A prender la Onda (APLO)

We are looking to solve the lack of access to learning opportunities for many children and young adults in Colombia. 

Children in vulnerable communities lack extra-curricular and autonomous spaces for learning, for the social construction of knowledge and the strengthening of the capacities needed to lead community processes. They also have few access to online methodologies that encourage them to learn and catch up autonomously, at their own pace, during leisure time. 

For the ones that do not attend any form of formal education it is crucial to find local and contextualized solutions for them to learn in their daily life More than 100.000 children dropped out of school in Colombia because of the pandemic (El Tiempo, 2020). Yet, even the kids that do go to school need more options to learn outside the classroom. In fact, there is potential loss of student motivation and engagement because even if schools are reopening, the number of hours a child spends in school has been reduced considerably and the amount of children per classroom is too high to ensure differentiated education to tackle the achievement gap aggravated during the COVID-19 crisis. Moreover, kids need to recognize that education can happen outside school to find a practical meaning in what they learn, to reinforce concepts and to strengthen their social-emotional learnings in daily live activities. In addition, the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of children and youth has been devastating (Unicef, 2021). Nonetheless, children are still growing up in adult environments that do not prioritize their needs. Traditional media such as television and radio have few options dedicated to supporting the wellbeing and learning of youth and there are not enough spaces in the community to attend children's curiosity, creativity and socio emotional requisites outside school. 

“A prender la Onda” (APLO) is a grassroot project, led by voluntary teachers, that started during the COVID pandemic due to school closures. The project has two main lines of action. On the one hand, APLO designs, records and distributes educational podcasts through WhatsApp, local radio stations, community loudspeakers and other streaming platforms. It has produced 30 seasons and 250 episodes that have been broadcast on 35 radio stations, covering over 50 municipalities in the country. The episodes pursue a high quality, context-based and flexible education by involving teachers, students, and their families in the different stages of the production process. The activities we propose on each episode aim to reinforce abilities and skills that are transversal to all subjects (reading, writing, drawing, critical thinking, etc) and to support youth wellbeing and curiosity.

In addition to designing and sharing educational audio content, we connect with students and their families through WhatsApp to follow up on the episodes, and exchange and correct homework. This helps parents to support their children’s learning process since many students that APLO caters to are the first in their immediate family to attend school so their parents may be poorly equipped to support their children’s learning, having not attended school themselves.

Besides, many students have not yet developed the skills to be independent learners and organize their own time, which can cause them to fall behind. The structure of the episodes aids students with this issue, as it is easy to follow, with a single objective and an engagement activity that brings the lesson to life. Moreover, contact with teachers, community leaders and social workers through WhatsApp allows them to support both the parents and children in their learning journeys.  

While school dropouts have increased in Colombia, APLO addresses a gap on alternative and inclusive education, allowing students between the ages of 5-19 to continue their learning or reinforce a concept at their own pace, autonomously and without any cost. Our content also aims to support their socio-emotional wellbeing. Hence, our mission is to use traditional media and contextualized technology to reach many children with fun opportunities to learn something new everyday and content that makes them feel supported in their growing up process.  

On the other hand, we provide training experiences, for schools and communities, that aim to unleash the potential of communities for engaging kids and youth into learning. Through these courses we join the collective efforts of teachers, students, community leaders and broadcasters to ensure that children have tools that enable a favorable environment for their development.

First, APLO shares its creative process with teachers and students to install capacity on groups of all ages on how to raise their voice, teach, inspire and tell stories through radio, Whatsapp and community speakers to ultimately bring about change in their communities. 

Second, we form and accompany different actors of the community (broadcasters, community radio stations, caregivers, social workers and community leaders) because we believe youth education and socio emotional support can not only rely on schools. In order to tackle learning loss, mental health issues and enable local educational processes we strengthen the leadership of many actors and motivate them to generate and guide flexible and contextualized non-formal learning spaces based on APLO content and related to their interests, knowledge and needs. Therefore, the sound library of APLO is an excuse to generate local spaces dedicated to children’s educational and socio emotional needs.  

The training processes are done synchronously and asynchronously (depending on the connectivity of the population) through an analog educational booklet, a google site, whatsapp audios, infographics, zoom sessions and phone calls. 

