Lecturio

The need to respond to the pressing health care capacity gaps in a sustainable and scalable way has never been more important. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the porousness of healthcare systems globally into focus, particularly in the developing world. 

Equitable access to healthcare and medical education & training remains a persistent problem in many countries in the Global South. Many nations suffer from a severe shortage of medically trained staff to serve their population. According to WHO, the current global shortfall is 7 million health workers and is set to increase to 18 million by 2030 (Global strategy on human resources for health: Workforce 2030, 2016).

Kenya, for example, has one doctor per 7,200 inhabitants, one clinical officer per 21,000, and one nurse per every 1,600 inhabitants (Kenya Health Workforce Project report, 2016). WHO recommends 23 health professionals per every 10,000 inhabitants and to meet this ratio, Kenya needs over 0.1 million workers. Similarly, in Ethiopia, on average 0.3 physicians serve a population of 10,000. Again, to meet the recommendation of the WHO by 2030 (i.e. having 23 health professionals per every 10,000 inhabitants) Ethiopia would need to increase its health workforce by 1354 percent (GHWA, Universal Truth Report, 2014). Tremendous challenges are posed on the abovementioned - and many other - health systems in African countries.

Offsetting the medical staff shortage and, consequently, ensuring accessibility of health services, can be achieved through, for example, higher enrolment rates to medical schools; however, these are also severely scarce in Africa. In fact, there are only 168 medical schools in the entire African continent with only one school in 24 countries and none in 11 (WHO, 2017).

The lack of health workers and medical education & training facilities is not the only issue. There are also serious disparities in the distribution of healthcare staff. Most of them are based in urban areas, with rural and peri-urban areas - where the poorest population lives - having limited access to medical care.

Overlaying the above-mentioned issues with the anticipated population growth, Africa will particularly and disproportionately suffer in the years to come (UN, Global Issues, Population, 2019). To echo the words of the WHO, there is no health without a workforce. Lecturio is on a mission to bring health to Africa.

Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being to all at all ages (UN:SDG3) can only be tackled by increasing the capacity of healthcare education systems worldwide. This means supporting quality and achieving more scalable medical education for nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers through carefully tailored capacity-building efforts in a cost-effective and adaptive manner.

Through Lecturio's educational learning and teaching platform, Lecturio is enabling capacity-building efforts in medical education in low- and middle-income countries in Africa. Thanks to the rich course catalog, developed in collaboration with top-notch university professors around the world (e.g.  Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University College London, etc.), we transform medical teaching and learning and ensure access to impactful high-quality medical education for medical students and professionals.

Specifically, we:

• implement digital learning academies for individual universities in a given country;

• map the national curriculum of a country against our own course offering to identify discrepancies;

• develop new courses to meet national curriculum standards and to reflect local context needs (e.g. particular medical machine use, particular vaccine administration, etc);

• develop apps with corresponding university academies to enable learning in low- or no-bandwidth areas (i.e. offline); and

• ensure a comprehensive tracking of student progress through the academies to support students' learning journeys.

The platform is heavily embedded in the learning science principles to allow for seamless learning and to maximize recall and conceptual clarity, as well as to ensure efficient teaching. We offer:

• 10,000+ videos

• 30,000+ Recall Questions

• 4,500+ QBank Questions

• 1,300+ Textbook Articles

By increasing the teaching and learning capacities of the existing academic systems, we enhance the quality and enlarge the number of qualified medical staff. In return, people who are left out of the system - the poor and the ones living in rural areas, gain equitable access to health care.

Lecturio's beneficiaries can be grouped into two categories:

• Direct beneficiaries: 1) medical education & training institutions and 2) their respective students

• Indirect beneficiaries: people living in peri-urban and rural areas with no access to medical care services

Africa faces tremendous challenges in providing high-quality medical care to its people. And yet, Africa bears more than 24 percent of the global burden of disease but has access to only 3 percent of health workers and less than 1 percent of the world’s financial resources (WHO, 2016). Lack of financial resources is evident in limited investments in education and science. There are only a few medical schools on the entire African continent and most are underfunded and suffer from a shortfall of teaching staff. Consequently, they have difficulties coping with the ever-growing field of medical knowledge. Learning science principles, which could enhance the teaching, are often ignored since the basic needs - such as stable Internet connection or computer labs - are not met.

