Motivar

Motivar is the easiest way to find, start and complete online courses

Across Africa today, not enough young people are accessing skills and know-how to compete and succeed in this century. Our current education system is inefficient. This single factor is responsible for the large skill/knowledge gap that exists between young people and today’s market/job opportunities. Leading to low levels of innovation and productivity, ballooning unemployment, and the large informal economy in the region that keeps young people in low income jobs.

Thankfully, digital education and online skill acquisition mechanisms can break this trend and democratize access. Yet its distribution is limited. Also worrisome is the high attrition rate among young people who do have access. An independent survey we ran showed that in four young people that enrolls for an online course, three would not complete it. 

This sad reality is due to socioeconomic reasons such as limited access to internet enabled devices, data challenges, problematic electricity, need to work, lost motivation etc. The impact of COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities and forced a tectonic shift of learning and opportunities online; this means that already disadvantaged young people will be further excluded.

We will offer learner support services and be the easiest way for users to find, start, and complete digital courses. This service will be distributed via software and community centers.

Digital Software - Motivar will deploy a web and app based software solution that uses AI and Big Data technology. Individual users will be able to register accounts, take a personality test, and select a skill/course they want to learn. In instances the user is unsure what skill to learn the platform will provide suggestions based on user personality and other data. The platform will be an aggregator and serve as a window to other online learning platforms. It will curate similar courses from affiliate e-learning platforms by quality and sort into two categories - Free Certified and Paid Certified courses.

Community Centers - Our community center will be physical infrastructure in poor locales with low distribution of internet enabled devices and low digital navigation skills amidst our target demographic. It will be equipped with computers and other digital learning aids. The centers will be managed by Motivar and funded in partnership with local community interests.

Our solution is based on a framework that leverages incentives, accountability and community. Core activities will include :

1. Provide cash or in kind rewards for learning new skills online

2.  Facilitate loans as financial aid for users to gain online certifications & degrees

3. Enable learner communities

Our target are young people between the ages of 12 - 40 who want to build skills and gain certification. Our core mission is to improve the efficiency and distribution of digital education for them especially for young people in rural areas or those born into low-income families, as well as street children, who lack access to internet-enabled devices, stable electricity, strong internet connectivity, or who face social barriers such as discrimination, poverty, or physical disabilities that limit their learning. They often are out of school or attend very terrible schools that lack required infrastructure and do not provide them the education they need to succeed. 

Digital Education is heralded as the way to democratize access to learning and open up education to the masses. In contrast, our traditional education  system is discriminatory (the quality of education you receive is tied directly to how much you pay). This excludes a lot of young people from quality education. These same people have a higher chance of being excluded from digital education. Digital exclusion is reinforced by other types of disadvantages related to parental or family support, mentoring, being part of a community, as well as socioeconomic status.

In Nigeria for example, access to digital skills is readily available for upper and middle-class households, but is difficult to access for the larger number of the population born into poor or rural families.

Our Innovation responds to the identified problems in the following ways:

1. Our Software will make it easier for users to find, start, and complete credible courses they need to upskill.

2. Learner support services like rewards and learner communities will help improve the learning experience for learners and bolster their commitment to complete the courses.

3. Financial aid in the form of loans that we would offer would help more learners bypass the challenge of cost to gain online certifications and degrees.

4. Our community centers would have electricity and internet enabled devices that run on our software. It will be open for young people to use. These centers would host our learner communities offline.

This work will help increase the completion and enrollment rates for online courses and maximize learning outcomes for learners. This will contribute to reducing the gap between available job/market opportunities and skill level of young people available to fill them. These outcomes are important to ensure educational equity, assure economic and social mobility, and reduce poverty.

As a young person I am very deeply bothered by inequities and see every day how dire the impact is in determining what my life trajectory is and what opportunities is available to me.

The divide that the lottery of birth creates is widened by systemic inequality. As undergraduates, we experienced this firsthand when public universities  spent 10 months on strike, school mates who had richer parents that could afford to pay for private education switched to private universities. They had the opportunity to continue their education while ours was on hold. 

This is small compared to the realities of millions of young people who do not have access organized skill and knowledge acquisition systems simply because they cannot afford it. It is heartbreaking to see the immense potential that these young people have underutilized because they don’t have access to the correct training.

We are currently a team of five young people and have been working together since 2021. Competencies on the team include, project and product management, strategy, marketing, and software development.

We did an online survey that had about 170 respondents to effectively understand the market and design our intervention. We piloted our learnings with the "One Naossite One Skill" program. It was co-organized by the National Association of Ondo State Students (NAOSS), the global umbrella body for Ondo State students. The project received support from the Ondo State Ministry of Youth and Sports Development and the Ondo State Entrepreneurship Agency (ONDEA). Motivar coordinated its execution.

We successfully executed three batches of training using our framework. Through us, 102 students enrolled in online courses. 44 of them across 8 skill tracks completed those courses and have begun to build their competencies within our community. This is a completion rate of approximately 43%, which is twice the average online course completion average from the survey we had run and 4 times the global MOOC completion rate.

