A Maths Tutor in Your Pocket

School mathematics in South Africa is in dire straits. Even before the disruptive effects of COVID-19, multiple studies revealed the depth and scale of the problem:

• Only 16% of Gr 3 learners are performing at a grade-appropriate level (Kotze & Spaull, 2015);
• 50% of Gr 5 learners are unable to reach the low international benchmark (TIMSS, 2015);
• In 2014, Gr 9 learners averaged just 11% on the Annual National Assessments (DBE ANAs, 2014);
• In 2020, only 1 in 5 learners writing maths passed with 50% or more (DBE NSC, 2021)

As concerning as these stats are, COVID-19 has made this situation even worse. For the majority of South African learners, school closures meant that many learners lost up to 70% of their year's schooling in 2020 and rotational times-tables in 2021 meant learners lost at least 50% of contact-time with teachers. Experts estimate that the education system, as a whole, has regressed at least 5 years.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. For the past 15 years, OLICO Maths Education has been developing maths support interventions to make maths make sense for South African children most at risk of ending school with poor maths results, i.e. learners from low-income communities. 

OLICO learners completing school consistently perform in the top 20% of math performers across the country. The maths hotline is a direct response to the challenge of keeping learners engaged in their studies and now has the potential to be an important resource for learners, teachers, parents and education departments. 

OLICO’s Maths Hotline first emerged as a response to COVID-19 and as a means to support maths ‘learning-at-home’ in new and innovative ways. Using widely available messaging platforms such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, learners can access critical maths resources on their phone and engage directly with a real, live, skilled maths tutor. Since opening the hotline - and with no above-the-line advertising - over 10 000 learners have used the hotline with more than 2 000 of these learners returning regularly. In short-term target is to support 10 000 regular monthly users. 

The Maths Hotline's unique proposition solves an under-reported challenge experienced by "ed-tech solutions" in that most learners with poor educational backgrounds struggle to self-direct or manage their own learning trajectories without human intervention. In our 15 years of experience of grassroots programming, this is true even for the most sophisticated AI-education-solutions. We've even developed our own online maths tool that is freely available and accessible (even data-free in South Africa), but we see far greater engagement when there is a human connection. The Maths Hotline is designed to bridge the gap between technology and the personal connection and places a premium on the human interaction.

As such, the hotline is staffed by trained and skilled OLICO tutors who support their learner interactions with OLICO’s existing online resources and maths materials developed over more than a decade. Learners simply send a message to the Maths Hotline and skilled tutors are able engage with these learners from the comfort of their own homes or university residences across the country (or potentially from anywhere in the world). Tutors are specifically trained to help learners work out answers themselves as opposed to simply providing answers. Most importantly, the maths hotline is designed to take learners on an on-going journey with regular interactions throughout the academic year. The intention is not a “drop-and-run” or once-off solution but is designed to be a consistent support offering for learners as they move through their maths backlogs and grade-level curriculum. As an "on-demand" service, the maths hotline is available as-and-when needed by the learner and, by its very nature, enables the tutor to intervene at the right level with the learner.

The Maths Hotline is currently focused on supporting learners aged between 11-15 years as they make the transition from primary school to high school. We've selected this age group because we believe this is the critical intervention point if we're going to set learners on a trajectory for maths success in later high school and post-school opportunities. Our supporting resources and materials have been carefully designed to address the backlogs in maths understanding that is the reality of most SA learners and our tutors are specifically trained to assist with this transitional period. 

Although the primary target of the maths hotline is learners, the hotline is also a powerful support for schools and teachers. Teachers can assign homework and send learners to the hotline for “just-in-time” maths assistance from tutors. This relatively simple support-offering could prove revolutionary when used effectively to support in-class teaching and/or learner backlogs. 

By extension, partnering NGOs and after-school programmes can supplement their support interventions by sending learners to the hotline even late into the evening (the hotline is open till 10pm). Whereas there would often be safety concerns about running tutoring sessions after dark in low-income communities, learners can now get access to skilled tutors from the safety of their bedrooms or kitchen tables whenever they need it.

Similarly, one of the cruelest legacies of Apartheid is that a sub-standard education means many of today's parents and guardians struggle to assist their children with the school work - especially in maths. Now parents can direct their learners to the hotline and they can monitor their child’s interactions, encourage them to return regularly to the hotline and receive support from skilled tutors at no cost. 

