Swarmob

The world labor market demands new skills from the youth given the projection for 2030 of 66% automation of routine jobs in Latin America (World Bank,2016) and the possible creation of 395 million new jobs oriented towards sustainability (WEF, 2020). In this context, it becomes a critical job differentiator to have collaboration, creativity, communication, critical thinking, and social and environmental awareness skills, among others.

Among the main global trends in educational innovation to address this need, Project-Based Learning (PBL) stands out, through which schools seek active and motivating teaching that improves learning outcomes and develops 21st century skills, enabling better job opportunities for their students (Zakaira, 2019; Kokotsaki, 2016). However, the school adoption of this methodology is difficult to achieve, because it requires radical changes in the institutional management of collaboration between teachers and classroom management with students. For this reason, schools or governments usually incur large investments of time and money in the support of external consultancies (from USD$10,000 per school), which often do not translate into the effective, holistic and lasting use of this methodology, which that excludes schools from the middle and lower sectors of participating in this type of teaching. Low-cost and effective support systems are needed to democratize the active teaching approaches required by the region.

In this regard, we are specifically addressing problems 1 and 6 of this Challenge: (1) "Provide access to improved civic action learning in a wide range of contexts with educator support for classroom-based approaches, and community-building opportunities for out of school, community-based approaches"; and (6) "Enable learners to bridge civic knowledge with taking action by understanding real-world problems, building networks, organizing plans for collective action, and exploring prosocial careers."

Swarmob is a learning management system (LMS) that helps schools transform their way of teaching towards an active, social and collaborative approach using the Network Project-Based Learning (N-PBL) methodology. With Swarmob, teachers plan and manage the teaching of the curricular objectives in a collaborative and interdisciplinary way, creating interactive learning paths to teach their students through impact challenges on sustainability issues (aligned with the Global Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030). Thus, students learn collaboratively in work teams to respond to these challenges, researching and creating solutions to the needs of their social and environmental context, while connecting with students from other schools through a social network of impact projects, to generate collective synergies. In this way, learning is achieved that promotes autonomy, motivation, critical thinking and global citizenship. Participating schools enter a network of collaboration and mutual support for transformation.

Swarmob is an integral system to manage institutional change based on this methodology, offering functions for management teams, teachers and students, sequencing change processes with monitoring metrics and evaluating critical 21st century skills (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, citizenship global and digital culture).

Along with this, Swarmob developed a support system leveraged by the platform, which in a few work sessions with management teams and teachers, establishes the bases for the use of the methodology and the platform, to consolidate the required institutional learning.

You can also watch our inspirational video here (remember to activate youtube translation).

We work to directly impact the lives of three types of school actors:

a) Students: children and young people between the ages of 6 and 18 who, due to their socioeconomic context, do not have the opportunity to access an active, motivating and challenging education that ensures they learn new skills for a better future job and social change vision. They are curious, concerned about what is happening in the world, they like to learn and help others, but they are easily demotivated as they get bored when the work is not practical or does not relate to their interests and concerns. They usually have difficulties to communicate their ideas and to organize teamwork, but they are capable of very critical thinking when given space to promote it. To understand and involve them in the development of Swarmob, we carry out surveys and focus groups where we receive feedback on the process they live with us. We address the solution to their needs by encouraging their teachers to involve them in practical teaching that puts them at the center of the learning process, empowering them from their own interests and concerns, to develop meaningful solutions for themselves and their communities.

b) Teachers: adults between the ages of 23 and 60 who need to incorporate new approaches and teaching tools to motivate and engage their students (and motivate themselves), in contexts where institutions do not have coherently structured teacher professional development strategies for it. They like to talk and share pedagogical ideas with their colleagues, but they usually do not have spaces in which this happens, since the routine traps them in an individual dynamic. As a result, they are often exhausted and feel isolated in their work. We address the solution to their needs by creating a platform that helps them experience highly significant educational experiences, inspiring them within a community of change-maker teachers and reconnecting them with their love for teaching. In this, collaboration is key to strengthen ties with their peers, which allows them to jointly create learning experiences with a high level of complexity, which profoundly change the lives of their students.

c) School directors and academic management teams: adults between the ages of 28 and 60 who need support to conduct successful pedagogical innovation processes in their schools, which includes training their teaching teams in new methodologies that they often do not master themselves. All this from a logic of efficient use of school resources. We approach the solution to their needs through the combination of two key dimensions: (a) a structured and sequenced change implementation strategy, which allows accompanying step by step and comprehensively the expansion of this innovation in the institutions, with transfer of well defined processes, for their empowerment as leaders of the process. (b) a web system that allows visualizing and monitoring the pedagogical transformation processes that its teachers and students are experiencing with the N-PBL methodology.

