EDYou Learning Studio

Civics education is critical to building an active, well-informed population that feels empowered to participate and effect societal change. When people feel powerless, they actively disengage from civic processes. To create a democratically engaged citizenry, civic education must be purposeful and build individual capacity to answer three key questions. 

• What are the systems that govern policy, how do they work, and how do they affect me? 

• What practical levers of change and opportunities to participate exist for me to drive impact? 

• Where can I find timely information needed to reach an informed opinion on current policy issues?

 An inability to answer any of the three questions leads to disengagement, and existing educational efforts for all three are inadequate because they are disconnected, impersonal, and inequitably distributed.

Civic education in formal education has primarily focused on the first capacity area, instruction on systems of governance, current political actors, and historical political events. However, recent educational focus on reading, math, and science skills has sidelined education on other topics, including civics. States typically provide only one semester of civics education in K-12 education, with only two states providing a full year of civics and thirteen states proscribing no civics education at all. This underinvestment has led to crucial knowledge gaps, with only 24% of American eighth graders achieving a “proficient” rating in US history on the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam. Educational opportunities for the other two capacity areas are even less available, often being locked behind expensive, time-consuming degree programs. Alternatives such as news outlets or internet search, while valuable, leave people vulnerable to misinformation due to a lack of diverse perspectives and curation, respectively.

Digging deeper on these knowledge gaps reveals striking differences in proficiency based on age, gender, race and ethnicity, demonstrating that information inequality is endemic in civic education. A 2018 Institute for Citizens & Scholars study found that 74% of respondents aged 65 and older could answer at least 6 of 10 citizenship questions correctly, but that number fell to 19% for respondents under the age of 45. A 2020 study by MIT’s Sloan School of Management found large variances in voters' knowledge of political news based on age, race and gender. Older white male voters were the most likely demographic to be aware of a given news story, while young minority females were the least likely. The political implications are significant as policies are likely to cater to the well-informed in an effort to garner votes. Erosion of political and civic knowledge among young people is likely to have a lasting negative impact on democracy. Younger people and minorities are already underrepresented on the voting rolls, creating a vicious cycle of distrust in government institutions and processes that don’t seem responsive to their concerns. Solutions are required that can scale rapidly and support ongoing civics capacity building for a wide range of ages, including the flexibility to support local customization.

EDYou’s Learning Studio will build capacity for civic action by providing a means to distribute and access information needed to understand and take a position on political issues at any level of governance. EDYou democratizes education by synthesizing and organizing a wide variety of educational content and using data to identify the next best learning options for each individual, presenting them with relevant choices to advance their personal learning experience. Five core components of the platform address information inequality and provide the continuous learning community required for active participation in democracy:

1. EDYou removes the rigid curricular structure of other formal learning mechanisms. Learners focus on concept-based learning with organic sequencing driven by learner choices. This allows learners to access the information they need without having to take entire courses or repeat mastered concepts. EDYou creates a continuous learning record, so individuals can quickly review previously mastered concepts as needed and can pursue topics of interest to the full limit of their curiosity.

2. EDYou provides multidimensional learning opportunities on each concept.  Learners can access quality crowdsourced educational content from around the world, allowing them to explore concepts from multiple viewpoints and in multiple languages, for those who need language support. This helps ensure that individuals can find inclusive resources that resonate with them.

3. EDYou’s unique architecture not only brings the best educators to learners regardless of their location but also provides support for hyper-local instruction and learning. Historical topics can be explored through local events at any level for which video content can be sourced by moderators from the local community, including local libraries, museums, and institutes of higher learning. Our tiered moderator system and content reporting mechanisms ensure that indexed resources and created learning experiences are high-quality, secular, and factual.

4. EDYou’s content is kept current at the same pace as new knowledge is created. Today’s most pressing issues can rapidly be incorporated into the concept network and mapped to relevant historical events, optimizing the opportunity for learners to find meaning and a call to action in their civics learning experience. Furthermore, informed voting increasingly relies on access to information about cutting-edge topics and policies, such as blockchain and privacy. EDYou can connect information about these topics to current events, political platforms, and proposed laws, helping students reach informed opinions on related policy discourse.

5. EDYou is inherently interoperable with many other solutions, providing a cost-effective way to distribute and measure the impact of content created by high-quality educators. As a nation, Americans place a high value on choice and individualism, yet this is stripped almost entirely from the current education model. Curricula, topical coverage, and instructors are determined almost entirely by the educational source and all learners in the same location or program generally receive the same content regardless of their individual interests or needs.  EDYou provides alternatives to ensure that the lack of qualified local instructors, or a poor fit with existing instructors and learning models, doesn't interfere with student access to appropriate learning opportunities.

EDYou is a lifelong learning platform intended to serve anyone trying to participate in civic processes or increase their knowledge of civic systems and issues. Our flexible framework can be adapted to develop civic learning experiences meeting any education need, so long as content creators in communities such as YouTube have created relevant educational content and moderators have organized the concepts into learning experiences. We would first focus on K-12 civic education, which forms the base for further understanding, and then expand our content offerings to capture the wider variety of advanced civic knowledge and related skills. 