Ultimately, our experience is that success in maths is a pathway to quality post-school opportunities and a way to break the cycle of poverty.

For 15 years, OLICO Maths Education has been based in low-income communities developing grassroots Grade R-12 maths solutions. We do this with children most at risk of ending school without opportunity, i.e. learners from low-income communities. OLICO learners consistently perform in the top 20% of school-leaving maths performers nationally and we are proud of a proven track record of maths success that is rooted in the communities we aim to serve. 

Evidence of this is that a number of OLICO's staff and tutors are ex-learners and beneficiaries who came through the OLICO programme and are now at university and working as managers or part-time on the hotline. 

Currently, OLICO works directly with 3 375 learners in schools and after-school centres in South Africa and indirectly with a further 8 900 learners through partnering schools, NGOs and provincial education departments. In addition, OLICO’s free online maths resources are used by approximately 13 000 learners across the grades each year.

Finally, the OLICO team boasts significant expertise. OLICO’s Executive Director and co-founder, Mr Andrew Barrett has 15 years of developmental experience and has grown OLICO into a multi-award-winning NGO. 

OLICO's maths strategy is led by Dr Lynn Bowie who has more than 20 years of maths education experience in low-income communities and is one of SA’s leading maths experts. 

The maths hotline is managed by Mr Patrick Ifeanyi, a maths PHD-candidate  with 5 years of tutoring experience in OLICO schools. 

OLICO is deeply committed to finding innovative solutions to the challenges facing maths education in South Africa by developing community-based solutions.  

To the Solve community, there are three areas of expertise we'd really love to get some help with. 

1. We'd really love to get help in how we can market this product and grow our reach to low-income communities. We need help thinking through the best advertising mediums to use, frequency of communications and how to increase awareness of this offering.

2. We'd really appreciate the expertise of a team who is well experienced in UX design and the user journey. We really want this service to be a regular go-to resource for learners and not a once-off intervention. So expertise on how we can effectively build relationships with our users and how the tech solution encourages returning learners would be extremely useful.

3.  Lastly, we would be interested in looking into the possibilities of monetizing this solution for learners who are not from low-income communities. Any Solve teams who have experience of different user payment policies would be useful.

1.The solution is unique to maths education in South Africa with no other solution like it for low-income communities. Any learner now has immediate and direct access to a skilled tutor from anywhere in the country (or world) for free. Geographical barriers are now no longer an issue and learners can work with tutors from the safety of their homes till well into the evening. We can also source volunteer tutors from all over the planet. 

2. The Maths Hotline solves a major challenge for "ed-tech solutions" that learners from low-income communities generally struggle to self-direct or manage their own learning trajectories even when these solutions employ sophisticated filtering and/or AI features. In our experience, because the learning backlogs are so extensive, learners need the human component to diagnose and resolve blockages not just with the content itself but also in how to productively engage with the content. We're convinced that, at least initially, the majority of learners need a human being to provide direction and motivation. To this extent, the Maths Hotline is designed to put the person back into personalised learning.

3. This solution relies on already existing technology that is comparatively low-tech and already prevalent in the targeted communities. For example, 23 million South Africans use WhatsApp and the market already provides low-cost data bundles specific to WhatsApp usage in this country. Most learners have access to a WhatsApp-enabled device in their homes at some point in the day. What's more, the system for tutor-learner engagements is platform-agnostic so learners can get access to a tutor via a wide range of messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger, Telegram, website-widget, SMS, Instagram, etc. 

4. We're particularly excited by the potential the Maths Hotline has to support 'learning-at-home' as a resource for teachers, parents and partnering NGOs. The ability to assign a learner a selection of questions for homework and then to offer the Maths Hotline as a resource to receive immediate feedback is potentially an education game-changer. This "just-in-time" support is vitally important for the learning journey of young learners. This is especially true for learners whose parents received sub-standard education during Apartheid and are unable to assist with maths homework. In this sense, the Maths Hotline is working to right a generational injustice.

5. We believe this solution can be expanded to work well with older learners and other subjects too so the potential for continued growth and impact is immense. The key is blending the available technology with the personal connection of a real, live, human tutor.