Our team is characterized by having a deep commitment to sustainable development and the transformation of lives through education, which has helped us lead the development of our company based on ethical and service standards. At the individual level, we have a combination of diverse skills from the social sciences and engineering: 

(1) Natalia Pérez (co-founder and CEO), is a community psychologist with 9 years of experience leading social and environmental impact projects with public, private and of civil society (Social Urbanism and the government program SENDA), with high capacities for organizing processes, experience design and team leadership. 

(2) Felipe Prado (co-founder and COO) is an educational psychologist with 9 years of experience in educational consulting for school transformation and creating collaborative EdTech networks and systems for educational innovation with 21 Latin American countries (Microsoft Edu; IDB-SUMMA), highlighting his Empathy and communication skills with users and clients, to achieve success in the implementation of Swarmob in the educational communities we serve. 

(3) Francisco Sánchez (CTO) is a software  engineer with 10 years of experience as senior full-stack developer, building platforms and applications and leading IT teams (Walmart; Mercado Libre)e. 

(4) Igor Ianiszewski (QA and Front-End) is an industrial engineer with 5 years of experience ensuring the quality of EdTech applications (Adaptativamente), with strong abilities to listen the needs and receive feedback from users, incorporating it into improvement processes into Swarmob system; since 1 year he has also trained with us as a front-end developer, assuming a role in this area.

In addition, we have a contractors staff committed to the cause of Swarmob, whom we turn to for projects and specific services from marketing to UI/UX development, cloud architecture, educational design, and business accounting.

On a personal level, the two cofounders of Swarmob lived significant experiences when they attended school education in their childhood and adolescence, which directly influenced the creation of this project. Natalia attended a traditional Chilean public school in Quilicura commune, with students from complex socioeconomic contexts. For his part, Felipe had the opportunity to experience various types of educational institutions and social realities that gave him a broad perspective on the educational phenomenon, from a school based on alternative methods such as Waldorf education in a wealthy context, through a single-teacher school highly behavioral, even an adult learning high school in a context of high social marginalization. These experiences are a permanent source of inspiration and focus for the development and implementation of Swarmob.

We applied to SOLVE because we think it will open doors for us to collaborate with organizations experienced in the EdTech ecosystem in the United States and Latin America. We are excited about learning and collaborating with leading industry leaders and experts to help us accelerate our learning, networking, and growth. Having built a solid product and achieved good customer retention rates (87.5%), the biggest challenge we currently face - and for which we know the SOLVE community would help us a lot - is refining our Go to Market strategy, to grow and impact more people.

At the product level, we are interested in receiving guidance to incorporate AI into our system, to continue innovating. We have already carried out some explorations in this line on the side of the automation of teachers instructional design processes and student feedback. Thisthis is a path that we want to deepen.

Our future strategy aims to reach the United States market to nurture our company and from that experience strengthen our work in Latin America. We see that SOLVE would be a great ally to start a first approximation in this regard. The US educational system has much more experience and familiarity with the adoption of technological platforms in education and is also a system more akin to the use of the Project-Based Learning methodology that we promote, being a benchmark for this pedagogical approach for Chile and Latin America. For example, the Buck Institute's PBL Works project has provided the conceptual bases for the implementation of this methodology at the curricular level in the Chilean Ministry of Education and our platform has been created following its standards for this approach. Therefore, our system is based on the standards that this institution also promotes in the US. Just as an example, this institution has been in charge of training 5,800 schools based on the PBL methodology, which could be much more likely clients to hire us, and we see in it also a very good potential ally to collaborate.

Finally, we are interested in the SOLVE process helping us get in touch with potential private investors, to accelerate our growth.

The innovative elements of Swarmob are:

1. Automation and efficiency: by automating processes of the Project-Based Learning methodology, Swarmob manages the complexity of its implementation in real time and facilitates the generation and permanence of internal capacities in schools, to achieve greater achievements in the use of the PBL methodology.

