CeyEdu : For a personalized educational experience

The global Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the learning of millions of students all around the world. After 2 years, the world is slowly recovering from the initial disruption, yet it has paved the way for the destabilization of volatile economies of south Asian countries. Currently, this has resulted in financial, transportation, and material shortages in the education sector in countries with crumbling economies. Sri Lanka, an island nation in the Indian ocean can be taken as a prime example of this situation. Due to the aforementioned scenario, Sri Lanka has faced many hindrances in the education sector, which are

• Inability to start schools due to the Covid-19 pandemic
• Fuel and material shortages were caused by the crippled economy which resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic
  • Fuel shortage is currently disrupting the transport section of Sri Lanka and as a result, school transport services are charging sky-high prices demotivating the teachers and students from attending the schools.
  • Printing paper shortage resulted in the suspension of examinations for millions of students in Sri Lanka. 
  • As the government is unable to secure fuel for power stations, the nation is currently facing island-wide power cuts with different time slots which makes it difficult to find common time slots for online examinations.

This situation has become a common problem for most developing countries in post covid era.

We propose a platform to make educators and students engage and complete their journey without any interruptions with personalized engagement and instructions depending on student performance.  Our platform consists of following features:

• Scan and convert exam papers into online question banks without the need for professional knowledge. 

Converting the existing learning resources to e-learning based methods is an additional burden on educators. We aim to remove such a burden by automating the process.

• Depending on the performance of the student, future assignments and instruction can be personalized thus making time for assignments more flexible.

As each question is saved to a question bank, the platform provides questions to each student based on their previous performance. By this, we can provide personalized assessments with flexible time frames. As an added advantage, we try to minimize the effects of regular power cuts on the education assessments through the concept of flexible time frames.

• Will contain recorded instruction sessions for students.

The education journey not only contains assessments but also classical classroom-based learning. Due to the effects on the transportation sector, it has become hard for the students to travel daily for such sessions. We try to remove the disruptions in the latter through a video library, available to the community.

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Our solution serves primary, middle, and high school students along with educators in south Asian communities who are facing disruptions in educational systems due to pandemic and post-pandemic effects. It serves them in the following ways

• Educators

It provides an easy-to-use platform for educators which can be used without any specialized help or knowledge on making online question banks. It also provides data analytics services to the educators which they can use to evaluate each student based on their assessments thus making it easy to provide a personalized education experience.

• Students 

Students can engage in assessments without being afraid of transportation costs or blackouts. In addition, they can use the platform to access recorded materials to support their disrupted educational journey.

• Education systems

Our platform tries to solve the main problem faced by the Sri Lankan education sector which is providing educational access to students and timely evaluation of students without disruption.

Our team consists of engineering graduates from Sri Lanka, with software engineering and electronic engineering backgrounds who faced the direct effects of the pandemic in the university education system during our final year in university. Even though we have graduated, we live in Sri Lanka, a developing country with a crumbling economy, which causes blackouts, transportation disruptions, and stationery shortages on daily basis. We live in this underserved community and we have close engagement with our past teachers and have a comprehensive understanding of the situation faced by themselves and their students. As young techies, with good education and brainpower, we believe it's our responsibility to provide the community with a solution to this problem and we are capable to provide and generalize a solution for this problem with our direct experience on this problem.

As fresh graduates in a developing country, we have severe financial barriers due to the high inflation and depreciation of the local currency. As we believe our product can be implemented in developing countries with similar situations, we also lack the legal and cultural expertise required for such a large expansion. We believe we will be able to overcome these barriers through MIT Solve as it will be very helpful in connecting our solution to global community.

Even though many solutions have been proposed for educational disruptions that happened during the pandemic, most of them were catered to the pandemic situation, not considering the after-effects of economic degression. As people experiencing the disruptions caused by economic regression followed by the pandemic, our platform includes many features that will help to continue the learning journey without disruption in this economic regression.

We expect our solution to impact the local communities within the next year as pandemic and post pandemic situation has made it a grave necessity.

Our solution is a web-based platform that uses cloud technology to support millions of students residing in underserved communities. The educators endpoint contains data visualization to monitor the situation of each student and OCR APIs for creating a question bank. Receiving student endpoint will contain a simple web-based portal to access the learning materials and do assessments. Web back end and AI back end will be hosted on the cloud platform and will make use of DBMS and data analytics to store data and provide personalized assessment experience to the students.

Currently our team of 6 people includes representation from different geographical backgrounds and gender identities and we plan to make our organization in to an entity which gives equal opportunities without any discrimination based on gender, race or geographical location.

We plan provide our solution to private educational institutes (B2B) and we provide students subscription directly to the students using the B2C model.

We plan to commercialize this product to private tutors and private educational institutes. In the time being we plan to achieve financial stability by providing SaaS to Private/Public entities in Sri Lanka.