EDYou Learning Studio

Girls de-identify with STEM topics early, with gaps in confidence in math appearing as early as 3rd grade. This persists throughout their education, with only 28% of high school girls reporting plans to pursue STEM careers vs 65% of boys, and even lower rates of women selecting college majors in male-dominated STEM fields. Women make up a minority of many STEM majors including engineering (21%), physics (20%), computer science (19%), and mathematics (16%). These gaps exist despite similar performance on STEM topics during standardized exams.

Although women have caught up and surpassed men in some STEM fields, such as medicine, progress is uneven across disciplines. The fastest-growing STEM occupations that pay more than $100,000 annually are disproportionately male: physicists (82%), data scientists (82%), hardware engineers (90%), network architects (93%), actuaries (74%), and information security (75% male). Failure to attract women into a broad cross-section of STEM majors will lead to persistent shortages of qualified talent and continuing income inequality. Additionally, society will fail to benefit from the perspective women would bring to these fields, making the world more dangerous for women. For example, women are 73% more likely to be injured in a crash due to design that doesn’t account for physical differences. In the military, women suffer pelvic fractures much more than men because the equipment is not designed for female anatomy.

The lack of STEM representation is largely the product of an identity gap generated by social pressures, resulting in women facing a lifelong battle to maintain a positive STEM identity, particularly in male-dominated fields. These social pressures fall into three categories:

• Implicit biases, often perpetuated by parents and teachers, socialize girls to believe that STEM is not for them or may actively redirect them to non-STEM fields.
• Stereotyping of women in STEM fields driven by the limited and often unflattering portrayal of females in popular media prevents girls from finding STEM "heroes". The Big Bang Theory and Bones are two of many examples where women in STEM are portrayed as unattractive and unfashionable or the opposite stereotype of attractive but socially awkward, cold, and alone.
• STEM instruction and environments often cater to interests primarily marketed to males, such as cars and video games. This creates a “can’t win” situation in which women are marginalized by a lack of appealing options if they don’t share those interests and a lack of social peers if they do. For example, STEM summer camps tend to focus on robot wars and video game design with few options in STEM applications specifically targeted at women.

EDYou seeks to break down barriers to gender equity in STEM by specifically addressing the need for 1) reinforcement to build a positive identity for diverse STEM subjects, 2) access to STEM education leveraging a more inclusive set of instructional methods, 3) access to resources taught by or referencing professional STEM women, and 4) early exposure to a wider variety of STEM topics and real-world applications.

EDYou’s Learning Studio addresses the underlying causes of the “leaky pipeline” driving the underproduction of qualified female graduates in STEM fields. Building on the findings from Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem, the Learning Studio leverages technology to create a scalable learning experience that captures many of the benefits of one-on-one tutoring.

For learners, EDYou addresses:

• Poor fit of classroom learning with individual interests, goals, cultural context, and current level of mastery.
• Unequal access to learning opportunities based on lack of exposure to STEM fields, absence of relevant role models, inadequate environmental support for STEM pursuits, cost of non-school STEM learning, and local availability of qualified instructors.

For employers, EDYou creates an avenue to:

• Provide an environment for employees to pursue diverse upskilling opportunities.
• Broadcast needs to learners to create a pipeline of candidates, including challenges and skill assessments for potential employees to prove competencies and problem-solving capabilities. 

EDYou’s key innovations are its indexing model, the supporting database architecture, and the crowdsourcing software. The indexing model separates the sourcing of educational content from the organization of content for learning by mapping digital educational resources to their underlying concepts and then organizing concepts into learning experiences by relating them to each other. EDYou ensures high-quality curation by using a tiered moderator system in which higher-tier (more carefully vetted) moderators police indexing by lower-tier moderators.  This index is connected to a user application that facilitates content navigation and leverages user characteristics and performance data to recommend the indexed resources that best fit the user’s learning preferences for each concept.

Together these components take advantage of the proliferation of high-quality, up-to-date educational content in communities such as YouTube, copyright infringement protections for platforms, and cheap cloud computing resources to provide customized learning that evolves with industry innovation and the needs of the user. Like one-on-one tutoring, EDYou eliminates structured curricula with fixed content coverage and pacing, instead continually optimizing the content presented to the learner. As students traverse the concept network, they’ll naturally build context, see real-world applications, and exceed standards in favored topics, leading to deeper learning with better retention and providing organic exposure to advanced disciplines earlier in the education process.

