QKnow Edtech

QKnow Edtech aims to become a major edtech player in Africa, we want our app to be able to reach as many students as possible irrespective of their financial status.

We want to keep innovating ways to deliver quality education to stakeholders in the educational sector and then use their learning data to enhance their learning experiences in order to improve their educational outcomes.

In charge of Product Development, important in developing and executing from ideation stage to product stage efficiently.

He is responsible for the overall vision of the company and its products and bringing together the different teams under the company. He understands the needs of the sales and business development personnel and works with our product development teams to ensure those needs are met so that smooth marketing and sales of our products are achieved.

He is in charge of raising funding for the company and meets with investors and takes calls and meetings to that effect.

He analyzes learning data produced by users and helps our analysts provide useful insights to our customers and clients

Each Team member within our Organization has defined roles aimed at ensuring productivity and output is high, everyone is committed to our mission and vision to ensure we can be the very best version of ourselves to ensure we deliver products that our customers and clients love.

That being said we take on additional roles when the need arises and everyone is eager to carry other's workload when we see that one of us needs help. We strongly believe in the "I am my brother's keeper" approach and strive to assist and cover for one another. Anyone can step up and perform other functions and operations would not miss a beat.

In the past 2 years our Team Lead has been involved in fund raising efforts, startup accelerator commitments, attending seminars and several travel obligations and the rest of the team has been able to step up to execute on his behalf.

Having been accepted into the Jacobs Foundation and Reach for Change Scaling Readiness Program for Edtechs in Ghana, we ensure we are available for their coaching sessions and other activities, with usually 2 members of our Team always present with full commitment. We have a good track record of being present and participating. 

QKnow Edtech is a data driven software aimed at improving the delivery of Quality Education and academic outcomes of students

The Quality of education in many African countries is quite poor, with a heavy focus on the theoretical side of education with little to no time to approach the practical aspects. Many students are taught to pass exams so they can progress to the next stage of education and they cannot really apply what they have learnt in real life or practical settings. A lot of the educational content do not have images in their books and text that describes what is being taught, so students come into the real world and cannot identify things they have learnt on.

Access to Quality education is also low with no real medium that can deliver improved and changing learning materials immediately, so updates to new syllabus takes forever to reach beneficiaries.

Our solution QKnow Edtech is solving these problems by delivering quality educational content in the form of notes, articles, quizzes, videos, and Learning Boxes. We use learning data from students provided through their results, scores and their overall user experience on our software to provide reports on their academic trajectory and use this same information to improve their academic outcome.

We have an assessment tool that has a long term target of identifying students with learning disabilities at an early age so that we can work with their parents and teachers to provide them with individual learning plans tailor made to them to ensure they have a better learning experience on our platform.

We would say we are at the formative research level. 3 years ago we launched a product aimed at improve overall results and scores of students who wrote their very first official Final examinations that takes them from Junior High School to Senior High School. In Ghana students usually do their primary education to Junior high level as day students and live with their parents or guardians. In order to move to Senior High school level you are to write an examination called the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and if you perform extremely well you can get accepted into your First choice school with the competition to get into the Grade "A" schools really high and usually based on academic merit.

We introduced the BECE Prepkit which tests preparing students on past questions from BECE years to help students gauge how well prepared they were before they write. Questions from the BECE are usually repeated in some form so if you understand these questions and how to solve them you usually are ahead of other students. We tried this with the Objective questions which were timed and self marking so students got instant results once they were done taking tests on our software. We noticed that over time student average scores moved from 25/40 to 35/40 as they got used to solving the questions and why their initial answers were wrong. They were corrected by our software and gained confidence as well as speed which helped them review questions they were not too sure on. The first batch of students who used our software had 70% gain admission to their First choice schools with the remaining 20% being accepted into their second choice schools.

For the next year we decided to add detailed breakdown of Subjective Questions (Section B) as we noticed those that got accepted to their 2nd choice school had problems solving the subjective part of their papers. results improved as 78% gained access to their 1st choice schools. We polled

some of these students and asked if they had had the subjective section
broken down by a tutor through a video form would that have helped since
they could assimilate the information in a different way, they said yes
and most of their parents agreed.

We integrated video into our software in 2022 and started shooting videos of tutors solving Questions of more difficult subjects like Mathematics and Science and how to manage their time whilst in the exam room. So far the students who have subscribed this year to this product are loving this new feature as some of them are not taught this in school because of time so this is a very welcome addition.

This new batch write their BECE in August and we will see how well this new intervention has helped when their done and their results have come out.

After introducing our new Product the BECE Prepkit, we always asked students and their parents how preparations are coming along and we try to find out how well they did after they write their Finals.

We have a summary of performances and improvements on paper as a form of research.

We have made improvements to our product, based on feedback gotten and added new features that have improved students academic performances.

We are gradually becoming a trusted option for students, schools and parents. They are starting to see the value of using our software for their intended roles.

As we are growing our reputation for delivering on our solution's objectives, we want to be confident that what we've built is actually impacting education in a positive way and not just a new discovery that will be forgotten soon.

We have been collecting learning data to help improve academic outcomes for years and have seen the upward trajectory of our users academic performances over this period. During this period we analyzed results manually and made suggestions to teachers to improve or change teaching methods to suit everyone in the class. We waited till now to implement AI tools to customize the learning experience for each individual user as the recent surge in adoption of AI makes this possible. We hope what we have done manually in the past will align with these new artificial methods and that we have not lead our users astray.

The time is ripe to prove that we were on the right track with our long term vision.

We would like to know if our intervention or solution was not introduced, would students still see improvements in their results heading into their finals.

Does our solution only prepare them for exams and then they forget. As we intend for them to be able to apply this knowledge in real world scenarios if possible. In Ghana the theme is usually "memorize, pass and forget" when it comes to examinations.

Our team would like to know if our solutions really correlate to improved academic outcomes. Would a student still naturally improve over the course of time if our intervention was not used and our insights were not passed on to their teachers to analyze.

If we could split a class into 2 teams A and B with students with different academic performances (top performing, average and below average) split into these teams, then we performed a term long experiment where team A used our intervention and team B did not, would team A outperform team B academically during that term? If they do that means our solution does really improve results.

Another scenario we would like to see is if the best performing students are put in one group and not using our interventions whilst the average to below average students are put into another group that use our interventions over the course of a year what would the outcome be? Would the 2nd group that use our interventions and our insights catch up or even outperform the top performing students or would there be no significant improvements. This would give us a clearly picture as to if what we say we do works or it only works for top performing students to improve themselves when they use it.

We hope to put these finding into use immediately. Being a tech startup we can quickly change or pivot ideas as building and integrating new features is rather easy.

Wherever our practices were wrong in the past we hope to learn from those and correct them so that our own team and those who benefit from our solution are all satisfied.

We believe evidence backed data is better than assumptions and this will help us operate on a better and trusted level.

Short term we want to be able to identify gaps in our processes as quickly as possible, we would like to know if we are not being biased or short sighted by the learning data we analyze and what real impact we actually have on student performances.

Long-term we want to use any findings or corrections we learn from the LEAP project in our processes so that we can offer better services to our users. We want these insights to be as genuine as possible without any human bias from our side as product owners. We would love our products and operations to be clean and trustworthy so our users feel comfortable with the solutions we are offering.