There are many diverse players in the edtech landscape. They hope to expand access to education, democratize it, disrupt the classroom, flip it, blend it, open it, personalize it. All these might be understood as strategies to accomplish a similar goal. They seek to make an impact on the education process so that more students can learn in a more effective manner. But in Lagos, Nigeria, one edtech startup isn’t trying to reinvent pedagogy. One might say they deal with big data, so to speak, but they’re trying to make it smaller. The team at dot Learn have one primary wrench in their tool box: a compression algorithm.

This is the first article in a series on the burgeoning edtech scene in West Africa.

When co-founder and COO Tunde Alawode was a student in Lagos, there was only one library in the city of over 20 million that offered public WiFi. Sam Bhattacharyya—who met Alawode at MIT—faced similar issues while serving in the Peace Corps in rural Mexico. He was there to teach math and science.

“I had tried to use Kahn Academy and things like that with the students I’d been teaching,” Bhattacharyya said. “While that certainly would have been possible for most people in the US, most of my students didn’t have internet or the devices to watch the videos. That kind of frustrated me, which got me starting to think about this problem.”

dot Learn’s Work Around

The two created an algorithm that could reduce a video file to 1/60 its original size while also improving the quality. It’s optimized to make educational content accessible via a 2G mobile connection. dot Learn has won several awards and competitions. In March, they colleted The Varkey Foundation’s Next Billion edtech prize.

Alawode and Bhattacharyya initially envisioned creating an education platform with their own content, optimized for learners in areas with poor or expensive internet connection. “We realized how difficult it was to scale an online education platform in West Africa,” Bhattacharyya said. “We realized we might as well just double down on our technology and work with other people who already have user bases in sub-Saharan Africa, or South Asia, or other parts of the developing world.”

“So we pivoted to more of a peer-to-peer technology, helping other tech companies in the developing world, make their videos data-light by using our direct-to-base technology, sometime around last year. So that’s essentially what we’re doing right now, we partner with ed tech companies in the developing world to help them make their online video offerings much more data-light so they can reach more users and their users are more happy and they can get more growth and all of that good stuff.”

Because of the differences in ICT infrastructure between the developed and the developing world, the edtech sector in each must must optimize for different conditions. 

“There’s a huge disconnect between the way that people think about the internet in say the US or Europe and the way that people think about it in many parts of the developing world,” Bhattacharyya said. “For many people in the US, myself included, the internet was something that you connected to first on a computer that was connected to a dial-up modem, and then a laptop connected to a fixed broadband connection, whether it was fiber-optic or like a cable modem or whatever. When you consider the idea of learning online, the idea of taking your laptop, sitting in your living room, or whatever, sitting on the couch, getting a cup of coffee, and taking coding tutorials about marketing, or learning about 19^th century art via an online course, that seems totally normal. But when you consider how people connect to the internet in the developing world, it’s quite different.”

“The first wave of online education was never really designed for the way that most people actually connect to the Internet in the developing world, which is why most ed tech companies that operate in the developing world have focused on mobile and other things like that. Imagine a sixteen-year-old kid who has a cheap Android smartphone, who bought it from some street seller or one of those market stalls—that’s their primary source of connection to the Internet.”

“These are very cost-sensitive people. To give an example, a lot of the phones that you could buy in India, or say in a country like Nigeria, come with multiple SIM cards, because the phones that they buy are designed for people who want to put multiple SIM cards, so that they can connect to the mobile provider that’s offering the cheapest rates at any given time. So sometimes one network will provide a promotion on data or minutes or whatever on the weekends, and another provider might have free minutes or something, so that’s how cost-sensitive these people are, and for a lot of users, the Internet is Facebook or What’sApp, that’s what they think the Internet is. And Facebook and What’sApp and Google, they’re not really aware that the Internet is a much broader ecosystem than that. Forget about laptops, forget about all of those other things. There are definitely people with laptops in Nigeria and India, but we’re talking about wealthy, upper middle-class people versus the average Nigerian or the average Indian.”

According to Bhaccaryya, connectivity issues are improving, but there’s still a long way to go.

