Elyceum

Students’ learning gaps will stay as an inherent component of the conventional school system as long as it continues to revolve around learning new topics every few weeks, rather than ensuring mastery of a topic before engaging further. Learning gaps are also a very relevant problem to school students who have active outside of school lives, those with serious health problems or those who’s learning has been disrupted by wars or other large scale crises. Because of learning gaps, students often fail to understand advanced topics, newly acquired knowledge is more easily forgotten, and resilience to continue learning something difficult drops significantly. Many bright children did not become doctors, engineers, scientists, etc. simply because their learning gaps were never identified, let alone dealt with.

The lack of a tool, for both students and teachers, that would enable them to experience truly personalised, mastery-based learning, is the main reason why learning gaps are still a problem.

Our solution is a Mastery Learning-based, personalised STEM learning platform with interactive learning content for secondary school students, called Elyceum.

It uses AI to generate a personal learning pathway for every student. The pathways are comprised of interactive video lessons, quizzes, flashcards and summaries. With Elyceum, students are able to embark on their own individual journeys of learning, with the pace of instruction and difficulty of content being just right for them.

We base our methodology on Mastery Learning, which says that not time, but achievement should be the standard, meaning that every student has to master a preceding topic before learning the succeeding one in their pathway.

STEM subjects have been chosen as the main focus of the platform because they are heavily inter-related and therefore provide the opportunity to generate ‘mixed’ pathways that make integration of several subjects seamless like never before. Most importantly, the subjects are at the core of the future innovations that will solve major global challenges, such as the Climate Change.

The platform can be accessed on any modern device and only requires an Internet connection.

Elyceum is a tool for both students and teachers. While students are given the ability to use the platform for independent learning, teachers are provided with informative dashboards showcasing relevant data about their students’ learning, allowing for in-depth analysis of everyone’s individual learning needs. Currently there are very few tools, especially ones dedicated to STEM, that provide similar solutions.

At it’s purpose a universal tool, Elyceum serves everyone learning secondary school level STEM: it is able to provide value to struggling and successful students; to make life easier for those teachers who are simply looking for interactive learning content to use in class, and to those who are in need of a tool that personalises instruction in a group of students with diverse backgrounds, knowledge, age, goals, etc.

However, with the recent invasion of Ukraine and the wave of refugees that followed, we saw that our solution could be used for a more specific purpose. It has the potential to provide refugee school-aged children with a tool that would help them continue learning despite difficulties related to finding educational opportunities in a foreign country, and all the problems that follow - particularly the language barrier. This is why we have decided to translate our platform to Ukrainian and Russian and to distribute it wherever it is needed free of charge. A tool like this would also be invaluable to schools, especially in countries with the largest refugee populations, where Ukrainian children have already started to attend school.

Our team mainly consists of teachers and university professors who have had decades of experience working with students in various formats - they know and understand them really well. They also feel the need for our tool in their own every-day practice. The three younger co-founders are students themselves and still perfectly remember the problems and needs relevant to our target audience in secondary schools. In fact, this personal experience has been the main inspiration for starting the whole project.

We have recently started testing the platform’s Beta version with 483 11-12th grade students. Their feedback has been very important for us to understand what exactly in our solution has the most value. The students have been particularly impressed by our interactive videos, the special “Solution!” videos, where the more advanced level problems are analysed in-depth, and, of course, the personalisation features (or at least the bit of it we are currently able to showcase). They have also pointed out various mistakes or features they felt are more essential to be implemented as soon as possible than we initially thought (e.g. math symbol typing in free form questions).

Ukrainian refugees are already attending school in Lithuania, and 8 teachers from our team have 1-3 of these children in their classes. The teachers know from their personal experiences what exactly are the main problems Ukrainian children face: academically, emotionally, and language-wise. Our teachers are able to talk with these students, share their experiences among themselves and arrive at solutions that will make our platform the best tool for them.

There are two main reasons why we are applying to Solve. Firstly, we need technical IT advice and help to achieve our personalisation ambitions. While we have been able to develop a working prototype that could already be successful in the Lithuanian market with our own hands, we will not be able to achieve our vision without additional IT help. Secondly, the $10 000 prize money would help the process of translating our platform to Ukrainian and Russian immensely. We haven’t received any funds or revenue yet - every team member is de facto doing volunteer work alongside their jobs and other responsibilities - so additional funding is essential to achieve our goal. We are also aware of The Andan Prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion and truly hope that our innovative solution will capture the attention of its organizers.

