Kelas by Pengajar Belajar

“By 2030, Indonesia will need 113 million digital talents. However it is projected that we will only have around 104 million talents by 2030. Indonesia will lack 9 million digital talents, both in quantity and in quality.”

- Ministry of Communication and Informatics, Indonesia.

Pengajar Belajar equips teachers with industry-relevant skills in STEM and empowers them with relevant technologies for the modern classroom. Our key programs helped teachers transition to an online learning environment and create industry-focused curriculums. Until now there have been approximately 3000 participants and 150 - 250 participants who take part in this program every month. Our solution will help teachers in adjusting to these online teaching methods with an engaging class. We will propagate KELAS so that teachers from rural areas can also access this platform and will have an impact on quality engineers in the future.

KELAS provides teachers with ready-made material that can be immediately used in their class. KELAS is a low-tech platform that provides free, ready-to-use materials to High School and Vocational HIgh School teachers in Indonesia. All curricula are approved by industry leaders and align with national requirements for their respective majors.

We believe that teachers are the essence of quality education. Pengajar Belajar equips teachers in Indonesia with industry-relevant skills and empowers them with relevant technologies for the modern classroom. In this demanding industry, 60% of teachers in Indonesia have very limited abilities in the use of information technology when teaching. We are working to make access to industry-relevant curriculums and resources are scarce especially in remote areas of the country.

Our leadership team has held various management and engineering roles in unicorn tech companies in Indonesia, making our team to adopt an agile ways of working while maintaining high level of innovation. Our CEO also held a role in Social Entrepreneurship from the London School of Economics, and helps us with impact assessment. Our CPO and Team Lead for Pengajar Belajar, Tania, is currently pursuing a Master of Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education to develop more understanding on the pedagogy of teaching and bring back this knowledge to implement in our organization and in Indonesia. Furthermore, we have our own team for curriculum development which we will implement in our KELAS platform. Our curriculum team always ensures whether the curriculum we implement is in line with the lessons and needs that are needed in the future. On average, the background of our curriculum team is professional teachers who teach STEM fields in the schools throughout Indonesia. We also have working professionals who are working in the industry, as well as industry partners who help us ensure that the curriculum are up to standard. We also have a marketing team, the average background of which is people who have skills in the field of graphic design, marketing and branding who can plan strategies we can implement to introduce and attract teachers to use our platform and also get to know our Pengajar Belajar community. In addition, we also have an event operation team. The average background of them is people who have the skills to design events and manage projects. The Event Operations team is tasked with designing and managing every workshop, bootcamps, and project that we run to promote our KELAS platform or our other brands.

Other than the funding that will help empower our growth as an organization, we would love to be a part of the MIT Solve community as we believe that through the support and guidance from the MIT community, we will be able to scale our impact throughout Indonesia and beyond. The strong innovative mindset that MIT Solve’s past companies and organizations have resonated with our organization, and we hope to gain inspiration from our peers and mentors throughout this challenge, and innovate our approach to solve this education problem in Indonesia.

Since the pandemic, many teachers in Indonesia have had difficulty adapting to online teaching methods. This can affect students in becoming "quality engineers" in the future. Access to industry-relevant curriculums and resources are scarce especially in remote areas of the country. There are not many platforms and sources that teachers can use for free. KELAS is here for teachers with industry-relevant curriculums and can also be accessed free of charge. We aim to create more accessible pathways for our curriculums, as it has the potential to change the trajectory of STEM education in Indonesia by upskilling teachers from 8,000 Vocational High Schools that focus on IT, and in result narrowing the gap for underserved children in Indonesia.

Our education team is working to develop more classes for IT-focused majors, but we aim to expand our platform to other subjects as well. One of our biggest goals is to make the curriculum on our platform open-source, so both teachers and industry professionals can contribute to improving and updating the material. We aim for 160,000 teachers to be given access to industry-relevant lesson materials, 8,000 Vocational High schools with a focus on IT will directly impact 400,000 employable quality engineers to succeed in the future.

Our organization has developed an impact evaluation framework that's used in all our programs and products that helps to assess impact to our beneficiaries. We also measure MVP Success Metrics for KELAS. Our target is to translate current Pengajar Belajar curriculums into videos and activities with low-tech alternatives, create leaderboards and assessment frameworks.