Equitable sourcing of moderators and content contributors from both genders will help women see themselves in a broader array of STEM careers by providing role models and relatable content options. K-12 students will gain early exposure to diverse STEM career options, which is crucial to the development of STEM interests. Future features will include social supports such as communities that members may subscribe to for opportunities to participate in competitions and events, chat with other members on forum boards, and foster engagement with additional resources (such as book discussions), with notices for these communities aggregated in an easily viewable “enthusiast’s feed”. These social features will allow women with similar interests to interact and begin to acquire needed support networks and mentorship opportunities.

EDYou is a lifelong learning tool designed to eventually serve the needs of diverse learners across a wide range of subjects. However, our emphasis on customized learning experiences allows us to foster the development of targeted learning experiences that can be tailored to meet the needs of specific populations. For the SOLVE challenge, EDYou would focus on creating software and building community partnerships to host learning experiences for Grade 6 through undergraduate STEM subjects for women.

The expectation is that the learning preferences of women will be diverse. Some will prefer to learn from video creators who look like them. Some will prefer to learn from videos from any creator, but leveraging a thematic interest not traditionally used to teach STEM subjects (such as graphic design). Some will prefer to learn from educators, some from professionals, and some from content creators. EDYou will seek to capture all this variation by encouraging moderators to develop diverse experiences. Where an individual’s preferences cannot be identified in advance, our algorithm will learn from their engagement and performance to identify preferences and optimize content recommendations accordingly. EDYou’s data-centric approach will allow us to also provide actionable feedback to moderators to identify opportunities to improve the experience for the target audience.  The rich data set created by learner participation in the Learning Studio will also provide valuable insights to further build the body of knowledge around effective pedagogy to encourage gender equity.

By creating learning experiences and customizing additional recommendations to meet the needs of aspiring STEM women, EDYou hopes to engender a greater sense of belonging and attainment. One of the key aspects of the “leaky pipeline” is that it only takes one hostile learning environment to create an insurmountable gap in prerequisite knowledge, causing women to drop STEM pursuits. EDYou can prevent attrition during these encounters by providing a supplementary space for them to enjoyably continue learning the required material. Furthermore, because EDYou’s learning experiences are interoperable, women will be able to continue progressing to the limits of their curiosity, giving them exposure to advanced STEM competencies much earlier in the educational cycle. Early exposure will lead more women to develop STEM career aspirations, leading to increased female enrollment and degree attainment in STEM majors.

EDYou’s mission-driven co-founders are uniquely suited to tackle this problem, with a long-standing and demonstrated commitment to social justice and equity.

The team lead, Gita Vatave, is a female technology executive and former educator. She has deep experience in developing strategic partnerships to bring robust, cost-effective product solutions to market. In addition, she has experience in designing engaging, user-friendly technical solutions, with particular experience reaching marginalized populations such as older adults (who may lack technology infrastructure and experience) and low-income minority populations.

As an educator, Gita taught both science and English, including classes for English language learners. She has a long-standing interest in education stemming from her role as a researcher on the landmark Beginning School Study that looked at gender differences in math and science achievement. As a health professional, she worked on health education campaigns for migrant workers, strategies for evaluating and disseminating best practices for reducing minority male violence and reducing social barriers to effective preventative care and health promotion.

As the daughter of immigrants and a woman working in largely male-dominated fields, Gita has first-hand experience with the inherent biases built into formal and informal educational processes and the importance of cultural sensitivity. She can personally vouch for the importance of female role models and support networks in the professional world, which she has sought to “pay forward” through active mentoring of female employees and participation in women’s professional networks such as Yale Women. On a small scale, Gita has sought to counteract the social cues that steer women away from STEM learning in her roles as a mother, a Girl Scout Leader, and a Science Olympiad coach.

