jakarta to conduct the lesson remotely from their home during the pandemic. In these schools , they have computer labs but very limited amount of teachers. So in these lessons, the local teachers are being accompanied while the students are being taught by the remote teachers and asked to do various Learning Activities.

The technology is Math and Science Interactive Content that emphasizes on the correct pedagogy and engage students to explore and understand.

While the learning platform allows teachers to create various Learning Activities and monitor student progress.

We believe the idea of our solution will mean that students in more rural areas can also receive good education from quality teachers. This will help solve inequality because waiting for the amount of good teachers to be trained and produced will still take a long time. Not to mention that not a lot of them will want to reside in the rural areas.

Therefore by enabling remote learning, this will change the range and scope of good teachers , making more students all over Indonesia to be able to benefit.

Initially our progress is measured by just the ability to keep the teaching and learning process to continue during the pandemic.

But as the lessons go on, the progress will be measured by the literacy and aptitude of the students receiving the lessons to see how they compare with their contemporaries all over Indonesia as well as the previous batches who didnt receive such education.

We also think local teachers who are being accompanied will be able to improve in their content understanding as well as teaching skills especially in terms of incorporating long-distance teaching methods and that will have to be measured by teaching aptitutde tests as well as how these improvements are reflected in the students literacy and understanding. The easiest way to measure these would be tests in the short run but in the long run, more holistic evaluation would have to be done ( measuring interest,understanding, involvement , etc). 

When a similar solution is implemented in the big cities in the existing schools, many teacher have the feedback that through this method of distance learning, not only they can keep lessons going as normal as possible in the pandemic, they have also been able to get through to some students which they previously didn't manage to connect with in person.

We look to involve more and more teachers and schools all over Indonesia with the hope that more and more disadvantaged students in rural areas will be able to receive quality education just like their peers in the big cities.

We plan to achieve them by raising funds and budget, hiring more good quality teachers and connecting with more and more rural schools who have the facilities to receive our lessons.

We also have a plan to create Satellite TV content to show educational TV programmes and lesson delivery through TV set up box for villages which does not have internet connection.

The first issue is that our solution need high quality teachers to learn how to deliver long-distance lessons and to allocate time to conduct their lessons. There are a lack of educators in general and to find more teachers who are not only pedagogically strong but also able and willing to learn new technology in the midst of their already busy schedule is challenging and costly. 

There needs to be a bigger talent pool and funding.

We also need to outreach to more and more schools in the rural areas to convince and invite them to this program to make sure that their students are able to receive better education and not lagging behind during the pandemic and beyond. This will need networking and reach as well as marketing budget.

Also technology /infrastructure is a massive challenge as our current solution requires the school to have devices and working internet. There are many other schools which does not have internet which we cannot reach with our soltuion at the moment. 

We plan to solve this by using Satelite TV and top up boxes and producing interactive lessons to be broadcast in these areas while waiting for the internet infrastructure to grow but this requires big budget and implementation

Pesona Edukasi (PesonaEdu)is a K-12 Math and Science content developer based in Indonesia and Singapore.  The organization creates high quality math and science interactive content because we believe that students should discover joy in learning.

Our Interactive Content aim to make the teaching and learning process much more interactive and engaging. We collaborate with various publishers and educational organizations to combine traditional tested learning methods with interactive content.

We believe this will help inequality in education by alleviating the scarcity problem of good educators and giving them quality resources for self-directed learning as well as long-distance learning.

The solution team consist of 3 main staff.

Andre, Selli , and Herman is part of the solution team which organizes the recruitment of teachers and clients. We communicate with the sister schools for schedules, training of teachers in terms of the products, etc.

We also work with various part-time teachers who wish to conduct remote lessons for the schools in remote areas.

Our solutions are licensed with Singapore Ministry of Education and we create digital textbooks with various International Publishers such as Alston Publishing, Marshall Cavendish , and many local Indonesian publishers and authors.

While for the Pesona Academy itself , we are still doing it on our own with our part time teachers and sister-schools from Nabire and Aceh.

We wish to have more funds and support with regards to our initiative since we believe it is something that has proved very useful for students in rural areas during this pandemic.

Feedback and ideas on how this initiative can reach more and more people and be improved would be deeply appreciated as well.

Financially as mentioned , the recipients and beneficiaries of this solution are disadvantaged students in the rural areas while we have product cost, training cost, and teacher cost. So the program would need to be running at a deficit for a while. So we need financial support or networking to Government,NGOs, or Charities who find this project interesting and useful and are willing to subsidize.

We also need to monitor and evaluate the progress of the students in terms of literacy , subject mastery , and beyond. 

Marketing and PR are also needed to have more and more teachers join our initiative and more schools in rural areas to entrust their students to us.