Aprende MAB

The pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities, and education worldwide has suffered, leaving us with a great concern as “education enables upward socioeconomic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty” (United Nations, 2018).

Academic gaps have grown, and it is urgent that kids catch up on what they have missed for almost two years of school. Together with this academic emptiness, psycho-social wellbeing of students and teachers has also been negatively impacted, as they both have been, in many cases, overwhelmed and stressed.

 Even before the pandemic, PISA results showed that Peruvian education was, in effect, very poor. In fact, according to the results of 2018, Peru had the 64th position out of 77 (Canal N, 2019). Now the problem is even bigger, as “the digital gap has caused us to lose the opportunity to have equitable and quality education, as well as greater economic development that benefits all Peruvians, experts on the subject indicated” (El Comercio, 2021).

According to the Ministry of Education (MINEDU), of the total 54,890 national schools, at least 21,017 require infrastructure restructuring. In some cases, 70% of the institution has to be demolished due to the damage in infrastructure. Underserved and marginal communities have no internet access or high-quality education access. In rural areas, the access to internet and technology itself is almost inexistant.  Rural Peruvian communities are completely left behind: “Those living in poverty and in indigenous and rural communities have limited access to supplies, TV and Internet” (UNICEF, 2022).

The public sector is still attached to the traditional education system where students are not in the center or even part of the educational process; and where socio-emotional learning or differentiated instruction is not taken into consideration. There is no personalized learning nor individualized education. Also, teachers are not well trained in soft skills and socio-emotional learning and students are not motivated due to an increase in stress and in academic gaps.

As a result, a complement for Peruvian public schools is profoundly needed. The whole education system in Peru is in great pain and needs to be reconstructed, taking into consideration the emotional and academic balance, and the reduction of technological gaps in the country.

Peru is a country “with already poor learning outcomes, vulnerable students are at risk of falling behind and dropping out, limiting their future learning and work opportunities” (UNICEF, 2022).

Aprende MAB is an online educational platform that democratizes access to high quality integral education for students, and that unlocks the incredible potential teachers and parents have in their active roles during their children’s development.

We provide a tech-driven solution that integrates academic achievement with emotional wellbeing, personalizes instruction and facilitates socio-emotional learning to kids, adolescents, parents and teachers in urban and rural communities.

 Aprende MAB has some major components:

1)    Ending up with traditional education: we promote a student-centered approach and differentiated instruction, respecting students’ needs and motivations, providing more than 30,000 online diverse free resources (videos, summaries, mind maps, assessments and worksheets).

2)    Balancing academic achievement with socio-emotional wellbeing throughout our more than 200 courses (academic, emotional and creative courses).

3)    Helping students catch up on what they’ve missed in school throughout dozens of courses that follow the national curriculum.

4)    Promoting teacher training throughout a section that aims at empowering teachers.

5)    Empowering parents and enriching their parenting skills throughout a whole section for parents.

6)    Solving the lack of internet access in underserved communities: we have a technology that enables us to share our platform without internet connection in rural communities in Peruvian Andes. We organize “cinema sessions” where courses are projected, and we have a program by which we travel to those communities and give in person workshops.

 7)    We complement our technology with in person programs and workshops around the country.

8)   Kids can navigate with freedom regardless the academic year they are at, so they can catch up every time they want or need to do so.

We provide thousands of different learning resources for students, teachers and parents in order to generate a learning community where education is accessible for everybody, and where social wellbeing is fostered.

No matter what backgrounds families come from, every kid should have access to high quality integral education where both academic and emotional achievement can be met.  We help parents become educators themselves and we empower teachers and value their important role in students’ lives.  Our most important goal is to create a better world throughout an integral education system based in technology.

Our vision is to expand and benefit billions of families around Latin America through technology and through our educational methodology that ends up with traditional standardized education, hence reducing educational, technological and social gaps in countries.

 Today, we positively impact more tan 100,000 Peruvian students.

 We use a 100% cloud server called AWS. The platform is currently being upgraded into a multi-service MERN Stack to make it easier to maintain, reduce operating costs, and improve management.