2. Focus on institutional change management: Swarmob is the only educational technology for Project-Based Learning with a focus on institutional learning, combining functions of monitoring and professional teacher development (management teams) and pedagogical and didactic management of the classroom (teachers and students), in order to achieve a holistic transformation of the teaching culture.

3. Network for sustainability: Swarmob schools participate in a network of institutions that seek to contribute to sustainable development, with tools for inter-institutional pedagogical collaboration. This allows an evolution of the Project-Based Learning (PBL) methodology, towards a Network Project-Based Learning (N-PBL).

1. Impact on student skills

By 2023 we plan to reach 15,000 students learning by carrying out impact projects. This will increase their 21st century skills by 23% (global citizenship, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, digital culture, and communication).

By strengthening our model and Go to Market system, in 2027 we project to have an impact on the development of 21st century skills of 1,152,853 students.

2. Impact on sustainable development:

In 2023 the 15,000 students will create around 3,750 projects with a social and environmental impact on their communities, which will mean an additional indirect impact of Swarmob to an estimated 2 people for each student (family members, neighbors, auditors, followers , depending on the nature of each type of project). That is, 30,000 additional people. These projects will jointly address the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which also includes an impact on the environment (expressed through recycling projects, planting trees, caring for drinking water, among others). others, projects which are usually carried out in our schools).

By 2027 we plan to work with 1,152,853 students, who we estimate could create 288,213 impact projects. These would have an indirect impact for 2,305,706 people (two additional people for each student).

3. Impact on teacher training: 

By 2023 we plan to work with 520 teachers, 93% of whom will report significant improvements in their teaching skills through active methodologies such as PBL (replicating results that we have obtained in previous years). By 2027 this impact is projected for 2,340 teachers.

The number of impacted students and teachers is measured directly through the number of subscriptions contracted by each school.

The impact on the development of 21st century skills in students is measured by means of a skills assessment instrument created by Swarmob and which is applied directly as part of the N-PBL learning path. This instrument is applied twice during the implementation of each PBL challenge (pre and post), in a self-evaluation format for students and as a teacher's hetero-evaluation, from which an average is extracted. Then the averages are compared between the pre and post. In 2022, an approximate progress of 23% in the development of skills has been reported in the implemented projects.

The impact on sustainable development is currently not measured because the great heterogeneity of the types of projects carried out by students has not allowed us to find a precise measurement method and indicators. What we do about this is to measure the change in attitude of students towards sustainable development issues and the increase in conversations in their families about sustainability issues based on these projects. We measure these through a final survey.

We measure the impact on teacher training through a final survey at the end of each semester, in which teachers report their perception regarding their improvements in teaching skills through N-PBL, among other indicators.

Swarmob's Theory of Change (link) contemplates different levels of work with students, teachers, school (management team, use of resources) and extended network (families and other organizations).

We implement a learning management system for teachers and students and training processes for teachers to learn to coordinate the planning and application of the learning methodology based on networked projects oriented towards sustainable development. Also we train academic management teams to carry out the teacher training process and an information campaign for families about the methodology. As intermediate results, students are motivated to create, execute, and evaluate collaborative network projects that have an impact on the SDGs, which is recognized by their families; their teachers achieve autonomy in planning and implementation with this active learning methodology; the academic management team achieves autonomy to ensure the logistical and training conditions so that all this can be done in the institution; The school builds ties with other schools and organizations in the area to collaborate on projects. As final results, students improve their attendance, presence and curricular learning, together with the development of SXXI skills that improve their job expectations; they are capable of generating a real impact on the SDGs and experience successful graduation trajectories both from work and from higher education. The school as a whole has become a space that values and promotes active learning, where teachers and students enjoy the project-based learning methodology, creating collaborative network projects through the effective use of digital media and their community. recognizes the impact they make on social and environmental problems. For the generation of evidence on this Theory of Change, the shared document includes sheets with indicators to consider for each of the levels described. We have not yet been able to carry out an impact evaluation, but in a preliminary way we have applied surveys to students and teachers with results that support this theory (see an example of students and teachers report of 7 Renca district schools in 2022 [IN SPANISH]). In addition, we rely on scientific evidence that supports our assumptions: Zakaira, 2019; Kokotsaki, 2016; Krajcik, 2021; Duke, 2020.

Swarmob has three digital components. 