The Pengajar Belajar team was formed in January 2020 with the aim of improving STEM education in Indonesia. We started by creating workshops in both technical and soft skills, which helped to upskill IT High School and Vocational High School teachers throughout Indonesia and guide them to creating better class material for their students.

Our Theory of Change is the following:

If we can provide free workshops and resources in STEM for teachers in Indonesia, then they will improve how they educate their students, so that Indonesia will have a better quality employable talent pool.

Our workshops, run by our team and by our operational partners, have been done through live (virtual) classes, led by an expert in the subject. When needed, we created a ToT (Training of Trainers), where we selected and trained Mentors to teach our curriculums. We have reached over 2,000 teachers through these synchronous trainings.

To scale our impact and reach teachers who are not able to join the synchronous workshops, we decided to create a platform to provide industry relevant, ready-to-use STEM curriculums to teachers.

We aim to create more accessible pathways for our curriculums, as it has the potential to change the trajectory of STEM education in Indonesia by adding 400,000 employable engineers into the workforce per year.

We built a low-tech, web-based platform that is mobile friendly which contains unplugged and offline-ready curriculum to teach IT with minimal technology. For every video, we create an engaging text alternative to help save on bandwidth. We create offline activities to accompany learning experience to ensure that the curriculum can be used even in rural areas.

Our mission is to empower underrepresented communities with skills and resources to create a more just and equitable education system in Indonesia. We make sure that our organization members are all on the same page so that we could decide on how we make our decision, and that every member of the organization understands each other's needs and expectations. Each of our team came from different backgrounds and experiences, we always make sure that all of us play a different role, but, we have the same purpose, that is to empower underrepresented communities with skills and knowledge. We always keep checking whether we already gave our team members a chance to grow, to evolve as a person themselves.  We strive to make sure that our team members are always learning in every process they currently have, we want to give them the best and resources to help them grow their career. Our organization runs with a horizontal structure where there are no levels of hierarchy for everyone to feel safe, they don't have to fear certain positions, and can freely share their ideas and thoughts in the process as long as all of us are under the same purpose to impact in the future.

As a non-profit organization, we aim to provide quality content and resources to teachers for free. By working together with many credible industry partners, and having a strong community of professional volunteers, we have been able to co-create our contents for free. 

Our customer base has been growing organically from word of mouth of our active community members of over 1000 teachers around Indonesia. However, we are also collaborating with schools to run workshops for our platform in order to reach even more customer base. Moreover, we are actively marketing our solution to our target audience through social media as well. We believe that this combination of social media marketing and community engagement has been working well for us to reach our customers.

We are still looking for ways to get sustained donations from many people, and during the construction of our KELAS platform, and until now, we have tried to register for many grants and challenges to help us support our platform and our organization itself. Now, we are working on partnering with major universities in Indonesia to support us conduct workshops and bootcamps, in curriculum and also on the financial side. Our plan for next year is to reach out to government sectors, to work together on two sides, in the spread of our platform and organization. In addition, we are also working on partnering with more foundations and philanthropic capital to help us financially stable and to give more impact to our beneficiaries.

We are still looking for ways to get sustained donations from many people, and during the construction of our KELAS platform, and until now, we have tried to register for many grants and challenges to help us support our platform and our organization itself. Now, we are working on partnering with major universities in Indonesia to support us conduct workshops and bootcamps, in curriculum and also on the financial side. Our plan for next year is to reach out to government sectors, to work together on two sides, in the spread of our platform and organization. In addition, we are also working on partnering with more foundations and philanthropic capital to help us financially stable and to give more impact to our beneficiaries. Our founding partner, Yayasan Anak Bangsa Bisa (Gojek Foundation) has been involved in ensuring the relevancy of the curriculums that we roll out through our platform. Additionally, as our higher education partner, Universitas Pelita Harapan and Universitas Pembangunan Jaya are involved in ensuring the quality of lesson plans and proper use of pedagogical content in the activities that we created. Our partners also helped us to ensure that our curriculum content is aligned with the national curriculum from the government, to assure a high level of transferability of content to the classroom.