fREADom by Stones2Milestones

Reading habits impact a child’s cognitive development, learning capability, growth and success. Yet reading proficiency and proclivity remain abysmal around the world, with 89% of students in India alone unable to demonstrate grade-level reading skills. By focussing on basic literacy, we have sidelined the much larger problem of poor comprehension, vocabulary and reading fluency even in developed nations.

We empower parents and teachers to close the Reading Gap by helping them Locate the child’s current skill level and Navigate them to where they need to be. We leverage technological tools to instill a lasting reading habit and get every child to fall in love with reading!

Stones2Milestones impacts over 200,000 children across 50 cities in India. Our aim is to close the global reading gap by 2030 and creating a nation of 10 million readers by 2022 in countries where English is a second yet an aspirational language.

There are more than 315 million students in 1.53 million schools in India. 90-95% of children in India have access to schools. Yet 9 in 10 children in India can’t independently read the texts assigned to them. Studies show that 3/4th of students who are poor readers in 3rd grade will remain poor readers in high school, giving them a lifelong disadvantage. Thus the reading gap, if left unaddressed, only grows wider over time.

Through our research we discovered the problem is two-fold. English in Indian classrooms is taught unscientifically, beginning with Writing when the child is unfamiliar with the language and not used to Listening, Speaking or Reading in it.

Surveys attached to our reading assessment also discovered that reading habit and fluency were highly dependent on the home environment, specifically whether children are read to in that language and have easy access to age-appropriate books. Yet parents in India are often ill-equipped to encourage their child to read and depend wholly on the ineffective school curriculum; they are either unaware of or not easily able to access age-appropriate English content to encourage the love of reading from a young age.

We work with parents of children aged 2-9 and pre-primary and primary schools and teachers to positively impact the reading abilities and proclivities of each new generation joining formal education in India. With the Freadom reading app we reach parents of 70,000 children across India, a number that is set to increase to 100,000 by year end, and we work closely with the schools to measure their improvement in reading skills over time using our proprietary FAST reading assessment, India’s first objective measure for reading skills in English as a second language.

Our EdTech platforms with in-built libraries and an assessment layer log comprehensive data on usage and impact that helps us understand our users’ needs and ways to serve them better. Combined with regular in-person engagement with our partner schools and teachers and regular feedback received from parents over our support channels, we ensure our solutions remain adaptive and relevant.

Our solutions, which include a reading assessment, in-class programs, teacher training app and a parent app, have together impacted over 200,000 children spread across central and remote locations in India.

Our solution is to provide affordable, data-driven, scientifically designed and intuitive reading programs and platforms that are adaptive, levelised, and culturally relevant.

LOCATE:

Over 8 years of research we developed India’s first and only objective measure of English reading ability - FAST - mapped to national benchmarks and Indian school board requirements and accredited by The Australian Council for Educational Research. We use this to first Locate the ability of the child, and then empower their immediate eco-system - school, parents and teachers - to help them Navigate to the desired level.

FAST tests children’s meaning making (comprehension) and word use fluency (vocabulary), assigning them a score that helps us map the spectrum of reading fluency among school-going children in India and levelise the content for our reading programs.

NAVIGATE:

Once we Locate a child’s reading level with our FAST assessment, our adaptive mobile reading app Freadom helps Navigate them to the required level.  

1. Freadom has been designed to help parents and teachers raise happy readers.

2. It instills a daily reading habit by providing curated and levelised stories, language honing activities, quizzes, and daily positive bite-sized news to enjoy with their child.

3. The content is available in audio, video and read only formats, and powered by an AI-based recommendation engine that can smartly match users with grade-appropriate and genre-specific content based on their interests.

4. An assessment layer (short MCQs added after each story, activity and news snippet) helps us monitor comprehension levels and send regular progress reports to schools.

5. Profile statistics, fun competitions and nation and school-wide leaderboards help parents track and celebrate their child’s progress and achievements.

Freadom was born out of a need to involve parents in their child’s reading journey. As per our research, familial involvement is most effective in encouraging a lifelong reading habit.

We believe in a plug and play guardian-mediated learning solution equipped with a streamable library of carefully curated and culturally-relevant content that is exactly matched to user needs and continuously adapated through AI integration.