EDYou has been actively engaging diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to develop our theory of change and source an initial pool of moderators to ensure female perspectives and female content creators are fully represented as we build the recommendation engine. To begin building a robust and representative advisory network, EDYou participated in the Yale Innovation Summit, including individual meetings with amplifyHERscience, the Equalize program, and Princeton’s Entrepreneurship Council. Partnering with innovative organizations committed to equity and inclusion, such as MIT Solve and the community of Solvers, will help EDYou ensure we meet the goal of including diverse viewpoints and teaching methods.

We built a functional prototype testing the viability of delivering a navigable learning experience using concept networks to guide concept progression. The prototype consisted of a web application with a user interface for each of our three learning modalities, a series of moderator forms for adding concepts and YouTube videos to the index, and a working index populated with a concept map and resources for Grade 6-8 science. Testing with the prototype established that navigating the concept map was viable and that crowdsourcing content into the index using forms was workable but will need additional mechanisms to mitigate incorrect or imprecise indexing for commercial use. User testing with the prototype also exposed a need to migrate to a new architecture to improve the scalability of the product. On advice from potential investors, a provisional patent was filed for this new design in April 2023.

We have had several meetings with key stakeholders and potential pilot partners using the prototype as a demo illustrating the viability of our contemplated full build and reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, with one former executive of a technology company expressing willingness to facilitate a pitch meeting to the sales and HR department of the company as a professional development solution. Meetings with local education leaders were similarly positive, but they doubted their ability to be first adopters following poor experiences with digital learning solutions during Covid-19. Despite this barrier to entry, we believe early penetration into the K-12 market is critical to achieving our mission of affordable personalized lifelong learning.

Please visit this link to create a free account for access to the prototype: https://edyou.org/log-in

The next phase of EDYou development involves testing the content moderation systems and enhancing the design to ensure scalability. MIT Solve will help us access a network of content creators, innovators, and educators to pressure test the design and functionality of the product. The global challenge of improving learning requires partners committed to the same ideals to support the rapid scaling up of content in a cost-effective manner and drive adoption of the new learning model.

Partnering with MIT, the community of Solvers, and Tiger Global Impact Ventures will help EDYou overcome three key barriers to commercialization:

• Form partnerships with educational stakeholders. EDYou is all about leveraging the proliferation of freely available educational resources developed by content creation communities and other educational stakeholders. However, our crowdsourcing model relies on a community of experts who can add structure to these resources and their underlying concepts to ensure users receive high-quality, logically organized learning experiences. Tiger Global and MIT Solve’s network of industry partners and the community of Challenge finalists are optimal mission-driven partners which could serve as an initial moderator community to generate experiences to address gender equity in STEM.
• Gain entry into the K-12 market. As a small, early-stage startup it will be challenging to enter educational institutions which are resistant to change and heavily influenced by large publishing companies, but we view early access to the foundational phases of education as critical to our mission to promote equity in education and lifelong learning. The backing and connections of a highly credible venture fund and world-renowned educational institution will help us get meetings to begin what is likely to be a slow sales cycle.
• Talent acquisition. As first-time founders, identifying and hiring top talent will be a critical priority. The networking opportunities associated with being in an innovative community will help us identify talent with the right skills and cultural fit. Collaboration with the MIT Solver community may provide connection points into MIT’s leading research centers in advanced information technology fields, such as knowledge graphs and neural networks, and the educational research community, allowing us to build a strong network to work with as we sophisticate our technology and refine optimization processes for user learning attainment.

The key stakeholders for our project are women, particularly those with an interest in STEM, and educators. Our team leader, Gita Vatave, is a woman who earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in STEM fields. Her professional career has been predominantly in the STEM arena, though she has also worked as a middle and high school educator in the public school system. Most recently serving as President of a technology company, Gita is active in forums supporting the advancement of women in STEM fields such as Women in Technology and Yale Women.

The EDYou Learning Studio is an innovative approach to developing a continuous learning experience. EDYou rejects the notion of structured curriculums designed for the "average" learner. Instead, EDYou emphasizes concept-based learning and uses a novel indexing method to offer logical "next concept" choices to the learner. EDYou's patent-pending indexing method combines data about the learner, the educator/content creator, and the learner’s demonstrated mastery to continually optimize the learning experience for each user as they move from concept to concept. This enables learners to go at their own pace, to learn about each concept from multiple educators and in multiple languages, and to explore any concept to the limit of their curiosity rather than the limit of the curriculum. The learners themselves determine how deeply they want to study a concept, when they want to move to the next concept, how many methods or approaches to the topic they'd like to learn, whether they'd like to see how the concept applies in the real world, and which related concept they'd like to move to next. This approach also allows the development of learning experiences for niche topics not usually covered by curricular solutions due to the need for broad applicability.