The crowdsourced framework allows EDYou’s content library to keep pace with technological innovation, global climate change, demographic shifts and more, which have created a wave of new problems and legislative requirements. Innovators, investigative journalists, academics and thought leaders are producing high-quality content to educate the public on these changes and potential solutions or impacts, but there is no effective means of ensuring that this information is provided equally to all members of the population or to provide any supplemental information or scaffolding that members of the public may need to digest and apply the information. Citizens are asked to vote on new legislation related to blockchain technologies, alternative energy infrastructure, genetic therapies and other complex topics without an efficient means of understanding the bigger picture, historical context or alternative solutions. EDYou creates a marketplace where quality content is sourced at the concept level and optimized for the individual learner. An innovative, patent-pending indexing methodology allows EDYou to combine multiple data sets to create logical sequences of concepts for the individual and provide a range of learning options on each concept, preserving learner choice and agency over the speed and depth of learning. In this way, EDYou serves the needs of both educators and learners of all ages, advancing opportunities for education to incentivize and prepare communities for civic action.

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.

Gita Vatave is a 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 and user-friendly technical solutions, with particular experience reaching marginalized populations such 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 of the inherent biases in built into formal and informal education processes and the importance of cultural sensitivity.

Rees Horton has a law degree from Duke School of Law and bachelors degrees in mathematics and economics from the University of Georgia. His professional expertise is in data architecture design for complex data systems for a variety of organizations. Having once pursued aspirations of running for elected office, he has extensive experience in government organizations including stints in Congress, with the Foreign Service Institute, and in local government with the City of Durham. Rees’s circuitous path is a reflection of his struggles with finding purpose within his own education. EDYou is his effort to help others driven people who don’t quite fit the mold maximize their unique potential by charting their own path to mastering the topics that interest them most. 

EDYou has filed a patent application for our unique architecture and proprietary indexing methodology. We have a functional prototype of the product that we have refined through market-testing with potential buyers and end users. EDYou is currently reaching out to partners to pilot test the solution in real world settings and will also be releasing a Beta version directly to end users so we can gather data about user behavior to help inform the next iteration of the product.

EDYou's tremendous potential relies upon crowdsourcing content through partnerships with educators and other key stakeholders such as universities, local governments and employers who will create and moderate content collections to guide learners to specific outcomes. For example:

• An expert on plastic pollution may curate a concept collection that helps learners understand the history and genesis of the problem from the viewpoint of multiple stakeholders, identify regulators and policy enforcement mechanisms for pollution, connect this learning to related concepts (e.g. ocean currents, geography, material science), and explore innovations and potential solutions to the problem.

• A political activist may curate a collection on how to effectively organize activist events and how best to engage with local communities to foster effective local action. They may also include concepts on how to run grassroots campaigns, engage with local political groups, and navigate local government systems such as town halls. 

• An elected official may curate a collection on political campaigns, the roles within them, and the important rules such as campaign finance laws and party affiliation rules.

The next phase of EDYou development involves the testing of the content moderation approach 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 to drive the adoption of the new learning model.

Collaboration with MIT Solve will not only benefit the development of the product but will also help EDYou overcome barriers to entry in the education market. Affiliation with educational leaders such as MIT  will provide important credibility in support of our initial launch of a direct-to-consumer model and B2B partnerships with learning communities. In addition to supporting revenue generation activities, close alignment with social enterprises such as the Solve program will facilitate relationship building with the content creators who will be so critical to the initial scaling up of the content library.

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, data about the educator/content creator, and data about demonstrated mastery and learning history 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 limits 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.

Innovations in database technology 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 towards their own end goal, preserving learner agency even when navigating within 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 in this space. 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 learners’ knowledge base to support engagement in civic action around targeted issues.

• Expand crowdsourced video collection to 25,000 videos through collaboration with moderators

• Grow subscriber base to 1000 paid users.

Impact goals - 5 years

• Expand moderator community to include at least 1000 global contributors

• Grow subscriber base to 500,000 users

• Deliver at least 500,000 hours of education related to civic action.

• Diversity of content creators delivering education on the platform
• Content hours per learner per week
• Student performance within the platform
• Participation in content collections by gender, race, ethnicity
• Diversity of learner community

ROOT CAUSES

• Inadequate scope and commitment to civics education in K-12 education, especially practical applications of civics concepts.

• Lack of curated, affordable educational materials on civic issues after K-12 education and on topics beyond the scope of K-12 education.

• Existing education programs are generic and outdated, leading to materials not connecting with the learner’s personal environment and beliefs. This impersonal educational approach creates a separation between civic knowledge attainment and actionable opportunities for individuals to effect change in society. 