Over 8 years of research we developed India’s first and only objective measure of English reading ability - FAST - mapped to national benchmarks and Indian school board requirements and accredited by The Australian Council for Educational Research. We use this to first Locate the ability of the child, and then help them Navigate to the desired level. FAST tests children’s meaning making (comprehension) and word use fluency (vocabulary), assigning them a score that helps us map the spectrum of reading fluency among school-going children in India. The test takers supply us with an unprecedented amount of data that is helping us set reading benchmarks for the country and levelize the content for our reading programs.

Freadom is our adaptive mobile reading app that helps instil a daily reading habit by providing parents curated and levelized stories, activities, quizzes and daily positive bite-sized news to enjoy with their child. The content is available in audio, video and read-only formats, and powered by an AI-based recommendation engine that can smartly match users with grade-appropriate and genre-specific content based on their interests. An assessment layer (short MCQs added after each story, activity and news snippet) helps us monitor comprehension levels to optimize content, generate progress reports, and continually improve interface to suit user behaviour.

Our solutions involve a web-based reading test taking platform FAST and a mobile first reading app Freadom.

FAST has the following main components:

1. Primary server: Runs on Google App Engine and manages all the page and API requests with ability to serve more than 1,000,000 concurrent test takers at the lowest internet speed. 

2. Frontend Admin App: A single page app that the content editors can use to create questions and online tests. The admin app also allows the internal admins to create school and classroom profiles and assign these tests to classrooms.
   

3. Frontend School App: 

4. Frontend Student App: An offline capable single page app that allows students to take the online reading assessment test. 

5. A glimpse of the reading scale developed using technology can be witnessed in this report: https://freadom-beta-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/1533719272.19-FAST-Report---Where-India-Reads-2017-18.pdf

Freadom:

Freadom is our reading app. We have native iOS / Android and web applications for the same. 

The FAST Scores from the web app are fed and linked directly into the app which forms the basis for understanding the users current reading level and then starting him off from a point in the learning journey that is appropriate for him / her. 

We are working on leveraging underlying CoreML technologies on Apple and Android to be able to surface content that is exactly right for the child at any given time. 

The app is available on Android and iOS and has the following main components:

1. Microservices Architecture

2. Docker for Container Orchestration

3. Jenkins for CI/CD

4. RabbitMQ for Asynchronous Messaging

If we had classify current solutions across two axes a) Skill or Will & Skill+Will b) EdTech vs Non Tech, Stones2Milestones would be the only solution that falls under the bracket that is a complete edTech offering.

Our program Wings of Words works with an eco-system approach to solve the reading gap by providing all stakeholders technology-enabled resources to develop the skill and will to read in English. The entire program costs less than USD 2 per child per month.

Freadom was born out of a need to include parents in their child’s reading journey. As per our research, familial involvement was most effective in encouraging a lifelong reading habit, and Indian families are particularly invested in their children’s educational goals as per a 2018 WEF Survey.

We have been able to gather crucial data on reading proficiency levels in the country where none existed, helping us put figures to a problem and understand and cater to regional differences. Unlike surveys by ASER or tests like PISA, our assessment has helped determine the exact areas where individual or groups of students are lacking across India, thus letting us customise our reading programs and platforms to deliver maximum impact. Our results are published in our report Where India Reads 2017-18.

Our returning customers assure us our solutions are effective and loved. We currently impact 1100+ schools across 50 cities touching lives of more than 200,000 children with proven improvement in learning levels which is testament to the solution we have created. 

Currently:

Freadom (parent app) - 60,800 children

FAST (reading assessment) - 345,744 students

Schools - 1,041

In one year:

Freadom - 100,000 children

FAST - 1,000,000 students

Schools - 6,000

In 5 years:

Freadom - 1,000,000 parents

FAST - 10,000,000 students

Schools - 25,000

We are expanding across three axes - geography, age groups and stakeholders/partnerships - and are one of the early players in India’s rapidly growing EdTech industry.

We plan to keep scaling up our products in terms of scope, technology, accessibility and reach. For example we recently launched a web version for Freadom to allow accessibility via smartboards in classrooms, and will continue improving its functionality and ability to engage. We also plan to strengthen the recommendation engine in the Freadom app using Machine Learning. We are rebuilding the FAST Reading Assessment into a completely adaptive reading assessment platform for K-12 and are converting it into a reading benchmark that can be used by any other EdTech, digital or publisher network to define reading levels for ESL

By our estimates our reading platform will be reaching 100,000 parents by 2019 end and our FAST reading assessment would have been administered to 1,000,000 students across India. Eventually we hope to impact all school-going children in India by helping them significantly improve their English reading skills and use the data gathered to revise reading benchmarks in real time.

