The Lesson

In Ugandan government schools, the student-to-teacher ratio is 100:1, this is because private schools (with a ratio of 40:1) are expensive costing $400 per term which most parents cannot afford. Over 10 million children that stay in rural areas and refugee camps overflow in a few law-capacity government schools that are located in those villages, some students walk a distance of over 5KM daily to school and another 5KM back home (Source) at times without having a single meal, private teachers at times are hired to teach children in people's homes (Source), and female school children that get pregnant develop stigma and stop attending classes as well as those in their menstrual periods. Old age and long-distance students hardly find time to attend all the classes. 60% of the schools in Uganda do not have a well-updated library that all students can effectively use, in fact, some schools only have teachers' guides and no library books for students. 

This makes it difficult for these students to understand what teachers are teaching in class hence low performance that makes children not qualify for the next levels of education. They end up dropping out of school and starting to stay home, some even convert into community hazards. Because they do not have any knowledge and skill, they cannot be employed and this lowers incomes hence total poverty across the country with all its side effects like hunger, difficulty in accessing good health services, and more.

If we do not avail more provisions of accessing education and only rely on classrooms and classroom teachers, most of the children In Uganda will never have access to good education, considering the rapid increase in population (high fertility rates) with no relative schools being set up.

We are recording national curriculum lessons into video and uploading them on The Lesson so that students can always use them to learn what they missed or did not understand in the classroom.

We would like to set up well-ICT-equipped study centers in hard-to-reach areas and refugee camps where students can go and study using The Lesson, we have got 18 teachers today that are always waiting for questions from these students, and the same teachers mark exercises given to students after every topic. This will bring good education closer to students of all kinds.

How it works: students visit The Lesson, pay $0.27 (daily subscription), and start having lessons, if one does not understand even after rewinding the recorded lesson, they can leave a question that goes directly to the teacher who then responds to the student. Teachers always leave topic questions that students use to try out if they have understood. Demo Link 

For students that use The Lesson as their sole source of classroom knowledge, at the end of the term, they physically go to school and do exams.

The Lesson will enable a lot of students to have access to affordable good education in Uganda.

We are targeting students in rural areas, and refugee camps as well as urban students that have difficulties in fully accessing learning materials and understanding classroom content. Students that are walking long distances to overpopulated schools that need extra learning and revision content, pregnant school children, and early mothers that still need to access education.

The Lesson makes the learning materials readily available to all kinds of learners at their convenience. They now have access to teachers for any questions and can use this content for revision purposes. This will make them perform with better grades that allow them to go to higher levels of education at relatively low costs ($16 per term instead of $400). They will acquire skills, innovate or get employed and earn a better living.

We are currently distributed in both Urban and rural areas, most of the teachers that we are curently working with are from semi-urban areas, all of us in the Lead team grew up and studied in rural areas during our early education therefore it is an experience that we have gone through. We have incaged parents in Rural areas to make test the solution out and they have been actively learning. It is an Idea that the target market (Parents of students) have welcomed.

We would like to be part of the impressive MIT Solve team that will encourage us, and we learn from them more business directions and guidance. We would also like to have access to leadership coaching and advice from the Solve experts. We would like to be exposed to the media so that our Idea can be known to the world, we are also open to grants and any kind of investments.

There are quite a number of other actors in this space, like ULesson, they are also recording lessons and publishing them for the learners to access. What we do differently is, we record the lessons according to the way the curriculum is designed so that students can use this content and still fit in the education setting of the country, which is not the case with other actors that do selective topics, it makes it difficult for the learner to follow along as the curriculum designer intended. The reason for this design is that we want the learner to be able to use this portal and at the same time seat an exam with those seating in the classroom and still stay at the same level with them.

We are still at the stage of content creation, most of our impact goals shall be obtained when this process is complete.

We want to complete the recording of content by the end of 2024 with 10,000 learners actively studying.  We shall achieve this by creating more awareness through local FM Radios and Social Media.

By the end of 2028, we shall be having 5 active study centers(one in each region) supporting 1,000 learners daily who that hardly afford to attend classrooms. We shall use the revenue generated from the individual daily learners and some grants to set up these facilities in rural communities so that learners there can access equitable and quality education.

We are currently having 229 active learners on the platform accessing primary education content recorded so far. 72% are male and 28% are female learners.

We source qualified teachers that make lesson plans and schemes of work before coming to the recording room, these teachers are recorded as they teach and those videos are chronologically arranged on The Lesson portal that we have internally developed. The Lessons are taught according to the standard of our local curriculum. These teachers are always waiting for any questions from students that use this content to learn and have any questions.

We are creating readily available learning materials like recorded video lessons, provision to access teachers remotely, provision to access books in soft copy as well as past exams papers for self-trials. This is making education accessible to all learners in Uganda.

As a result of accessible education materials, learners shall obtain better performance in terms of grades and knowledge acquisition that leads to innovations, employment, and economic development.

And then Ugandans shall have a better lifestyle that innovates, that is employable. This shall lead to poverty eradication in this country.

The Lesson portal is developed using Laravel, a PHP framework for Web artisans, the videos are currently hosted with YouTube, and the addresses of those videos are stored in a MySQL database from which the portal reads the data and renders it to the learner. The Solution supports Mobile money and Bank payments for subscriptions.

At Shule Technologies Limited, we work with 18 teachers, 11 of these are female. we also have 2 staff in video production, one is male and the other female. 

We onboard our staff from across different districts in the country teaching in different schools.

The Lesson aims at serving learning materials to learners in primary education, and lower and upper secondary education. The parents of these learners are the ones that pay for the Lessons. Parents pay their learners $0.27 daily or $1.34 weekly, and or $5.36 monthly to access video lessons of their choice. Learners also have access to teachers remotely for consultations.  This avails the learners with a variety of revision materials that make them score better grades in academics. 

The revenue and profit obtained are used to facilitate the teachers that record new lessons, attend to learners' questions and pay other human resources in the video production department. In the future we shall use this revenue to set up ICT study centers where rural learners without computers or Tablets can go to have access to this portal.

We intend to sustain this business through revenue acquired from selling the Video lessons, grants, and Investments. The budget to record all the lesson content is $200,000 and Revenue alone cannot achieve that in these early stages of product development, we need grants and investments, the good side of it is that lessons are recorded and invested in once, the rest shall always be revenue from them.

We have so far received an investment of $7,500 from a Kenyan Individual and we have made revenue of $602 from 5% of the content that we have so far recorded.