INPUT/ACTIVITIES

• Personalized Learning Studio with a patent-pending architecture that allows data-driven and fully personalized learning pathways that adapt to learner behavior and demonstration of mastery in real time.

• Engagement with key stakeholders, including local governments, political action groups, universities, and content creators, to form an initial moderator community willing to curate content and create learning experiences for civic education. 

• Collect data on user engagement and performance with civic educational content, education resource characteristics, and content creator info to analyze means for improving civic education pedagogy.

OUTPUT

• A diverse set of learning experiences for core civic education topics including U.S. federal, state, and local government systems, how to vote, lobbying, rulemaking, introductory law, and subject matter relating to key policy areas such as public health, immigration, and civil rights policy.

• A distribution mechanism for civic education content creators to deploy their lessons to a larger community of learners.

• Functional EDYou Learning Studio provides a safe environment for answering key questions that enable learners to become informed participants in democratic processes and perpetuate learning within their communities.

• Improved recommendation and optimization systems to identify “best-fit” educational content for each individual user.

SHORT TERM OUTCOMES

• Previously marginalized citizens feel more confident in their understanding of policy alternatives and their ability to effect desired change

• Civic literacy is improved across all demographic categories

• Content creators are rewarded for production of high quality educational content via increased audience

• Some users (those who excel in civic learning or are particularly interested in civic participation) should achieve significantly greater breadth and depth of civic concept coverage, as compared to the topical scope of existing formal civic education. 

LONG TERM OUTCOMES

• New approach to education - self-directed learning with customization of content and education sources to ensure alignment with characteristics of the learner.

• Create a new educational market where content creators, academics and industry can collaborate to create new learning pathways that guide students into growing fields of employment, foster more informed discourse on important policy issues, and deploy timely information on current events and their historical context.

• Creation of broad data sets to further analyze and refine algorithms for matching effective content to individual learners and for training of AI and machine learning tools for content optimization.

IMPACT

• Increased depth and breadth of civic education concept coverage in K-12 education settings.

• Increased performance on civic education benchmark tests.

• Increased confidence in ability to participate in political discourse and effect change, particularly within historically marginalized demographics.

• Broader representation of marginalized perspectives on civic education issues.

EDYou’s core technology is a novel patent-pending indexing system which 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.

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 has its origins in the need for educational fit for diverse individuals and the democratization of the educational delivery pipeline. The unique crowdsourcing approach to educational content is specifically designed to source content globally, expose learners to multiple perspectives and teaching methods, and expose learners to a wide variety of 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 own interests and reach their personal 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:

1. 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.

2. Parental support for education is limited by lack of culturally relevant references and linguistic support. In the United States, parents who do not speak English are often unable to participate in their children’s learning experiences in a meaningful way 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.

3. 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.

In the first phase, EDYou will be a subscription-based B2B service with annual and monthly pricing. Our Go-To-Market strategy will capitalize on the limited content options for civic education and learning, including the absence of effective distribution methods for community-based civic learning programs. 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:

1. Schools face many challenges serving the needs of increasingly more diverse student populations. Limited budgets create significant barriers to the type of differentiated instruction that leads to improved learning. Difficulty recruiting qualified teachers in newer disciplines, such as civics and computer science, limits the range of learning options presented to students. EDYou’s Learning Studio will provide a cost-effective means of creating value for students in terms of content variety and quality. Furthermore, the broad content base can allow students to learn materials in ways that reflect personal interests and circumstances.

2. Teachers are on the front-lines of differentiated instruction, challenged with meeting the individual needs of 30 or more students per class, keeping them engaged in the learning experience and measuring student mastery of a large number of concepts mandated by the state. EDYou supports teachers by establishing a continuous record of learning, enabling innovative teaching models such as flipped classroom 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 exceling.

3. 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 evergrowing body of knowledge that lets each person learn whatever they want for the price of a single textbook. For schools, teachers, parents and students, EDYou’s Learning Studio is inherently more affordable than a collection of point solutions and creates a more cohesive learning experience due to our unique indexing approach which makes concept maps interoperable with each other.

Early adoption by community influencers or education systems will help fuel our eventual expansion to a B2C model. Once the user base 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 can purchase additional tutoring, specialized training and other services from education-based affiliates. In addition to creating an online marketplace, offline services, including many other Solver 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 the optimization of 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, enabling us to keep costs low for the consumer while generating enough margin to reinvest in scaling the technology and improving the user experience. We expect to release our first Direct to Consumer offering in the summer of 2023 at a very low annual subscription rate. The initial body of users will provide important data for product enhancements and help fund further R&D to improve scalability. The fully built-out version of the product is expected to operate profitably for less than the cost of a single textbook. Once accomplished, we would then have the option to then pursue venture capital funding to hyper-scale.

We haven't secured any funding to date, but we made it through the first round of consideration for an SBIR grant funded by the National Science Foundation and our full proposal is currently under consideration. We've secured letters of support for our grant application from key stakeholders, including one potential seed investor and one educational organization that is considering a paid pilot program with us.