Our strategies and learnings will then be employed in other countries where English is an aspirational but alien language and thus we plan to positively impact students, educators and parents in every non-native English speaking country in the world.

Our biggest challenge is to make educators and parents care about Reading as a separate skill that can be honed scientifically. In India English is often taught in later grades where students begin by writing in a language they’ve rarely heard used around them, not spoken in nor habitually read in. It is conflated with English Grammar or Communication and not purposefully encouraged as a separate activity. Our second biggest challenge is to motivate and train teachers and parents to adequately pass on the will and skill to their wards and raise happy readers. 

As a pioneering effort in the field, we have no roadmap when it comes to scaling up our solutions, and need to constantly innovate. We are also generating vast amounts of data across a large and diverse country and it is thus a challenge to derive meaningful takeaways that can map the distribution of reading levels across demographics. We have realised the need to solve for fine discrepancy in reading skills within the same grade or level to deliver more personalised solutions. 

 Lastly we wish to implement advanced technological upgrades such as ML powered story recommendation and Voice Command for a more intuitive interface and need to summon enough resources to develop the same.

We are overcoming the lack of awareness by gathering first-of-its-kind data on reading levels among students in English-medium schools across the country and then publishing this data to demonstrate the alarming reading gap prevalent even in urban centres. By putting a figure to the problem we are providing hard evidence of an issue and getting educators and parents to care about addressing it. 

To motivate caregivers we have to make our programs and platforms systematic, intuitive, highly structured and easy to implement. We have succeeded in this by converting reading goals into milestones and curating and levelising our content to make it easily accessible and relevant. 

Our smart recommendation engine and backend level-optimisation ensures parents always have access to fun, age-appropriate and language honing content at their fingertips that they know has been hand-picked to systematically improve their ward’s reading skills. In consideration of their busy schedules the app has been designed so they can spend just 10 mins everyday to improve their child’s reading skill and habit.

We are also working to incorporate greater adaptability of content and appended quizzes via AI integration to let them evolve with the skill of the user even within the same prescribed reading level. We are aiming at a fluid and flexible reading scale that can determine reading skills using all the data we capture in real time and put users on an adaptive learning path.

35 full-time employees located around India

Kavish Gadia: Co-Founder, CEO / [ Ex-Investment Banker / Education: IIM Lucknow] (100%)

GIven his experience building large organisations, would be primarily incharge of resource mobilisation and project tracking 

Nikhil Saraf: Co-Founder, Head Product & Marketing [ Education: / Info Edge / Stanford University / MICA Ahmedabad ](100%)

Responsible for product road map and building out best inclass user experience across the pyramid coupled with a disruptive go to market strategy 

Amit Agarwala: Co-Founder, Head Growth / [Ex-Finance Professional, Did Decade at Big 4 / Education:   CA/CPA] (100%)

Amit would be responsible for achieving our target 20 million children over the next three years by leveraging school network given his expertise in enterprise sales  

Aditi Mehta: Co-Founder, Head Content & Impact [Education:  Harvard University / LSE London] (100%)

Given decade long experience with building learning curriculum, Aditi makes sure our products can deliver the promised impact metrics 

Mani Jagdeesan: Head Technology [Education: / IIT Madras / IIM Lucknow] (100%)

Mani comes with an unmatched technical background in big data and machine learning helping us stay ahead of the curve when it comes to delivering low cost technology at scale and building out a reading benchmark

1. We have received seed funding from Menterra’s Social Impact Fund and Unreasonable Capital.

2. We have partnered with the Social Enterprise Worldreader and Lexile-based reading platform LightSail based out of USA and South Africa respectively to combine our research and capability.

3. We are content partners with numerous organisations such as Pratham, Penguin Random House India, HarperCollins India, African Storybook Initiative, Kalpavriksha, Book Box, Book Dash, Champak and more to provide relevant and interesting content to our users.

4. We have hundreds of reputed chain, marquee, independent and government schools as our long-lasting partners who implement our programs

5. We have partnered with the largest public school system KV's and JNV's to test students in 1100+ public schools across India and determine their reading ability using our FAST assessment. 