This year, the immediate next phase of the hotline is to grow the reach to 10,000 active and regular users every month by the end of this year. In the process, OLICO will increase the number of paid-tutors per shift and support increasing numbers of volunteer tutors. The aim is for the hotline to have a core team of contracted staff and an increasing team of volunteer tutors as the hotline usage increases. We have already raised sufficient funding to support this target in the short-term. 

In 2023, the next target is at least 25,000 active and regular monthly users. This will need additional tutors and funding to accommodate this increase in learner numbers. 

In 2024, OLICO aims to support 50,000 active monthly users by which time the total cost per learner will be less than $5 per learner per year. The hotline will be staffed by increasing numbers of tutors per shift with the appointment of managerial-role tutors. At the same time, we aim to offer the hotline support offering outside SA borders to neighbouring African countries.  

For 2025 -2027: The subsequent growth strategy will be based on the speed at which we meet the targets of the previous years. Assuming all goes well in the preceding years and the research supports a continuation of the intervention, the next steps will be either one or a combination of the following: 

1. further increasing the target number of active learners in South Africa to 100,000+; 
2. increasing the reach and expansion into neighbouring countries (difficult to put a number on this at this stage); 
3. expanding maths support to older SA learners as well and looking at the inclusion of additional subjects.

It's highly likely that with the right support, a number of these targets above can be achieved much quicker than this timeline. and this is where we believe we would really benefit from the support of the Solver community.

Ultimately, we aim to achieve improvements in maths performance as demonstrated in school and school-leaving results and using this success in maths to access quality post-school opportunities.

The messaging system connecting learners to tutors provides detailed analytics of activity on the hotline and OLICO’s hotline managers ensure on-going quality control and oversee safety considerations. We actively track:

• the number of learners by province, school, preferred tutoring language; 
• the frequency of usage by individual learners;
• the conversion rate from new learner to frequent learner;
• the number of new learners accessing the hotline; 
• the tutor response times;
• the number of daily conversations;
• the ratings of tutors by learners; 
• the performance of learners on embedded quizzes and their progression through key topic areas.

In addition, OLICO will also run a research project across a number of schools in SA. We will actively promote use of the Maths Hotline in these schools and progress will be tracked across frequency categories and compared to similar control groups. The research project will seek to answer: 

• What is the magnitude of the uptake and frequency of use of the service when widely encouraged at school level? and 
• Are there any shifts in school Mathematics attainment for learners who use the service regularly, compared to those who do not? The design of the research project will be similar to the research conducted on the Nokia Mobile Mathematics Service: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278678218_From_challenging_assumptions_to_measuring_effect_Researching_the_Nokia_Mobile_Mathematics_Service_in_South_Africa

The vast majority of learners from low-income communities carry extensive learning backlogs in maths. This is a well-known and uncontroversial starting point. In OLICO’s approach to backlogs, we adopt a ‘connect-to-accelerate’ approach that works concurrently on overcoming learner backlogs and enabling learners to access grade-level curriculum content.

We focus on developing core fluencies and identifying a pathway of ‘key concepts’ to address learner backlogs as they grapple with grade-level work. This approach is in contrast to a traditional ‘remediation’ approach that attempts to address backlogs by covering curricula on a grade-by-grade basis. The ‘connect-to-accelerate’ approach takes a grade-level topic area and tracks back to the prerequisite and foundational material required for that topic. This foundational material is then taught coherently connected to the grade level topic.

For example: in teaching scientific notation to Grade 9 learners we start by working on place value, multiplication and division by 10, estimates of multiplication and division by 10, approximating the size of decimal numbers, approximating the answers to decimal numbers multiplied by powers of 10 and then moving into work with scientific notation.

We draw on literature around foundations required for success in high school mathematics along with our experience working with learners from disadvantaged backgrounds.

