shikkhok.com, an isif awarded project

Shikkhok.com -‐ An Altruist-‐built, Ultra-‐Cheap MOOC Pla6orm:

Building an Open Content Educa?on site for Rural South Asian Students

Ragib Hasan [email protected] Assistant Professor

University of Alabama at Birmingham and Founder – The Shikkhok.com project

www.shikkhok.com

2013 ISIF Award Winner for Innova?ons in Educa?on

BDNOG1: May 24, 2014

(pronounced Shik-‐khok), is a Bengali language word that means, literally, “One who teaches/educates”

Shikkhok.com

Shikkhok.com was founded by Dr. Ragib Hasan, a computer scien?st and professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, originally from Bangladesh. Shikkhok’s volunteer teachers include researchers, educators, and professionals/experts in various fields, who are spread all across the world.

How to change the world with li5le investment (using the power of the Internet and Crowds)?

Low-‐income and rural students in South Asia with limited knowledge of English do not have access to quality educa?on. How can we provide top-‐quality educaBon at a very low cost to the millions of students in rural Bangladesh and India?

Shikkhok’s soluBon

•  Develop a highly localized MOOC with a hybrid Internet-‐non Internet-‐based dissemina?on model

•  Use the crowdsourcing model for both content development, deployment, and marke?ng, spending as li5le as possible

Who we are? Educators: Volunteers spread all around the world who are passionate about sharing their knowledge in na?ve languages

Students: Underprivileged students facing language and technological barriers

•  Bengali is the 4th largest language in terms of na?ve speakers (250-‐300 million speakers in Bangladesh and India)

•  Students in rural areas oeen do not have access to quality teachers, books, or good schools.

•  Higher educa?on opportuni?es and content is scarce in Bangladesh and India –  Only 50,000 opening in Bangladeshi universi?es and colleges for incoming freshmen, while there are more than 300,000 eligible students

–  Many students drop out due to lack of cheap higher educa?on opportuni?es or extreme poverty

Background

Background: InformaBon Technology to the rescue …

•  While regular compu?ng devices are not common/affordable in rural areas, Mobile phones and hence Mobile internet have significantly high penetra?on in Bangladesh, even in rural areas (100 million mobile subscribers as of early 2013, in a 160 million popula?on)

•  A mobile-‐op?mized Bengali language MOOC can serve as an alterna?ve educa?on pla6orm for rural and non-‐tradi?onal students

•  And an innova?ve non-‐Internet based delivery mechanism can allow rural students with no internet access to get high quality educa?on

Why reinvent the wheel? Because, Exis?ng MOOCs are not enough

•  Coursera.com has 208 courses, ALL provided in English language •  The Khan Academy’s excellent online educa?onal videos are also in

English •  Unfortunately, Bengali transla?on of Khan Academy’s videos are not

popular among the students in Bangladesh and India (most video lessons have an average of only 100-‐120 views in 1 year. Example: hkp://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL58BD1F917975C9BE).

•  Anecdotal reasons include mismatch between the lessons and academic syllabus in Bangladesh/India, cultural mismatch/”lost in transla?on”/ar?ficial and literal transla?on –  As a comparison, Shikkhok.com’s Culinary arts course videos received an average of 300+ views within 1

week of publica?on (hkps://vimeo.com/user14642276/videos/sort:plays/format:thumbnail)

Project Requirements •  Educa?on medium must be in Bengali

•  Content must be highly opBmized for mobile phone browsers with limited and slow data plans

•  Lessons must be short, include both text and mul?media, and have easy-‐to-‐use student registra?on, feedback, and evalua?on schemes

•  Must be highly-‐available, low access ?mes even in Bangladesh and India

•  Must be designed, delivered, and publicized at a very low cost, and provided to students for free

•  Must not depend only on the Internet to deliver content.

IdenBfying the Challenges

•  Technical: Iden?fying the best tools and design principles

•  Team: Organizing and coordina?ng a distributed team

•  Stakeholder: Gepng effec?ve feedback and aken?on informa?on from the users

IdenBfying the Challenges

Cost: Popular MOOCs such as Coursera.com have millions of dollars in venture capital funding. – Coursera itself has $22 million funding – Such funding is unlikely for educa?ng rural students in Bangladesh and India

– Marke?ng/adver?sing such a site to the masses is also expensive.

IdenBfying the Challenges?

•  Overcoming the language barrier: Students with limited English language proficiency cannot u?lize exis?ng MOOCs such as edX, udacity, or Coursera, so how do we ensure maximum impact for such students?

