Digitizing Education in Africa

The Client:

A leading EdTech enabler in Africa

The Industry:

Education & EdTech

Offering:

Cubet partnered with an African tech giant to create a digital ecosystem that gave African students access to personalized education and resourceful study materials. The digital ecosystem we developed provides the best EdTech platform for African students from the most isolated and underprivileged communities, also brings the schools into a digital network where learning processes are digitized and progress is monitored. This was truly a first-of-its-kind global initiative that enables the overall development of an African learner by bringing together learners and contributors who can track the impact of their social investments in real time like never before. 

The Challenges:

• 51% of African students live below the poverty line, 90% do not pay school fees, 77% have no access to a library, 72% have no internet access, 53% will not matriculate, and 60% are unemployed until at least age 35.
• The system's high inefficiency rate hampered the timely availability of high-quality textbooks in schools, resulting in delayed curriculums and teachers not being able to use classroom time effectively.
• Lack of teacher training to address the unique challenges of raising African students, as well as a lack of methods to identify students' interests, skills, and activities.
• There are no defined learning standards or methods to monitor outcomes. There is no data available on the learning levels of two-thirds of students.

Key Features:

1. Lenovo Tablet devices customized with robust security mechanisms to ensure that the devices are used only within the ecosystem.
2. Study material provided well ahead of school to enable students to begin studying in advance.
3. A secured digital workspace that unlocked the boundaries of conventional learning and established a revolutionary learning environment for the students.
4. Anytime and anywhere access to digital devices for students.
5. Increased user engagement through personalization.
6. Compatible with Lenovo Tab 8 and Tab 10, and in Android.
7. The data collected using the devices can be made accessible to parents and teachers via secondary applications.
8. The app allows parents and teachers to track the child's interest in a particular field such as arts, music, science, or technology.
9. Blockchain Wallet based reward system development is in progress.
10. Highly effective hack monitoring system which provides early detection of hack attempts.
11. Direct engagement with Lenovo and Huawei in leveraging hardware capabilities for maintaining device security.

Collaboration in Action:

Cubet deployed a team of experienced engineers, solution architects, and designers to develop the learning ecosystem in a phased manner that provides a secured digital workspace for studying with anytime and anywhere access to study materials. The ecosystem has the following features:

• Deployed a team of experienced engineers, solution architects, and designers in a phased manner to develop the learning ecosystem.
• The ecosystem has a learning app that works on a tablet with a customized Android operating system.
• The learning app provides learning materials in the form of digital textbooks and other features required for the learners to connect to the internet and take evaluation tests, manage other learning related activities, communicate, etc.
• The learning app provides increased user engagement through personalization and AI-based learning recommendations.
• The ecosystem has various other applications that analyze large volumes of data sets to generate detailed reports for teachers, contributors, etc.

The key solutions are the following:

• An EdTech ecosystem that allows learners to access a world of personalized educational resources at the touch of a button.
• A learning system that facilitates training for teachers, learners and parents on how to correctly adopt technology within the classroom and beyond.
• Support system that provides remote high end support around the clock to learners and teachers, along with the provision of requested educational content and learning support.
• Live dashboards to monitor and evaluate the impact of the system and the progress of each individual learner. 
• Dashboards with detailed reports for contributors to present to their committees on the impact from their contributions.

Value Delivered:

• The platform has helped schools in Africa go paperless, mitigating the issue of having limited access to textbooks. 
• Learners are now able to access all of their school content through the learning device, even ahead of the Academic year commencement.
• The communication has tremendously improved, as learners and teachers can now  communicate with each other anytime about any challenges through the system. 
• With the metrics and continuous engagement analytics that the platform provides, each learner is mapped, and their interests and skills are recorded, enabling the school system to empower each learner differently. 
• With the comprehensive dashboard system, each sponsor can analyze the impact of their investment on kids who had no previous access to online resources, augmenting and enabling their education while developing their talents at the same time.

Technologies Deployed:

1. HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and ReactJS for front-end development
2. Encryption and secure authentication
3. Cloud-based storage
4. Android IOS, and React Native for mobile
5. NodeJS and MongoDB for back-end development
6. RESTful APIs for data communication
7. AWS for hosting and server management.

What an African students says about the Edtech platform;

Having the tablet has truly been the best thing ever for me. Data used to be my problem, as I couldn’t download the study guides and textbooks that I wanted, but now I can. This has helped me a lot by getting me extra work, books, and others. This also helps me understand the work that maybe I didn’t understand well at school.  I hope and pray that this grows, and many school children from all of Africa get the privilege of having this with them at the start of every school year