Our target population can be divided in the following groups:

• Early childhood (kids from 0-5 years old)
• K-17
• Teachers from urban and rural areas
• Parents

Ways in which our Early Childhood population is underserved:

1. In Peru, early childhood is left behind, as attention is focused on the regular education system that starts from 1st grade (approximately 6 years old).
2. Unfortunately, many mothers in Peru are minors that have been raped or have had no access to integral sexual education. Hence, they have no parenting basic skills.
3.  Many babies do not receive any educational stimulation during early childhood as mothers carries them to their works.
4. The Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion (MIDIS) has some social programs that aim to educate new mothers, however, the ministry alone is not able to tackle this issue and help from other institutions is needed.

 Our solution, Aprende MAB, will give this population several benefits such as:

1. Providing information and workshops about physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development of children in Early Childhood.
2.  A Program for Early Childhood created due to the agreement we have with the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion (MIDIS) through which we have created the course section “Programa de Primera infancia”. Here we empower mothers and caregivers with information and special techniques to educate little babies. 
3. Free courses for both urban and rural areas in Peru. 

Ways in which our K-17 population is underserved:

1.  Education system in Peru is very poor
2. The lack of healthy infrastructure is forbidding schools from opening or functioning the way they should
3. The lack of teacher training provides a low-quality education  

Our solution will give this population several benefits such as:

1. Providing more than 200 free lessons
2. Access to almost every lesson of the National Curriculum: mathematics, geography, English, communication, among others.
3. Free navigation on the platform, adapting to the necessities of the user.
4. Students can go back each time they need to do so, and they can accelerate their learning if they wish to do so.
5. Aprende MAB contains assessments every time something is taught, so learning can be monitored.
6. Teacher training lessons, throughout a whole section directed to educators around the country in things like motivation, differentiate instruction and creativity, among others.
7. More than 30,000 educational tools that adapt to different learning styles: mind maps, summaries, videos, worksheets and multiple-choice questions.
8.  Students can be able to catch up on what they have been missing 
9. Learning Styles and Personality Styles questioners that provide important socio-emotional information for students. 
10. Access to more than 80 socio-emotional wellbeing courses for kids and adolescents.

Ways in which our teacher population is underserved:

1. No solid teacher training
2. Too many bureaucratic homework and no place for innovation
3. Low incomes and thus no budget to pay for trainings

Our solution will give this population several benefits such as:

1. Teachers will have access to free training in socio emotional learning, with emphasis in soft skills such as motivation, empathy and creative thinking.
2. Access to more than 30,000 learning resources that they can share with their students and work with them.
3. Access to student assessment so they can see how their students are progressing.
4. Teachers also receive synchronic training monthly, where they can interact with teachers around the country, ask questions and actively participate in discussions and lessons.
5. We have more than 20 socio-emotional wellbeing courses for teachers. 

  Ways in which our parent population is underserved:

1. There is a lack of communication channels between parents and schools
2. There is a lack of programs that educate parents in healthy parenting
3. Most parents do not understand what their kids are studying at school
4. Many parents do not know how to read or write
5.  Many parents have not attended even primary school

 Our solution will give this population several benefits such as:

1. Access to parenting tips and lessons
2. Access to health lessons such as “Fighting anemia”, “cancer prevention”, “well-child check-up”, among other courses that very well-known professionals have created with MAB.
3. Access to socio emotional parenting lessons such as “accompaniment in the upbringing” and “positive parenting”.
4. Parents can also navigate in the different academic topics, such as history and mathematics if they are willing to help their children at home.
5. Courses in a friendly language or even in the native language of rural communities, such as quechua, which facilitates the understanding for parents and their children.
6. Access to multiple choice questions and their answers to help parents guide and correct their children knowing the right answers.

Me and my team have many characteristics that promote our leadership in delivering this solution and expanding it:

1. We are a group of multi-disciplined professionals

2. We have a board of directors that help us take better decisions

3. In our team, there are professional with a lot of experience working in social projects and this brings us closer to our targets:

• We have people that has experience working with rural and urban underserved communities.
•  As a team we have visited more than 40 communities around Peru’s poorest areas (Huancavelica, Puno, Ayacucho, Apurimac, among others).
•  We go and personally diagnose the educational situation in rural areas, and with that, build up upon our solutions
• We have a close relationship with communities - every course in our platform is made because we identified a need in a specific area or community.