•  Finding teachers: How to gather teachers with the right exper?se and technical know-‐how?

•  Reaching stakeholders: How to publicize and deploy content to the intended audience?

The Shikkhok Solu?on

•  Explore Human Computer InteracBon principles and methods to effec?vely reach the rural students

•  Take extreme penny-‐pinching measures to develop the pla6orm at a low cost

•  Use social media markeBng strategies to publicize the service to the target audience

•  U?lize non-‐Internet based supply chains to deliver content to the rural students

Design Strategies

Design – Use an itera?ve model for crea?ng the most effec?ve user interface which has to be mobile friendly, less-‐graphics intensive, and suitable for both smart and non-‐smart cell-‐phone browsing – Follow a User Centric Design methodology by constantly evalua?ng user responses to lessons and modifying teaching tools accordingly

Design Strategies

Development – Use rapid prototyping and design methods to develop courses (lessons and lectures augmented per user feedback and view counts) – Use ultra-‐low cost and open source tools in a crowdsourced model – Use Social Media marke?ng for free, leverage the power of cloud to distribute content

Design Strategies

Evalua?on: – For evalua?on of lecture style and content, measure user responsiveness and aken?on span for each lecture (use webpage stats to calculate how long users stayed at each lecture page, how many users came back to view further lectures, i.e. user reten?on) – Measure user engagement by correla?ng lecture views with par?cipa?on in quizzes associated with lectures

(Ultra-‐cheaply) Designing Shikkhok.com

•  Over summer 2012, we rapidly developed Shikkhok.com pla6orm

•  Total development cost: only US $15.00 •  Total number of registered students (first 6 months) = 20,000 (aeer 20 months, = 70,000)

•  That is, cost per registered student = US $0.00075 only!

•  Total number of courses designed = 55 •  5500 lecture views per day, from 4000 unique visitors


•  To minimize development costs – – Adapted open source CMS (Wordpress) to provide authoring pla6orm

– Mobile-‐op?mized front end – Host all media/videos on free online repositories such as Youtube, Dropbox, imgur

– Use Google forms and embedded scripts to automate user registra?on and MCQ quiz processing

•  Cost: Domain name: $5/year, 100 MB low-‐cost host: $10/year (Development (mostly wordpress theme tweaking) done by one volunteer for free)


Site design and graphics: Crowdsourced via Social network contacts (received 5 submission from a volunteer within a few hours of request on Facebook)

Insight: Social Media is extremely effecBve GeVng content and volunteers

To gather a team of volunteer teachers: –  I posted a request on Facebook – 10 volunteers signed up in 1 day – Two courses were developed by day 2 – By week 2, 5 courses were running – By week 8, 15 courses were started – By month 8, 25 courses running, with 5 courses completed

Design principles and strategies for online educaBon via a mobile phone

Plain text (not mul?media) is s?ll the king of content – Users of mobile phones have to pay per-‐KB, so less images is beker

– For videos, youtube based low-‐res streams and downloadable 3gp formats work the best

Reaching rural students: An InnovaBve DistribuBon Channel

•  A major challenge was to create a non-‐Internet based distribuBon channel to reach rural students without Internet access

•  SoluBon: Develop innova?ve distribu?on channels.

InnovaBve DistribuBon Channels: Using exisBng Social InteracBons

Our Approach: Approach 1:

•  Create short 3gp version videos; put a collec?on of courses on USB s?cks, give out to phone vendors/shops in rural bazaars.

•  Students visi?ng the bazaars can load the videos on their phones for free or for a nominal fee (charged by the vendors, not us)

•  (We found this model to be very useful, as rural bazaar phone shops are already used as a distribu?on hub for music videos/songs, and people are used to going there to load videos on their phones)

InnovaBve DistribuBon Channels: Cheap compute boards for Shikkhok Kits

Approach II –  Use ultra-‐cheap Raspberry PI computers (Each Pi costs only $35)

– We put a large number of courses on SD cards on each PI, add a donated keyboard, mouse, and ship this to rural schools. (No internet needed, we preload everything on the SD cards, and make a kiosk-‐like interface easy for even non-‐computer users)

–  The schools can hook the Pis directly with regular TVs, and have the video lectures delivered to students

SoluBons -‐ User engagement strategies that work …

To engage users in easy discussion, integra?on with exis?ng social networks is the best strategy:

–  Using wordpress na?ve commen?ng: about 2/3 comments per lecture

–  Using Facebook comments: at least 30 “like” and 5-‐10 comments, ques?ons per lecture