On the other hand, due to a scarcity of medical education & training facilities, many students have no opportunities to pursue their studies. Relocation to urban areas - where most of the medical schools are located - comes with a steep price that many families cannot afford. Any distance education attendance - even if it existed - would be very challenging due to unstable Internet connection and pricy Internet access packages. 

Furthermore, and ultimately, those who suffer the most are the people of many African countries who have no access to health care professionals. These are mostly poor families living in rural and peri-urban areas of Africa, which boast on average about 23 percent of a given country's doctors and 38 percent of a given country's nurses (Anyangwe and Mtonga, 2007: Inequities in the global health workforce: the greatest impediment to health in sub-Saharan Africa).

Lecturio's solution is aimed at increasing the current medical teaching capacities by digitilizing the educational offering in a scalable, adaptive, and cost-effective manner. Lecturio:

• transforms medical teaching in Africa by delivering high-quality courses developed by the best professors around the world. We continuously update the curriculum to reflect any new discoveries in the medical field.

• white-labels our solution to fit the needs of every partner we work with. We encourage full adaptability of the platform spanning from a selection of relevant content, to building and creating new content and quizzes, and ultimately to using the platform to suit any lecture/learning needs. 

• works with our partners on developing content that suits the local needs. This can include a course on the use of particular medical equipment, administration of specific vaccination regimes, or a course on family planning that reflects respective government policies, among others. 

• embeds the learning science principles in every aspect of our offering, e.g. :

  • adaptive review, to deliver custom learning experiences that address the unique needs of an individual through just-in-time feedback, pathways, and resources (rather than providing a one-size-fits-all learning experience), 

  • spaced retrieval, to boost learning by spreading lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time so learning is not crammed all at once.

• offsets the issues of poor or no connectivity by enabling access to the educational platform via an App. All materials can be downloaded and accessed offline.

• creates opportunities for distance education given the fact that our platform is teaching and learning method agnostic (we can leverage and support any type of teaching delivery and formats spanning from small lecturers to flipped classrooms and blended learning formats).

• delivers an opportunity to track and monitor the progress of every student. Lecturers have a chance to identify gaps in the knowledge of an individual student, flag students at risk, and simply optimize their teaching.

By enhancing medical education capacities in an existing country, Lecturio is bringing health to Africa. We enable the creation of equitable access to health services, particularly for those living on the fringes of society.

Since 2008, Lecturio has been building, adapting, and improving its educational offering to deliver the best content and experience for the learners and faculty worldwide. We received a number of awards for our work (e.g. 2021 WorldFestival Innovation Award, 2021 Top 3 USMLE prep courses, 2016 Global Award for Innovative Higher Education Pedagogies). We know what medical students need to succeed in their studies as we have dedicated years to it. Nevertheless, not every student is the same nor is facing the same challenges. Not every medical school is equal.

For that reason, bringing voices and agency in the development process of every intervention is instrumental in carrying out successful projects. Therefore, we:

• perform exploratory and field research in every country we engage with academic partners. We focus on understanding the political, social, and economic circumstances of a country, with a specific angle on public health policies.

• work closely with the beneficiaries of every project, from the project development side to its implementation:

  • At the outset of the project planning, we seek input from medical schools and their respective students to identify the needs and challenges through organized focus groups sessions. 

  • Throughout the project implementation, we continuously monitor the progress and seek feedback on a regular basis to determine potential pitfalls and aspects for improvement.

  • We work jointly with local partners on the development of new content in the pre-production, production, and post-production phases. We rely on local expertise regarding the curriculum mapping aspect. Local experts provide input on learning outcomes and content delivery format (video, presentation, a text document, etc.). We engage the local experts on active participation in a video format lecture. 

Therefore, we are not 'representatives' of the communities we work with. We are their partner and we understand how to balance each other strengths. Lecturio brings high-tech performing online platform heavily embedded in learning science principles with rich content. Partners on the ground are the experts on the local issues, realities, and needs of medical education & training. They actively inform every step of project building and implementation.

Jointly we create synergies that have the capacities to generate a genuine impact in a flexible and cost-effective way.