4. We have people with experience working with the Government. In fact, we have monthly meetings with important departments of MIDIS and MINEDU.

5. Our communication with our target is constant:

• “Cinema sessions” where we connect with rural communities are monthly.
• Synchronic teacher training programs are also monthly
• Our online impact is complemented with in person programs, so we have constant conversations with our students, teachers and parents.

6.  Our measuring department is consolidating over time, currently implementing:

• Interviews
•  Surveys
• Instruments that provide quantitative and qualitative data
• Processes that provide comparisons between communities where we have impact and where we don’t

We are applying to Solve as we are interested in many benefits Solve might provide. Solve can help us:  

1. Structure the international sponsorship strategy
2. Improve technological aspects of the platform
3. Improve even more our measurement tools
4. Reach more people and presence worldwide
5. Gain exposure in media and conferences.
6. Receive business and marketing mentorship
7. Increase our impact measurement practice 

Our tech-driven solution provides not only a new online educational resource but also a new look at education, ending up with the traditional education system where it is believed that every kid learns in the same way. Aprende MAB breaks with the educational paradigm, democratizing access to high quality education, promoting both academic learning and socio-emotional wellbeing, and solidly serving unserved communities conformed by students, teachers and parents.

 Some characteristics of Aprende MAB that makes it a unique solution that is definitely changing the future of thousands of students in Peru are:

1. We are the first online education free platform that shares not only academic courses that follow the national curriculum but also creative and socio-emotional courses that promote soft skills education.
2. We respect the fact that each kid learns in a particular way and therefore we provide more than 30,000 different learning resources (videos, summaries, worksheets, assessments, among others).
3. We provide emotional tests: learning style test and personality tests in order to promote self-awareness and self-knowledge.
4. We arrive to underserved rural communities that not even the Ministry of Education reaches. Aprende MAB has a whole rural strategy that ends up with the lack of internet access in poor communities by leaving laptops in poor underserved rural communities with our platform previously downloaded in an offline version. Hence, lack of internet access is no longer a limitation for our educational proposal.
5. We are the first platform that includes courses in quechua, which is the most important native language in Peru. We have both academic and socio-emotional courses in quechua.
6. We provide more than 200 diverse courses (academic, emotional and creative ones) that promote the free navigation of users, respecting motivations, passions and needs.
7. The navigation is completely free so users can go back to learning what they have missed for example, which enables students to catch up in several areas according to their needs.
8. The platform has different areas for the different important actors of the education system: teacher training and a parenting area for parents.
9. Teacher training in socio-emotional wellbeing is something completely new in Peru, where teachers for decades have only focused on academic achievement.
10. Aprende MAB complements all the online resources with in person workshops for students and teachers.
11. We have formal agreements with Peruvian Government: with the Ministry of education (MINEDU) and with the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion (MIDIS). This empowers our program as they spread the platform within their impact areas.

Aprende MAB seeks to achieve the following goals. 

Next year: 

1. Triple the number of students that use Aprende MAB, reengaging them to learning throughout our more than 200 free courses that fit into different passions and throughout our personalized and differentiated instruction.
2. Reduce students’ academic gaps throughout our more than 120 courses that follow the National Curriculum, our alliance with MINEDU (Ministry of Education), our assessments and our more than 30,000 digital educational material such as videos, summaries, multiple-choice questions and mind maps that adjust to different learning styles.

Next 5 years: 

1. Reduce technological gaps in Peru throughout our rural technological program that leaves computers with our online platform (Aprende MAB) in an offline version so no Wi-Fi is needed, and through our agreement with MIDIS (The Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion).
2. Participate in a public policy that promotes socio-emotional education, throughout our close relationships with two important ministries of Peru and our online platform Aprende MAB that is used all across the country.
3.  Educate students, teachers and parents in Soft Skills, which promotes better mental health, throughout Aprende MAB that gives access to dozens of courses that educate in skills such as motivation, resilience, creativity and empathy.
4. Triple our teacher training: synchronic and non-synchronic throughout our Aprende MAB section of “Teacher training” that includes dozens of courses aimed at empowering teachers (differentiate instruction, promoting motivation in class, among others) and throughout our online synchronic workshops. 