SoluBons -‐ MarkeBng strategies: uBlizing social media

Social media based “free” marke?ng campaigns worked very well

•  Did not use regular adver?sements, rather used Facebook and Twiker to publicize Shikkhok •  Got 3000 fans on its Facebook page within a few days •  Each lecture announcement is viewed approx. by 4200 people within one hour or so (stats via FB Insight) •  Total fans as of May 24, 2014: 24,579

What we have achieved

We demonstrated that localized strategies work beker than globalized universal MOOCs (local language based and cultural context-‐aware content is more effec?ve)

•  E.g., Unlike Khan Academy Bangla, we did not translate exis?ng MOOCs, rather developed localized content from scratch, which turned out to be more useful to students. (our video lectures viewed many ?mes more than the translated content)


•  We developed a set of tried-‐and-‐tested design principles for educa?onal content delivery over mobile internet to rural students

•  Evaluated various site design and lecture content to determine the best possible strategy and content formats that serve the mobile-‐internet-‐using rural students


•  Our user centric design and constant feedback/evalua?on loops allowed us to detect strategies that work (mobile op?mized video, Facebook Integra?on) and that do not work (e.g. live sessions with teachers using Google HangOut)

•  Constant user engagement strategy allowed us to improve our lecture content (lectures with lower user reten?on/aken?on span are re-‐wriken/developed)

What we have achieved: A micro-‐lesson model that YOU can use

Our biggest contribu?on is the generalized set of design and evalua?on principles for the development of a localized micro-‐lesson model that can be effec?vely used by e-‐learning systems in other languages in other parts of the developing world.

The results? Some numbers …

Results – some numbers …

•  Since it’s start on August 1, 2012, Shikkhok.com has –  50 online courses on diverse topics such as Bioinforma?cs, Neuroscience, Computer Programming, Finance 101, Calculus, Cloud Compu?ng, Cancer Nanotechnology

–  Total number of students registered for all courses: 70,000 (actual student count larger since registra?on isn’t mandatory) •  The Computer Security101 course alone has 3000 registered students

–  Total number of quizzes/tests taken: 50,000+

Results – some numbers …

•  Total unique visitor count in in 20 months: 1 million

•  Total lecture views in 20 months: 3 million •  80% visitors are from rural Bangladesh, using mobile phone browsers

•  Shikkhok.com is gepng 5000-‐6000 unique visitors a day

Quarterly Visitor data as for 2012-‐2014

Results, that ma5er

•  Shikkhok.com is the first e-‐learning MOOC site in Bengali language, completely free and open for everyone

•  Students from rural Bangladesh and India regularly contact us to express their sa?sfac?on:

–  “I wanted to study Computer Science, but had to drop out of school due to poverty. Shikkhok.com has given me the chance to enter the wonderful world of computer science once again” – tes?mony from a user from Jamalpur, Bangladesh

Shikkhok.com’s Awards Winner of 2013 Google RISE Award Winner of 2013 ISIF.asia Award for InnovaBon in Learning and LocalizaBon Winner of 2013 Deutsche Welle Best of Blogs and Online InnovaBon Award Winner of 2013 Internet Society Community Grant

Future goals •  To create a complete set of courses for grade 6-‐10 of

Bangladeshi school curriculum –  Project ?meline: Summer 2014 –  Technical content development begins from May 2014 –  Content distribu?on and pilot studies in several Bangladeshi schools: September-‐October 2014.

•  To create a complete set of courses for grade 11-‐12 of Bangladeshi highschool and college curriculum (Fall-‐winter 2014)

•  Reach at least 200,000 students and 100 schools by the end of 2014

Summary: What did we learn from Shikkhok.com?

•  Lesson 1: It is possible to design successful MOOC e-‐learning sites at ultra-‐cheap cost via an altruis?c volunteer model (Shikkhok cost only $15 to develop and deploy compared to $22 million for Coursera)

•  Lesson 2: Aken?on to HCI design principles such as user centric design can allow beker reten?on of users and improved aken?on to content

•  Lesson 3: To reach rural students, focus should be more on non-‐Internet based textual content designed for low-‐bandwidth mobile phone browsers

•  Lesson 4: Localized, na?ve language educa?on is more successful than the one-‐course-‐fits-‐all approach by many well-‐known MOOC sites

Ending thought? (My X)

Educate millions using ultra-‐low-‐cost Technology

IS possible

To view Shikkhok.com in ac?on •  Please visit: hkp://www.shikkhok.com

Thank You!

Ques?ons??