Connectivity Will Still Be an Issue for Some Time 

“I think it’s a two-pronged thing. One is that the costs are going down and they have been going down. What most people fail to realize, though, is that they’re not going down substantially as quickly as you would think. Even I’m skeptical sometimes about whether one day in ten years or five years, data’s not going to be an issue, but even if I think about it that way, I ask my own employees, my co-founder, and everyone else who has been living and working in Nigeria, they emphatically say, “Why do you think that? I’m 100% certain that data will still be an issue in five, ten years.” Even from ten years ago till today, people have had Internet, but it hasn’t gotten cheap enough, quickly enough.”

“The prices of data seem to go down about 50% every three to four years, but if you talk for example about a place like Kenya, where an hour of video still costs something like two or three dollars to stream, then you’d have to wait ten to fifteen years before people stop really thinking about how expensive the data is. The question on one is, yes, prices are getting cheap, the question is, “How cheap?” or “How quickly will it get cheaper?” Based on our research with the IT use done with the telecommunications union, puts out a report every year talking about interconnectivity and data that we can look up, and it seems like it will be ten to fifteen years before data stops being an issue for most people.”

“And then the other bit is that if you actually look at the breakdown of 4G, 3G, and 2G in the developing world, or even 5G now, people have access to 4G, but that doesn’t mean that people necessarily use 4G. And even then, 3G use is still growing, and it will be growing until the mid-2020s. What a lot of people don’t realize is that around 46% of the world still isn’t even connected to the Internet, so there’s still a lot of growth in mobile Internet connectivity in the first place. So while people who already have Internet are moving 3G to 4G, or 4G to 5G, there’s still people who aren’t connected at all and they’re moving to 2G or to 3G. So that’s where a lot of the growth for a lot of these companies will come from in the future, especially in the developing world. If you look at a country like India, the first ed tech companies that have gotten successful now, that started about five years ago, have gotten successful pretty much from users in big, large cities, but that only accounts for like twenty to thirty percent of the population, and now the majority of their growth will have to come from second-tier or third-tier rural areas, where people still have only 2G or 3G connectivity. As more people get connected to the Internet, their possible market grows, and essentially what we do is we just speed up that process.”

dot Learn is currently working with numerous educators to make their content cheaper and more accessible.

“There’s a company in Indonesia with ten million monthly active users; they have Kahn Academy-style videos and right now a lot of their traffic is online, but most of it’s on mobile. Online data is still so expensive in Indonesia, to be fair it’s gotten cheaper in the last couple of years, but it’s still very expensive for a lot of people. So what they do is they sell USB sticks and CDs with their full catalogue library. So a student can order the high school package for math and he’ll get a CD in the mail, because that’s still cheaper than streaming all of those videos, which is kind of crazy when you think about it.”

“Another company is based in South Africa that’s doing the same thing; rather than CDs they sell SD cards, but it’s the same concept. They have high school math-level courses that help students prepare for the national exams, it’s kind of like a for-profit Kahn Academy. There’s another company that does MOOCs focused on universities. They help universities provide online courses to students in West Africa, so that students can take an online degree. Unfortunately, one of the big barriers to that is the video file size. Whenever a student signs up for a semester, they get mailed a USB stick full of videos to watch. It’s kind of online education, but not really. I hope that’s illustrative of the fact that there are companies that are doing this kind of stuff, they’re all kind of working around the data infrastructure problem in a lot of these places.”

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UNESCO Mobile Learning Week 2017. Source: ITU Pictures, Flickr.

At the end of March, UNESCO conducted their annual Mobile Learning Week. The event is the organization’s flagship ICT conference. Their theme this year was “Skills for a connected world.” The conference included a wide variety of presentations and symposiums that went far beyond mobile learning. In tandem with the event, UNESCO released its latest report which focused specifically on the role mobile learning can play in refugee communities. “A Lifeline to Learning: Leveraging Mobile Technology to Support Refugee Education” compiled all available research on the subject and looked into several ongoing initiatives.

It goes without saying that education cannot be neglected for any person, full stop. A gap in a country’s education stands as one of the major secondary factors of war and conflict. If a large body of people go without a sufficient education, it only complicates and diminishes a country’s ability to recover. Despite this, education initiatives historically receive scant resources from humanitarian aid. In 2013, according to the UNESCO report, only 2% of the worldwide aid budget went to education.