Lecturio is interested in gaining greater access to the network and the platform that MIT Solve offers. Through these connections, we want to build partnerships to accelerate our work and scale our solution across the African continent. We want to shed light on the work we have been doing and present results which have been catalytic in driving educational transformation in some countries.

We also want to raise awareness of and highlight the needs of the local communities we are engaging with. Lastly, we want to gain a platform to advocate for more digitally enabled capacity-building solutions in medical education and testify to their transformational nature. 

Medical education and medical knowledge have advanced significantly over the past years. There is a growing body of material that faculty needs to teach and students need to master to become effective doctors and medical practitioners. At the same time, much of the teaching has not kept up with another body of evidence called learning science. Lecturio brings together vast medical education and knowledge with learning science principles in an innovative, cost-effective, flexible, and scalable way. 

Furthermore, Lecturio is not content-in-a-bucket but supports faculty teaching and student learning in a data-driven manner with extensive analytics to make the teaching process as effective as possible. 

Lastly, the Lecturio platform covers entire medical and nursing degrees, i.e. delivers the relevant curricula easily adopted by any university wishing to enhance their teaching, or any student wanting to improve their learning.

The above-stated elements make Lecturio's platform unique and innovative in the delivery of medical and nursing education. We are at the forefront of digital medical education innovation and can deliver top-notch tech platform in the contexts and geographies that can significantly benefit from the online high-quality curricula.  

We aim to drive the quality and scalability of education for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers. We see the potential for many African countries to leapfrog in terms of learning-science and AI-based approaches that many high-income countries are slow to adopt.

Lecturio's impact goal for the next year:

• Lecturio makes impactful high-quality medical education equally available to all medical students and professionals in Ghana, Tunisia, and Uganda. Lecturio supports respective schools that display an acute need for medical education capacity-building support by providing access to our digital medical education platform.

How?

• By building on the success and learnings of our current interventions on the African continent, we plan to scale our activities in other African countries.

• We have been in conversations with Ghana Health Service, a number of medical universities in Uganda, and relevant organizations in Tunisia where we are planning to reach even more universities and medical students.

• Current funding opportunities to finance the interventions come via our collaboration with the GIZ and their respective develoPPP program, as well as via many donors we established a relationship.

• Lecturio enhances the learning and teaching of health extension workers (HEW) in Ethiopia.

How?

• Currently in the pilot stage, the project with the Global Fund and the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia focuses on the development of coursework on Immunization and Cold Chain for HEW.

• The follow-up project will enhance the HEW curriculum by providing additional Family Planning and Health Education and Communication courses and provide comprehensive pre-service HEW training. 

Lecturio's impact goal for the next five years:

• Lecturio scales its operations across East and West Africa and makes impactful high-quality medical education equally available to all medical students and professionals. Lecturio supports respective schools that display an acute need for medical education capacity-building support by providing access to our digital medical education platform.

How?

• We build on our experience in African countries and continuously build relationships with the relevant stakeholders in the respective countries.

• We evaluate the impact of the digitally-enabled medical education capacity-building on the wider education and healthcare system.

• We determine the cost-effectiveness of the implementation as well as create a blueprint for the national-level replication in other countries.

• Lecturio enhances the learning and teaching of all community health workers (CHW) around the world.

How?

• By building on our Ethiopia experience in delivering relevant course work for health extension workers, Lecturio enhances its offering and extends it to other countries and community health care workers.

• Community health care workers are the backbone of many healthcare systems in African countries. Therefore, supporting them in the delivery of quality is of services is paramount for many rural and remote communities in Africa.

Lecturio's interventions and capacity-building projects reflect three SDGs - SDG3, SDG4, and SDG 17. 

There are a number of indicators used to measure our overall progress toward Lecturio's impact goals. These include:

• Number of academies implemented

• Number of Android/iOS apps set up

• Number of registered users

• Number of sticky/active users in academies

• The average score on final medical, nursing, and community health care worker exams

• Number of graduates from medical schools and training facilities

• Number of webinars held to train the teachers

• Number of quiz questions and QBank questions answered

• Number of students who achieved mastery in various disciplines

• Number of new courses developed to answer context-specific needs

Impact

• Improving access to medical education and training for future healthcare workers in LMICs.

• Enabling and improving access to health care services in LMICs.

 Outcomes

• Universities testify to the increase of medical, nursing, and community health care workers graduates.