1. First, it is a learning management platform (LMS) specially designed to automate processes and facilitate the adoption of the Network Project Based Learning methodology. This helps teachers in the processes of interdisciplinary collaboration around planning, creation of didactic material, monitoring and feedback of students and learning assessment based on projects. In this way, they save much more time when applying this methodology than when they don’t use the platform and they do it more effectively because everything is integrated into a unified system.

2. Secondly, Swarmob is a social network of projects (social media) that promotes online pedagogical collaboration between institutions that teach from project approach, offering schools a community of support and joint learning. Both characteristics allow Swarmob to be scalable by helping to reduce by 73.6% the HR time allocated to the processes of a normal consultancy to support the adoption of PBL, allowing schools to manage the implementation of this methodology with progressive autonomy. And it also adds to the additional component of network collaboration around this methodology.

3. Lastly, we have conducted initial successful explorations of using AI (Chat GPT) to speed up teachers instructional design and student feedback processes. These are not yet directly integrated into the platform, but we are on our way to do so.

Our leadership team, represented by our two founding partners, Natalia Pérez and Felipe Prado, seeks to embody the value of gender equality. We express this from an equal distribution of responsibilities and income between men and women, as well as from the valuation of the contributions and achievements of each one. We also actively promote, both in our team and in the schools and in the product we create, the appreciation and respect of people of different cultures, beliefs, ethnicities, sexual identity or orientation, physical condition and socioeconomic groups. A concrete example is found in the inclusion of specific indicators of appreciation and respect for diversity and inclusion within the century skills assessment system that we created for students and teachers, in relation to the Global Citizenship skill.

Our business model's value proposition is to facilitate the transformation of school teaching towards active methodologies such as Network Project-Based Learning (N-ABP) effectively and at low cost thanks to the use of technology, so that low-income students acquire skills to face the future of work and collaborate in a network in the face of the great sustainability challenges that we face as humanity. Thus, they create projects with an impact on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The platform measures its impact through the number of students and teachers benefited; the evaluation of the development of 21st century skills in students; the improvement of teachers' skills to teach through N-PBL projects.

Our product is a web platform that is sold to schools and districts in SaaS mode and that supports teachers and students in the pedagogical management processes of the N-PBL, as well as facilitating directors and academic coordination teams to manage institutional change for adopt this methodology. Our service is pedagogical support for the professional development of teachers and management teams.

Our clients are public, subsidized and private schools (B2B), which are unable to consolidate the transformation of their teaching towards active methodologies, as well as demand aggregators that manage school networks (B2G), e.g. districts or municipalities. We sell them SaaS subscriptions to serve the users, which are teachers, students, and management teams. Our social impact value is one of the main incentives that lead our customers to prefer us, which is why it is directly linked to our sales strategy. Regarding profits, our model contemplates reinvesting them to achieve salary equality for all employees, and in the future, to grant scholarships to schools that cannot pay for our product.

Swarmob is based on a B2B model of SaaS subscriptions per student. In this way, our current financial sustainability depends on sales to our clients: public and private schools or demand aggregators (districts, municipalities or foundations).

For this, we offer semi-annual or annual plans with optional user support (induction, workshop, follow-up). An annual subscription costs USD $14 per student and includes unlimited access to the platform for teachers and management teams. For schools that require additional support, we accompany groups of teachers to consolidate the use of the N-PBL methodology and the platform, thus we promote adoption achievements that increase the loyalty of our clients. The accompaniment is online and has a value of USD $90 per hour. We have a standardized model of 4 stages of school appropriation (familiarization, adoption, transfer and autonomy) in which schools start involving 2 to 3 classrooms and few teachers, until all their classrooms and teachers are onboards. In this process, the monthly accompaniment per school goes from 2 hours to 7 hours per month, until finally it is reduced to 1 hour per month in the final stage when the appropriation has been successfully achieved. At this stage, 90% of the income is generated by the sale of SaaS subscriptions, favoring the scalability of the project.

Currently, Swarmob has reached its break-even point based on its sales, where 59% of our income comes directly from subscriptions to the platform (USD $44,840) and 41% from support (USD $31,160). For this reason, we are interested in continuing to innovate and incorporate the use of artificial intelligence to reduce teacher support time and have an increasingly effective and scalable process, to achieve at least an 80% of our income from subscription to the platform in the initial stages.

Additionally, throughout our history, we have received grants for a total value of USD $200,731 from different allies, such as CORFO, Start-Up Chile, Tecnológico de Monterrey and BHP|Escondida.