Our different training methodologies are an effort to provide a platform for leaders of all ages to come together, share and learn from each other, discover their potential and ensure that educational content through existing technology is available to all no matter the circumstances.  

Both the production of content and training are focused on strengthening the skills necessary for good community living, healthy socio-emotional life and critical thinking: 

• Recognition and appreciation of diversity. 

• Collective conscience. 

• Curiosity and healthy relationship with the environment. 

• Creative thinking and active listening. 

• Self-knowledge and self-love. 

The contents we produce are designed for elementary, middle school and high school students. Most of our episodes can be used with all grades and ages, others are recommended for specific grades and ages. With our content we have reached approximately 44,000 children and youth from all over the country. 

Yet, our project aims not only to produce educational content but also to generate local, alternative and flexible educational processes inside and outside the classroom. This can only happen if many actors of the community recognize their role in making education accessible to all. 

That is the reason why “Amplificando la Onda”, A prender la Onda's training scheme, was born. This is the target audience for the training courses:

Radio student clubs: Especially during and after the lockdown students need to express themselves, their feelings and questions. We have been training 10 student groups composed of 142 students and teachers from public schools since the beginning of 2021. This training seeks to solve the students' need to tell their stories, to raise their voices, to have a space that allows them to learn about communication in a practical way while learning to record, edit, and share contextualized educational content with the technology they have access to. This training scheme wants to honor the fact that kids can also be creators and promoters of knowledge. This group has co-produced educational content with us and is working to create educational radio stations in their schools.

Student broadcasters: APLO has 11 student volunteers who are the ones who give voice to the characters of the podcasts.They are exploring their creativity, being trained in voice-over, voice acting and performance while discovering a possible life project in communication. 

Teachers: With teachers we are working on two strategies: "Profes que prenden la Onda", a short workshop that has been taken by more than 100 teachers, to learn how to use our sound library synchronously and asynchronously in their classes to reinforce some subjects, assess others and introduce new ones to students. We started doing these workshops in 2020 because many teachers did not have how to motivate their students from home and had to start making content from scratch, which increased stress and lack of time to give feedback to their students' educational processes. 

The other strategy is "Profes que amplifican la onda", 20 teachers from different regions have enrolled in our course to create educational podcasts in order to replicate the experience of APLO in their educational contexts. This scheme was born from the request of teachers who wanted to replicate the strategy but with their work groups and in their contexts. 

Formal educational spaces and grass roots organizations: APLO believes in systemic change, that is why it aims to strengthen already existing formal and no formal educational strategies that are reimagining education. With our workshops and sound library we have reached 40 educational institutions that have used our content as part of their teaching plan and 5 grassroot organizations that are enhancing their work by receiving tools to better motivate, plan, run, monitor, and evaluate learning moments for kids in their communities. 

Community leaders and social workers: APLO conducts a training scheme for community leaders and social workers that is designed to help them to develop their leadership to improve the educational situation in their communities. This training line arose as part of the distribution of listening kits (consisting of a speaker, a USB and a sound library directory) to 11 communities that do not have internet connectivity or a signal to a community radio station. The idea with this training is to support their leadership and the appropriation of daily spaces in favor of education, through the use of the content of A prender la Onda. This training is all done through whatsapp taking into account the time and connectivity of the participants. 

Community radio stations: We trust in the power of community media as a place of convergence of traditions and ancestral knowledge, as a channel for people to pursue and spread their dignity, identity and rights. Therefore, working hand in hand with community radio stations is crucial. We offer the people who work in the community radio stations, with which we have an alliance, a taylor made training scheme of short cycles of workshops based on their needs. 

Working with many actores allows us to affect change at every level. We have constant communication with all the actors so that the process is a fluid and collective construction based on their needs and feedback. We do this through surveys, focus groups and emotional timelines. This training takes advantage of the local technology that each population group has and maximizes its use.

A prender la Onda (ALO) is an initiative led by a group of Enseña por Colombia’s (Teach for Colombia) fellows, alumni and other teachers. Enseña por Colombia (ExC) is a non-profit organization that is part of the Teach For All global network. Its purpose is to develop leadership and learning in children and youth in Colombia to help them shape their future and the future of their communities. 