Innovations in database technologies and the rise of the creator economy are key enablers of EDYou's solution. By decoupling learning from pre-defined "courses" and local educational resource constraints, EDYou enables top educators in every subject to contribute content to enable individual learning. EDYou's Learning Studio takes care of the logical ordering of concepts so that learners progress efficiently through concepts toward their own end goal, preserving learner agency even when navigating moderator-created experiences.

Since EDYou creates a market that matches content with learner needs, it is effectively a collaborative approach to education, including the potential for collaboration with others seeking to advance gender equity in STEM. EDYou has the potential to fundamentally change the educational model with obvious first applications being:

1. Changing the way people demonstrate their qualification for a role, relying on demonstrated concept mastery to qualify them instead of a degree, standardized test score, or grades.

2. Changing the way schools function, with lecture and reading tasks completed online and class time reserved for interactive or experiential learning activities. One can easily envision a computer lab where each student is pursuing their own learning goals and coming together to problem-solve or debate in small groups.

3. Providing a framework within which existing curriculum content could be redeployed to facilitate individually customized learning.

Impact goals - next year

• Partner with at least 3 organizations to create bespoke learning pathways for their students or target population, improving women's access to STEM learning for targeted issues.
• Expand crowdsourced video collection to 25,000 videos through collaboration with moderators
• Grow subscriber base to 1,000 paid users.

Impact goals - 5 years

• Expand moderator community to include at least 1,000 global contributors, including equal representation of female content creators
• Grow subscriber base to 500,000 users
• Deliver at least 500,000 hours of STEM education to women
• Contribute to the educational community by developing a rich dataset that can be used to help optimize pedagogy to support equity in education.

• Diversity of content creators delivering education on the platform
• Diversity of learner community
• Participation in content collections by gender, race, ethnicity
• Student performance on testing resources and challenge problems within the platform
• Content hours and number of concepts progressed per learner per week

Root Causes:

 A single bad experience in K-Undergraduate can lead to an insurmountable requirement gap for continuing STEM pursuits.
 STEM instructional materials disproportionately use examples from traditionally masculine interests.
 Implicit biases perpetuated by parents and teachers reduce girls’ confidence in their STEM abilities and contribute to long-term de-identification with STEM topics.
 Unflattering portrayals of STEM women in popular media and the glass ceiling prevent girls from finding STEM role models.

Input activities:

 Personalized Learning Studio with a continuous learning framework and clear progress metrics.
 Engagement with key stakeholders including universities, professional networks, companies, and content creators to form an initial moderator community willing to curate content and learning experiences for girls in STEM.
 Collect data on user engagement, learning attainment, user learning preferences, educational resources and their content creators, and more to analyze how to more effectively engage girls in STEM topics.

Output Activities:

 A diverse set of STEM learning experiences leveraging an inclusive set of interests, created by a global community of stakeholders, and covering a wider range of STEM topics, including traditionally male-dominated fields.
 A platform for professionals, educators, academics, and content creators who are women to contribute and serve as role models for girls learning STEM concepts.
 A safe learning environment that can meet individuals at their current learning ability and provide pathways to remediation or exceeding requirements in STEM topics.

Short-Term Outcomes:

 Increased STEM attainment by young women in all areas of STEM.
 Content creators are rewarded for high-quality educational content through exposure to a larger audience.
 Some girls should greatly exceed the STEM requirements in formal education, especially in areas of interest.
 Stakeholders are empowered to create targeted learning experiences for STEM-aspiring women, receive data on the efficacy of these experiences, and actionably iterate on them.

Long-Term Outcomes:

 Creation of robust communities for women to meet and interact with social peers who share their STEM interests.
 STEM women who benefit from the resources and experiences can “pay forward” by creating resources and learning experiences on their expertise and STEM journey.

 An increase in the % of women pursuing STEM degrees and careers, especially in traditionally male-dominated fields.