We want to hold a similar pilot over the next year to validate our process as we build out our software product. Our team will implement a program that would guide 50 SS3 students from two public secondary schools in Ado-Ekiti to develop digital skills and competencies relevant to the future of work. We will use our framework to help them find, start, and complete online courses tied to their interests. This program will be implemented in two batches.

Our next goal is to launch our software solution within the next six months in private beta.

Motivation, accountability, and community are critical pillars for effective learning that naturally occur in live classrooms. This is eroding as learning becomes increasingly remote. The result is, less than maximal learning outcomes for learners, as seen in the high dropout rates from online courses.

Our solution will deploy a framework that leverages elements of these three pillars. The closest competitor to what we want to do is Classcentral.com, which aggregates courses from various e-learning platforms. The learner support services that we provide will differentiate us from them. Our singular goal is to amplify digital learning and maximize its effectiveness and reach. We are ensuring digital access to the last mile.

Secondly, other systems that build communities are paid services that are quite expensive. e.g., PluralSight. Our solution will be a much more affordable alternative.

Finally, other platforms that provide learner support services are usually industry-specific. Ingressive4Good and HNG internships, for example, are designed specifically for tech communities. We are a no-bounds platform that will offer support for all forms of online skill and knowledge acquisition; from short courses to degree programs.

Our offline community center is novel and will aid in the distribution of online courses and ensure more learners, especially in underserved populations, access digital education.

We are currently building our software product and intend to launch it in private beta within the next six months. In the next three years. We hope to have;

1. Completed the 4 stages of our pilot testing
2. Launched our software product for mobile and web.
3. Established our first fully operational community center.
4. Assisted 50,000 students to find, start, and complete online courses.

Our next activity is the second stage of our pilot -

Our team will implement a program that would guide 50 SS3/recently graduated students selected from two public secondary schools in Ado-Ekiti to develop digital skills and competencies relevant to the future of work by using our framework to help them find, start, and complete online courses tied to their interests. 

This program will be implemented in two batches. This will help us to develop learnings that we will deploy in our software solution

Motivar is a personalized learning solution that will optimize access to digital learning platforms, tools, and resources.

We will induce motivation by providing cash/tokens or in-kind rewards for completing online coursework; facilitate loans as financial aid for users to obtain online certifications and degrees. We will also induce accountability by actively enabling learner communities. 

Our solution would incorporate AI and machine learning models to create a personalized student learning pathway that ensures a fit between the student's current capabilities, learning, and professional goals and the offerings and structure of online education providers.

This profile would be created from the personality and interest-based tests taken by learners, as well as other relevant datasets. We would implement deep learning models to determine reward systems, adapting a similar system to Amazon's recommendation system.

In our first pilot, we successfully executed three batches of training using our framework. Through us, 102 students enrolled in online courses. 44 of them across 8 skill tracks completed those courses and have begun to build their competencies within our community. 

This is a completion rate of approximately 43%, which is twice the average online course completion average from the survey we had run and four times the global MOOC completion rate.

Our second iteration will target 50 students from public secondary schools between the ages of 15 and 20.

A. We require 5,500 dollars to fund the next stage of our pilot, product development, and operations for the next year.

B. We need to resolve business registration and incorporation.

C. We need to negotiate partnerships and agreements with
1. E-learning platforms e.g. Alison, Udemy etc.
2. Large enterprises and SMEs
3. Banks and financial Institutions
4. Government and local community interests

D. We need to hire or train our technology team to build specific competencies in data analysis and artificial intelligence.

We worked with the National Association of Ondo State Students, the Ondo State Enterprise Agency, and the Ministry of Youth and Sport Development to execute the first stage of our pilot.

We are currently receiving mentorship and support under Innovate UK KTN as one of the 10 innovations in the Ekiti Youth innovation showcase.

We will offer learner support services for young people between the ages of 12 and 40 who want to gain skills and certification. Our solution will lower the bar for them to find, start, and complete the digital courses they need to develop the required skills and gain certification.

This service will be distributed via digital software and community centers.

We will position ourselves to serve digital learning platforms; they would pay us to increase enrollment and completion rates on their platforms. 

Our solution is based on a framework that leverages incentives, accountability, and community. Core activities will include:

1. Provide cash or in kind rewards for learning new skills online

2.  Facilitate loans as financial aid for users to gain online certifications & degrees

3. Enable learner communities

4. Product development and database management

Learners would also be charged a subscription fee, which they could either pay monthly or pay once for lifetime access.

Our revenue model will iterate through the revenue streams highlighted below and determine the combination that allows us maximum efficiency.

1. E-learning platforms pay us a commission to drive their enrollment and completion rates. (Affiliate revenue)  

2. Donations and Grants

3. Monetize our data

4. Subscriptions

We will focus on long-term customer retention to cover customer acquisition costs. We will work to improve LTV (lifetime customer value) by supporting learners better and having them use our service longer by improving design and making features generally more beneficial. 

Longer engagement will boost monetization per user.