We consider the following to be the key areas for work:

• Working with numbers and operations on numbers in a way that reinforces the structural aspect and generalization of properties that flow into work in algebra. (Dowker, 2009, Cai & Knuth, 2011; Cai, Lew, Morris, Moyer, Ng & Schmittau, 2005)
• Number knowledge and operations that learners need to have near instant recall of/be sufficiently fluent in order to reduce cognitive overload when engaging with high school mathematics.  (Ketterlin-Geller & Chard, 2011; Parcutilo & Luna, 2016, van Merrienboer, Kester, & Paas, 2006)
• A sense of the relative size of numbers which would include a firm understanding of place value as well as the ability to locate number on the number line. (Balley et al, 2014, Booth et al, 2014, Fuchs et al, 2013, Torbeyns et al, 2015)
• Work with rational numbers in various forms (Siegler et al, 2012, Booth et al, 2014, Torbeyns et al, 2015)
• Reading and interpreting diagrams and measurements within diagrams.
• Basic work with functions and algebra (Cai & Knuth, 2011; Cai, Lew, Morris, Moyer, Ng & Schmittau, 2005)

Based on the above, we are looking for learners to progress along a trajectory of understanding linked to the prerequisites for high school mathematics.

Where we are physically based at schools and community centres, we work with learners through a blended use of technology and in-person tutoring. We engage with learners after-school, two-to-three times a week and take learners along a clearly defined learning trajectory as (partially) outlined above. Our Maths Hotline aims to apply our learnings and successes of our in-person support to the remote-support environment. The personal connection and having the option to speak to a skilled human tutor is designed to encourage learners to return regularly, and to put in the consistent hours required to overcome learning backlogs and succeed in maths.

We use a combination of messaging platforms (such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger) and the Open-source Learning Management System, Moodle. 

OLICO Maths Education is a diverse team reflective of the demographics of South Africa. We are predominately female-led, our senior management team comprises of 1 male (the co-founder) and 5 female senior staff. 

In addition, OLICO reflects the racial diversity of South Africa with a mixture of Black-African, White-African, "Coloured"-African and Indian-African staff. We fully support and deliberately pursue a similar mission to MIT, to "advance a respectful and caring community that embraces diversity".

We are proud of the fact that the majority of our staff are from the low-income communities where we operate. We deliberately set out to recruit ex-beneficiaries into our programme once they graduate from school or university. Currently 2 out of our 5 mid-management staff are ex-beneficiaries and a number of our part-time tutoring staff are previous learners. Inclusivity is a core value of our organisation. 

See OLICO's Social Business Model Canvas below:

1. We believe the Maths Hotline presents a unique and innovative solution to a major challenge facing South Africa and so we are confident it will be an attractive Corporate Social Investment prospect for South African companies, at least in the short-term. The the longer term, we aim to clearly demonstrate the utility of this service so that it attracts government partnership and financial support. 

2. We also believe there is significant opportunity to use skilled volunteers from across South Africa and around the world to staff the Maths Hotline and reduce the need for tutor wages. In this regard, we expect to recruit a significant number of volunteers from both the general public and through employee volunteer initiatives. As per best practice on similar services (such as volunteer-staffed hotlines run by Lifeline, SADAG in SA), tutors commit to a minimum number of shifts per week for a minimum of period of time. The large-scale recruitment and management of volunteers is key to ensuring the maths hotline is built as an affordable and sustainable venture with high impact.

3. With increasing scale comes impressive cost-per learner calculations as economies of scale start to kick in. With our current target of 10 000 active learners per month, it already only costs +/- $1 per learner per month or $14 per learner per year.  Once the Maths Hotline reaches 50,000 active and regular learners, the effective cost per learner drops to less than $5 per learner per year. Given the impact of a readily available tutor in your pocket for learners to use to improve their maths, the cost-benefit calculations are immense. 

4. Lastly, it seems entirely feasible that learners from wealthier schools will also make use of this service in which case, a premium can be charged for these users. We would love to engage with any Solver teams with experience in monetising a service for particular sectors on how to make this a reality.

The maths hotline project has already received seed funding from a South African trust of $190,000 a year for the next 3 years and an additional once-off funding contribution of $80 000. There are active fundraising efforts to secure its on-going sustainability. 

OLICO itself has been existence for 15 years and has a strong track record of successful fund-raising. Our core programme staff are supported by long-term funding partnerships. We believe the Maths Hotline offers a strong proposition for new donor support going forward. 

To date, OLICO has received funding for some of our in-person work from provincial governments and we aim to seriously advocate for government funding in the long term. We also have some experience (albeit limited) of charging for our services which we also wish to explore for users who are not from low-income communities.