 Democratization of solution development addressing the variety of challenges facing women aspiring to learn in STEM fields.

Impact:

 Increased representation of women in commercial environments and in product design teams, resulting in a safer and more equitable world for women.
 More equitable distribution of men and women in all STEM fields.

EDYou’s core technology is a novel patent-pending indexing system that leverages new-age databases to connect freely available educational resources into navigable learning experiences. To facilitate effective delivery of these indexed resources, EDYou combines crowdsourcing software leveraging copyright infringement protections designed for social networks, an innovative tiered moderator system inspired by community websites such as Reddit, user and moderator web applications (with future plans for mobile applications), and cheap cloud computing resources. 

Data science is a core element of our approach. We collect data from all elements of the educational delivery pipeline including the educational resources, the creators of the educational resources, the user’s demographics, user performance on testing resources individually and in the aggregate, user engagement with content, and user choices within the learning studio. This data is analyzed to determine the quality of crowdsourced indexing and optimize content recommendations for each user. Currently, this individual-level optimization is algorithmic, but we are collecting data to create robust training and testing datasets to eventually address this optimization using machine learning and AI.

The company currently consists of two founders. The CEO (the technical founder) is currently working on EDYou full-time. The team lead, Gita Vatave, has been working part-time up to this point, but will be transitioning to a full-time role in July. She leads customer experience, business development community engagement, and revenue generation.

EDYou’s founders have been working on the solution for 10 months. Following an initial design phase, we met with key stakeholders to refine the idea and revise the product specifications. The web application and seeding of content required approximately 5 months of build time, including several iterations. The resulting prototype was presented to stakeholders in the academic, technology, education, parent, and learner communities for initial testing and feedback. Early positive feedback led us to consult an IP attorney and file for an initial patent. With IP protection in place, we are beginning the first stages of commercialization.

EDYou is all about individual fit. Our slogan is “Education Your Way.” EDYou’s founders share a deep commitment to diversity and inclusion, partially due to our own multicultural backgrounds and experiences, but also because we’ve both had the benefit of enjoying diverse personal networks and the richness of experience they afford. Furthermore, our team leader is intimately familiar with exclusionary biases as she belongs to one of the most discriminated against groups in the tech sector - a minority female over the age of 50. EDYou was founded to provide educational fit for diverse individuals and democratize the educational delivery pipeline. The unique crowdsourcing approach to educational content is designed to source content globally and expose learners to multiple perspectives, teaching methods, and educators.

Compared to single-teacher classrooms, bringing talented and diverse content creators into students’ homes via the EDYou Learning Studio provides far greater opportunity for students to find role models in areas of personal interest, especially professionals and content creators from outside academia and from marginalized demographics. 

At EDYou we define equity in learning as providing each learner with equitable access to educational opportunities to pursue their personal interests and goals. We do not see equity as providing each learner with exactly the same content. Some of the institutional barriers to equitable learning opportunities addressed by EDYou include:

• Erasing geographic limitations. For example, many K-12 students, especially those from rural and minority communities, attend schools where civics education, geography, computer science, AP physics, or other subjects are not taught, cutting off early access to learning in a way that limits career choices and puts them at a long-lasting disadvantage vs. peers from other schools.
• Parental support for education is limited by a lack of culturally relevant references and linguistic support. In the United States, parents who do not speak English are often unable to meaningfully participate in their children’s learning experiences because of linguistic barriers, a limitation that can easily be removed within EDYou by sourcing videos from a variety of languages and indexing them to the same concepts. This will allow parents to understand and discuss concepts with their children.
• Pacing and bundling built into formal curricula leave many students with unmet needs. Students who need subject remediation or slower pacing have few opportunities to review and repeat in traditional learning models as they are forced into predetermined pacing and concept sequencing to meet graduation requirements. In contrast, excelling students who have mastered subject matter are forced to learn at the classroom pace instead of their individual pace, resulting in wasted educational hours. EDYou removes these barriers by shifting control of progression to the learner.
• Social barriers to learning. Biases and social pressures can create unequal learning environments, even for students in the same classroom. Though EDYou will eventually provide collaborative learning experiences, the option of individual learning without schoolyard social pressures frees learners to explore topics of interest without fear of judgment or labels.