6. We are in a research partnership for impact evaluation with the Human Centered AI division at Stanford University and IIM Calcutta

7. Partnered with the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment for the Inclusive India Campaign
8. Alibaba India for their Mission Million Books campaign
9. Part of Village Capital 13 member edTech cohort in India 
10. Winners of GMC Calibrator, an edtech learning accelrator run by venture fund Gray Matters Capital from over 200+ edtech startups

We work with schools as a distribution channel to reach out to parents / children - B2B2C. The school would first assess children and then subscribe to the app for all in the recommended grades and pay us a yearly subscription.

We are also in the midst of piloting the Freadom parent app as a direct to consumer (B2C) offering.

We are a for-profit enterprise with a subscription-based platform and all paying users. As such our revenue streams have allowed us to be financially sustainable from the beginning. We are currently in the midst of raising our next round of funding (investment capital).

Our Readvantage program to provide our products to disadvantaged communities and schools is funded by corporate partners under their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) schemes. For every child that subscribes to the programme we make it available to one child in need.

We are entering a rapid expansion phase where we are partnering with exciting new co-believers and reaching more users than ever before. We have brought in 1100+ partner schools who have tried and vouched for our solutions, tied up with government bodies, big-name and independent publishers, NGOs and literacy promoting organisations worldwide. Our solutions have been courted by major chain and marquee schools across India.

400,000 students have already registered to take FAST this year and over 70,000 parents are using Freadom, with more users coming in every month.

We need to quickly scale up our competencies to cater to this ever growing audience. We need to augment our platforms with technological upgrades such as ML and engage in more robust data science to ensure our platforms remain adaptive and relevant for a diverse user base. We need to map impact with greater precision for which we have entered research partnerships with professors from Stanford and IIM.

We believe Solve will be the perfect platform to assist us as we reach a new stage in our organisation’s history and scale up our solutions to deliver measurable impact across India and the world. We require strong mentorship in this high-growth stage and given the unique niche we occupy we require the right associations and personalised guidance which Solve MIT can provide.

We are also forging international partnerships and gaining worldwide visibility and we wish to continue exploring opportunities across geographies, a quest in which Solve will prove invaluable.

We believe in partnering with all co-believers in our mission to Create a Nation of Readers. This includes other literacy promoting or educational enterprises, educators, educational institutes, research organisations, content creators, parents, investors and business partners.

1. We hope to increase ease of use and content relevance to increase user engagement and increase their time spent on the app. Advanced AI is the only way we can improve our recommendation engine that matches users with content that interests them and is of the right difficulty to improve their skills.

2. AI can help us develop a fluid and flexible ESL reading scale that can adjust reading levels per user in real-time based on their performance on the assessment layer. This will also allow us to solve for fine discrepancies in reading skills within the same grade or level. This can be done through greater adaptability of content and the appended quizzes that lets them change according to and evolve with the skill of the user even within the same prescribed reading level.

3. Big data analysis - we collect vast quantities of data through our applications and need help converting them into impactful modifications. 2000+ schools have opted for FAST assessment and we’re collecting literacy and reading proficiency data at unimagined levels. We need to use this data to map the reading level distribution across India and determine a benchmark that can work across English as a Second Language (ESL) countries.

Our parent app Freadom, designed to help parents of children aged 3 to 10 raise a happy and competent reader, has found greater adoption among women and girls and has been a means of providing equal access to books and guided learning to girls from regions or communities without access to libraries or other age-appropriate reading material. 65% of users of our parent app Freadom are women and 2 of our 3 most prolific star students are girls. Our metrics and user feedback indicate the app is being used to mitigate gender differences in access to reading material, specially in smaller towns and far flung regions of India, and has been instrumental in gifting the love of reading to generations of girls who may have never been encouraged to read otherwise. 

• AI can help us develop a fluid and flexible ESL reading scale that can adjust reading levels per user in real-time based on their performance on the assessment layer. This will also allow us to solve for fine discrepancies in reading skills within the same grade or level. This can be done through greater adaptability of content and the appended quizzes that lets them change according to and evolve with the skill of the user even within the same prescribed reading level. This scale can be made available to any country where English is a second language.
• Post that we want to use AI to further refine the recommendation engine, providing children with the exact appropriate content at the right time according to their learning levels leading to at least 5x jump in their learning outcomes which was unimaginable before.