Mobile devices are widely sought out in refugee communities for several reasons. UNESCO authors found that 39% of refugee households own at least one phone with internet capabilities. Another 32% own at least one basic phone. Educators have already begun to implement mobile technology as an aid in the classroom. In many situations, it has had a dramatic effect on the educational process.

It might be unrealistic for many to read the full 95 page UNESCO study cover to cover, so we have condensed a few interesting and/or instructive takeaways below.

Takeaways from the UNESCO Report

To begin, the last time there were this many people displaced by war, violence, or persecution was at the end of World War II. There are currently 65 million people forcibly displaced, and the number of those who have left their home country for other reasons—such as improving their socioeconomic situations—is even higher. Between 40% and 50% of these are children.

What’s more, the average time spent in exile is increasing. In 1993, refugees spent an average of nine years before they either returned home or were granted asylum in another country. Today, that average timespan is twenty years. As the authors note, “This time span, which is longer than an entire formal education cycle and can cover large parts of a person’s working life, clearly underlines the shortsightedness of all provisional solutions or quick fixes.”

Educators Teaching Refugees Face Unique Challenges

The simplest and of these challenges is the sheer scarcity of educators. A previous UNHCR Education Strategy recommended that one teacher should instruct, at the very most, 40 students per class. Many of the mobile learning initiatives explored in the study have been carried out in classrooms where the teacher-student ratio stands at 1:100 or higher. The authors write, “With a global rise of 30 per cent in 2014 only, the increasing number of school-age refugees further exacerbates the issue of availability of qualified teachers. It is estimated that at least 20,000 additional teachers and 12,000 additional classrooms would be needed on a yearly basis.” What’s more, a wide variety of factors make it more difficult to teach a class of refugees than one comprised of patriated students.

Mobile Technology Tends to Help in Very Simple Ways

Refugee communities tend to be hectic. People are constantly arriving and moving about, seeking access to government services, healthcare, food, and employment. Still, a large majority of refugees have access to mobile technology, which is crucial for community organizing. What’s more, establishing trust between government organizations and displaced people can be difficult.

“In dynamic contexts, such as upon arrival and during resettlement,” the authors write, “refugees are not only overwhelmed with information but also skeptical of official institutions, as in their home countries these can be the main sources of repression and persecution. With its potential to forward and spread messages across trusted sources, digital and mobile social media channels can be leveraged to inform refugees of education-related opportunities and deliver digital learning and educational courses. Social media campaigns require collaboration with people trusted by refugees, including other refugees, volunteers, activists and NGOs on the ground. Mobile network operators and social media providers recommended by trusted acquaintances and networks are the critical partners to reach refugees.”

Examples of Mobile Technology in the Classroom

Little academic research exists on the efficacy of using mobile technology to supplement education in refugee communities. But there’s no lack of examples. While a classroom in a developed country might use mobile technology to explore 3D animation with augmented reality or discover historical sites with VR, many refugee educators use their devices more for connecting via SMS or blended learning.

According to the UNESCO authors, “The Teachers for Teachers project in Kenya incorporates a rich professional teacher development approach with a mobile mentoring element. After onsite training, and in addition to a face-to-face coaching component, mobile instant messaging is used to facilitate continuous learning and ongoing support. The project operates in the Kenyan refugee camp of Kakuma, where the student/teacher ratio is about 100:1. Less than one-third of the teachers are trained, and the great majority of them are refugees themselves. Many of them may not have benefited from systematic schooling, and some struggle with psychosocial and emotional issues stemming from their experiences as refugees (Mendenhall, 2017; Teachers College, n.d.).”

“The Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project provides teacher training to qualify untrained teachers in the Kenyan refugee camps of Dadaab. While the main lecturing component takes place onsite, students can use tablets to access a learning management system that features textbooks, videos and articles.”

“Similarly, the Connect to Learn (CTL) programme enables Syrian teachers in Iraq’s Domiz refugee camp to access digital resources via a cloud-based server. The content focuses on social-emotional skills, literacy and numeracy, and teachers can also use the technology to share their experiences with peers across the different camp schools (Dahya, 2016). Teacher training programmes have also started to leverage blended learning through massive open online courses, known as MOOCs. Examples of online teacher training are Edraak (‘realization’ in Arabic), an Arabic-language MOOC platform implemented by the Queen Rania Foundation, or the Jesuit Worldwide Learning (JWL) teacher training programme (Gladwell et al., 2016a).”

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