We have a whole measuring team formed by different professionals (psychologists and administrators) and we measure our progress in many ways:

• Numbers of teacher users
• Number of student users
• Satisfaction surveys after each workshop
• Number of teachers that take the virtual synchronic training
• Number of courses completed in Aprende MAB
• Percentage of teachers who know how to use the platform Aprende MAB (navigation, worksheets, etc.)
• Number of recurring users
• Assessment results after each video is watched
• Number of online resources downloaded (worksheets, summaries, mind-maps).
• Number of rural communities using our offline version of Aprende MAB
• Satisfaction surveys
• Tests that show if people are really understanding and implementing soft skills in their lives
• Number of kids and adults that attend our educational “cinema sessions” in rural areas (where our courses are projected).

Our online platform, Aprende MAB, started in SquareSpace. With time, due to the necessity to increase the quality and quantity of courses and content, we opted to migrate to WordPress on a shared server. In August 2021, we started implementing NODE, MongoDB and google drive in a cloud service.

 The Facebook shutdown of October 4th caused the shared server where the main website was hosted to have many errors, which left the platform out of service for many hours, so the decision was made to migrate to a 100% cloud server called AWS. The platform is currently being upgraded into a multi-service MERN Stack to make it easier to maintain, reduce operating costs, and improve management.

Besides, we are working on an offline platform, which has the same content as the online one, in order to take it to the “Tambos” (rural platforms in different underserved regions of Peru). With this tool, we can use all the content from our web, without needing internet connection. This is very important, because internet connection in rural areas is very unstable or inexistent. 

For this platform we are using a framework called Laravel with Xampp, which is a free software package, that works mainly in a MySQL database management, in order to use the platform without internet connection.

 We start our trips to the Tambos in April 2022, bringing this updated offline platform, and we will continue to check on the use of it, through several periodical meetings with the Tambos´ managers and the communities near the area.

In MAB we strive to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable, heard and respected. We have different proves that show how diverse and inclusive our team is:

• We have multidisciplined teams (marketing, creativity, administrative, legal, pedagogical, psychological, technology, accounts), so people from different backgrounds, passions, education, university and college work together.
• Most of our team is made up by women. In fact, 90% of our leaders are women, in a country where there are lots of social gaps due to gender inequality, sexism and favoritism towards the male gender (Save the Children, 2018).
• 70% of our technology team are women (in a heading where men lead), and these girls are Laboratoria’s alumni, so they come from vulnerable parts of the country.
• We work with very young people (their first job), so we give them opportunity to learn and grow.
• We work with people from a very accommodated social class and also with people that come from vulnerable areas of the country, thus reducing social gaps.
• We have working moms and give them flexibility.
• We have workers with disabilities such as deafness.
• We provide internships to young people who are still studying, so they can have the opportunity to learn in real life situations.
• Our team includes people from different nationalities (e.g. one of our leaders comes from Venezuela).
• We promote a working place where sexual preferences are respected and valued, having people that are part of the LGBT community.

Canvas - Aprende MAB

In order to become financially sustainable, Aprende MAB has different plans that involve:

1. Getting national sponsors (personally and as companies).
2. Getting international sponsors
3. Promoting crowd funding
4. Promoting regular donations and recurrent donations
5. Selling Products (with our actual branding)
6. Organizing funding events
7. Having service contracts to governments

There are different elements that prove our plan to achieve financial sustainability has been indeed successful so far:

1. We receive monthly donations of approx. 240,000 soles ($60,000)
2. Our donations campaign of 2021 enabled us to buy laptops for 40 poor communities around the country, benefiting approximately 1727 students and 430 adults (parents and teachers). This campaign helped us achieve our goal of reducing technological gaps in rural areas, as the laptop included the offline version of Aprende MAB, so no internet is needed in order to navigate among the educational resources. The value per laptop is approximately 4,500 soles (USD 1,220 approx.)
3. One of the most important economic groups of Peru sponsor us: Lindcorp Group.
4.  Very well-known companies sponsor us:

• Tambo
• Aruma
• HP
• LATAM
• Lindcorp Real State
• Comidas Gourmet
• APS BROKERS SAC
• DG (Distribuidora Gráfica): donation of books

Furthermore, we have alliances with organizations such as Propel and Claridad coaching that gives us free mentorship in things like marketing and business growth.