Outputs

• Higher enrollment rates in medical and training schools in LMIC.

• Average student test scores improved.

• Teachers are trained to deliver education using online tools.  

Activities

• Implementation of institutional academies with relevant medical content

• Implementation and set-up of apps to access the relevant content offline

• Webinars to train faculty on the use and best practices of applying the academies in teaching and learning.

• Development of additional content to reflect the local needs.

Lecturio is a cloud-based online learning and teaching platform. It utilizes a set of different technologies to deliver its services. Specifically, we rely on:

• Mobile application to ensure complete offline usage of videos, quiz questions, and text materials.

• Mobile application and AI technology underpin Lecturio's Bookmatcher feature. By taking a photo of a medical book page our mobile application performs a series of AI operations, such as OCR to recognize the words on the page and NLP to recognize the important phrases and words. Once the key phrases and words are recognized, the system utilizes a full-text search through our lessons database to deliver the best fitting lessons we have on the exact topic of the book page.

• AI technology enables our system to translate automatically the Qbank and quiz questions to dozens of languages on user request so that they can better understand what the question is about, especially if English is not the language they are most proficient in.

Lecturio strives to achieve a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone, regardless of who they are or what position they occupy, feels equally involved in and supported in all areas of the workplace. 

We are a multi-cultural organization operating across Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. Therefore, our workforce is multi-cultural, multi-racial, and diverse. We benefit from team members' unique world views, skills, and cultural experiences to solve problems and increase productivity. Lecturio seeks out new hires in different locations. In today's environment, where technology has enabled virtual communication and collaboration like never before, Lecturio is able to benefit from worldwide talent.

Although Lecturio is a relatively young tech organization, our teams are composed of experts with different generational and age differences. We seek to balance the cutting-edge skills and enthusiasm of youth with the consistency and experience, more veteran employees bring to the table.

Lecturio's business model is based on three commercial pillars: 

1) B2User model - Subscription model catering to individual medical and nursing university students (https://www.lecturio.com/pricing/).

2) B2University model - Provision of our medical platform to medical universities and training facilities. Setup of institutional academies (accessible via webpage or an app) where faculty and students of a respective school are able to access relevant medical and nursing content.

3) B2B model - Serving SMEs and well-known Dax companies such as VW, BMW, and Deutsche Telekom in the DACH region with the development of the relevant course and training materials for their respective employees. 

The largest stream of our income comes from the B2University side, followed by the B2User and B2B.

The target group of the abovementioned services is medical and nursing schools, individual students, and corporates who have allocated budgets to purchase our services. By building so strongly our commercial side of the business, we are able to venture into development and capacity-building projects and initiatives with greater financial flexibility. 

We will keep on relying on the existing commercial revenue streams and three client groups, i.e. individual users (subscription model), university clients, and corporates to further enable the implementation of the development and capacity building initiatives in low- and middle-income countries around the world. We have been witnessing substantial growth in our revenues from year to year and we are confident that we can continue along the same trajectory. 

A strong revenue stream acquired through our commercial side provides us with the financial flexibility to engage in development projects. 

Besides the abovementioned successful commercial revenue streams, in Dec 2021, Lecturio has raised USD 45 million in growth capital, led by Sterling Partners (“Sterling”). Sterling partnered with Inspara Partners (“Inspara”) on this investment, whose principals have long been affiliated with Sterling. Together they bring to Lecturio a unique and successful track record of investing in and building global education enterprises. The University of Applied Management (“UAM”) and other existing Lecturio shareholders Holtzbrinck Ventures, Holtzbrinck Digital, Technological Founder’s Fund Saxony, and Seventure also participated in the round. The transaction closed on December 10, 2021.

On the capacity-building side, we have launched a project with the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia - through a private-public partnership (PPP) agreement. The project focus is on supporting quality and more scalable medical education and capacity building in Ethiopia.

Lecturio has also launched a new project jointly with the Global Fund and the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia (again PPP) focusing on health extension workers (HEW) - who are the backbone of the Ethiopian health service provision. The goal of the program is to develop pre-service HEW training courses with a focus on Immunization and Cold Chain, Family Planning, and Health Education and Communication. The project is in the pilot phase with courses in Immunization and Cold Chain being currently developed.