This project started when we all were teaching in different regions of Colombia in 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis. We realized that many of our students, while lacking internet access, have access to community radio stations and WhatsApp and that we could support them, keep in touch with them and continue their educational processes through that existing and contextualized technology. Therefore, this solution came from our direct experience of teachers in difficult contexts. 

With time, our group of teachers volunteers has grown outside the network of Enseña por Colombia and we included students in our production team. Hence, our project is constantly receiving direct feedback from our beneficiaries. 

Furthermore, to understand the needs of the educational community we evaluate our production process and our training process in different ways to measure our impact and relevance. 

On the one hand, we follow quantitative indicators in the production process, such as the number of episodes per year. Also, we keep accountability of the co-creation process of episodes with 12 radio clubs across different schools of the country. We track the reach of the radio audience, conducting surveys on sample municipalities categorized per population magnitude and demographic data to estimate, on a next phase, the captive audience of the 17 municipalities we are currently broadcasting our content through radio stations. 

On the other hand, we follow quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure our training processes with teachers and community leaders. As we track the number of social actors using our content, we are also offering them a method based on our experience to create their own media as part of their teaching and community training strategies while also evaluating their learning experience through surveys and focus groups to measure their satisfaction with the course. These scenarios where the participants are the center of our actions and show high engagement allow us to follow up success stories as part of our impact analysis.

We are frequently systematizing the process of creating and sustaining radio clubs to evaluate and reflect, along with them, their experience with the facilitation we provide.

All the content we produced  is being evaluated with a pedagogical scheme that is allowing us to enrich our quality process. Each episode we produce goes through an evaluation process that verifies its pedagogical basis, the language and style of the script, and the learning objective by teachers outside our team. 

Through these surveys and focus groups we ensure that all our systems (community radio stations, community leaders, teachers, students, caregivers and families) is engaged in our processes because we adjust the subject our our podcasts, the subjects and format of our training following their needs, time availability, internet connection, opinions and ideas. 

In ¨A prender la Onda¨ we work with many stakeholders because we know that profound change can only happen with systemic leadership, action and collaboration. Hence, being part of the Solve community is the principal reason why we are applying. Sharing experiences with projects all over the world can allow us to learn from their successes and contribute with our experience. Also, we believe that the Solver community can help us think and overcome with the challenges we are facing and the questions we are asking ourselves as a team: 

1. We want to learn to grow and scale our project responsibly. How can we continue having direct relations with our beneficiaries and engaging communities into our processes if we become bigger? 

2. We seek to understand which is the best model to legalize our project. For the time being, we are not we are not incorporated under any legal form and we are not sure if we should establish ourselves as an NGO, corporation or  company. 

3. In Colombia, community radio stations do not have a measurement instrument to measure their impact. However, APLO has developed a robust strategy to monitor and evaluate its processes. Yet, we want to continue perfectioning this measurement practice to improve our lines of actions based on evidence. 

4. For us it is crucial to have people and their contexts at the center of it all. Hence, we trust that to make the world a better place we need to start with our team. We want to continue learning how to foster our collective leadership, how to put the teams wellbeing first and how to create an organization where its first beneficiaries. 

5. One of our aims is to become economically sustainable offering our services to organizations, the government and schools. We want to strengthen our business model and our pitch to achieve our financial goals.

Our strategy is innovative because: 

1. We are an example of systemic leadership because our work is sustained by a network of actors that are all equally important and heard. 

2. All the training processes of APLO are contextualized according to the necessities of the students. 

3. Our educational content aims to represent the diversity of Colombia. Hence, the student broadcasters of our podcasts are from different regions, with different accents and of different backgrounds and ages. 

4. Our production and creation processes are carried out jointly with our beneficiaries. 

5. We do not seek to reach places with new technology, we use the technology already used by the communities (community speakers and radio stations)  to transform it into a tool for local storytelling and leadership, flexible education and wellbeing content. 

6. We not only produce educational content. We use that content to train and engage communities into local learning activities conducted by local people so that educational processes are accessible to all and happen beyond the classroom.