Our solution is unique in that it provides personalised learning for everyone, only requiring a connection to the Internet. We expect that it will both change the market of solutions for additional learning and homeschooling, by providing learners with everything they need to completely master STEM topics, (B2C) and the way teaching and learning happens in schools (B2G). The latter is currently our main focus. More about that in the answer to the question regarding our theory of change.

Our impact goals for the next year are that students in schools that buy our platform achieve 50% better results in math than previous classes; that every Ukrainian refugee in Eastern Europe or child in Ukraine left without schooling gets access to our translated platform and continue their learning as seamlessly as possible in these circumstances.

Impact goals for the next five years are for our platform to be implemented in at least 80% of secondary schools in Lithuania and at least 10% of schools in Poland, allowing the schools to employ flipped classroom and Mastery Learning methodologies, thus transforming conventional learning. More about that in the answer to the question regarding our theory of change.

Underlying every goal is UN’s SDG 4: Quality Education. In particular, we are concerned with Targets 4.1 (By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes) and 4.2 (By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship).

Grounding our mission on these goals, we have won the LCC International University’s SDG Competition in 2021.

We will measure our impact goals for next year with the help of schools that will use our platform. They will provide all the relevant data.

Regarding impact goals for the next five years, we will measure the impact by establishing partnerships with schools who will decide to employ Mastery Learning and flipped classroom methodologies; we will provide professional help - workshops and mentorships - to assist the schools in making the most of the opportunities our platform provides. The number of active partnerships will be the main quantitative indicator.

Our solution, if applied in schools, has the potential to transform the conventional school model. Instead of teaching new topics every week (despite of how well the students know the topic), teachers will be able to manage each individual student, as they will have all the relevant information and tools at their fingertips (each student’s personal pathway, learning statistics, and pedagogical recommendations) comfortably and with confidence.

This methodology is called Mastery Learning, an approach developed by American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom. Bloom’s 1984 article ‘The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One tutoring’ showed that the average student from a group where each student had a personal tutor who employed Mastery learning performed better than 98% of students from a group that was taught conventionally.

We believe that our personalised platform will have the same effect as giving every student a personal tutor who uses Mastery Learning.

This is the ultimate change we strive to achieve.

The core technology is an AI algorithm able to generate personal learning pathways based on learning goals chosen by the student, the student’s learning history, a links between bits of content that are pre-established by our content creators. The algorithm uses Machine Learning to then identify other links between pieces of content that we would never know are there and so improve personal pathway generation even more.

Our team is truly an unusual sight in the world of young EdTech startups that we are part of. The co-founders are Mantas Vičius (21, M), Mykolas Kalmatavičius (19, M), Aleksej Kurilčik (19, M) and Vilija Dabrišienė, PhD (59, F) - a combination of youthful ambition and decades of experience and wisdom. In general, 80% of the entire team, including the 16 content creators, is female, while more than 60% are above 55 years old.

To us it is a self-explanatory, value-driven goal to continue expanding the team with no preferences to age, gender, culture or social status and to maintain an environment where everyone is valued and respected. We have found that with us it all happens naturally and hasn’t required any extra effort on our part.

We provide our personalised learning platform to students (B2C) and to schools (through municipalities - B2G and organisations - B2B). The latter is our main focus for this and next year.

We will have two main revenue streams. The main one will come in the form of annual license fees from schools and government bodies (e.g. municipalities) as well as various organizations - B2B. The secondary one will come from individual students (their parents) as monthly subscription fees.

The version for Ukrainian / Russian speaking refugees will be free of charge.

We have secured a €50 000 worth license fee deal with one of the 60 Lithuanian municipalities (17 schools in total). We are not yet able to disclose the name of the municipality publicly. 3 other municipalities, 2 private schools and a private University are interested to make similar deals before September this year.

As of 31st March 2022 we have 250 students on our waiting list (+483 students who have been testing the platform) ready to pay monthly fees and start using the platform as soon as it will be launched.