EDYou’s business model is evolving as we move into the commercialization phase. Originally envisioned as a direct B2C model, exploratory conversations led us to explore B2B opportunities to ensure the Learning Studio is accessible to high-need populations such as economically disadvantaged learners, refugees, and students without access to technology. We're launching a B2C subscription model in July 2023 because user experience data will be a key input to the product's next iteration. However, we are simultaneously exploring long-term B2B distribution channels.

EDYou will offer an affordable subscription-based service with annual and monthly pricing.  Our Go-To-Market strategy will capitalize on the limited options for sourcing quality STEM instructors in high-demand topics and disadvantaged geographies. Although we envision EDYou as a lifelong learning solution, our initial target market will be K-12 students and the institutions that serve them since the mandate for learning is clear and demonstrated achievement is an important qualifier for the student’s next step in life.

EDYou will provide important support for schools, teachers, and students:

• Schools face many challenges serving the needs of increasingly diverse student populations. Limited budgets create barriers to the type of differentiated instruction that leads to improved learning and long-term employment outcomes. Difficulty recruiting qualified teachers in advanced disciplines, such as material science and computer science, limits the range of learning options presented to students. EDYou's broad content base can let students learn these subjects using resources that reflect personal interests and circumstances.
• EDYou supports teachers by establishing a continuous record of learning, enabling innovative teaching models such as flipped classrooms and small group sessions, and providing tools to support remediation or acceleration for many students at the same time. Additionally, our focus on data allows us to generate clear progress measurements and identify areas in which students may be struggling or excelling.
• Students will have the opportunity to learn more organically, exploring topics through lenses they personally connect with (e.g. the science of skateboarding, how plate tectonics shaped the African continent, etc.) and learning through a preferred medium - high-quality, focused videos.

By leveraging technology, EDYou is able to create a unique ecosystem where educators/content creators contribute to an ever-growing body of knowledge that lets each person learn anything for less than a textbook. For schools, teachers, parents, and students, EDYou’s Learning Studio is inherently more affordable than a collection of point solutions and reduces transitional hurdles since our learning experiences are fully inoperable.

Once the user base and moderation community reaches a critical mass, many secondary revenue streams are available. 

The EDYou ecosystem will create an ideal marketplace for an affiliate revenue model. A loyal base of subscribers could purchase additional tutoring, specialized training, and other services from education-based affiliates. Partnership opportunities are naturally created, including with other Solver solutions, either as moderators or as distribution for their content. Partner content can be incorporated as a “buy up” or in a premium tier. Non-technical partner solutions can be linked to individual concepts giving offline content creators access to a targeted audience.

The prototype and initial business planning stages were completed by the founders, who have all the needed skills to launch and manage a technology company. We are actively seeking non-dilutive grant funding from MIT Solve, the National Science Foundation (SBIR, I-TEST, and DRK), the Department of Defense, and others who share our core belief that a diverse and well-educated population is required to drive global innovation and economic opportunities. Grant funding will be used to hire a more robust product team including additional technical experts with deep skills in machine learning, data science, and UI/UX. Our goal is to remain focused entirely on optimizing the technology for learning communities as we complete the next iteration of the product, without the added pressure of rapid growth and financial returns that venture capital funding will bring. 

Our financial projections indicate that we can become profitable at a fairly low subscriber threshold due to the cost advantages of crowdsourcing content, enabling us to keep costs low for the consumer while generating enough margin to reinvest in scaling the technology and improving the user experience. Once accomplished, we would then have the option to pursue venture capital funding to hyperscale.

EDYou is in the early stages of commercialization but early indicators are positive.

• EDYou was selected as a presenter at the Yale Innovation Summit, which will allow us to present to a community of investors and innovators.
• Submission of an initial white paper to the Depart of Defense Office of Naval Research led to an interview and invitation to submit a full application for $250,000 in non-dilutive funding.
• Submission of an initial proposal to NSF SBIR Phase I led to an invitation to submit a full proposal for $270,000 in non-dilutive funding.
• Key stakeholders have responded positively to the prototype and offered introductions to potential partners for pilots, including the National Association of Science Educators, the University of West Virginia, and a leading Cybersecurity company.