Profile for the 3rd winner of the Innovating Education in Africa Expo 2020

Title of Innovation: Chalkboard Education

Organisation Implementing Innovation
Chalkboard Education

Country/Countries of Implementation
Ghana, Rwanda

Short description of innovation
A remote teaching and learning toolkit aimed to help teachers and parents during
the COVID-19 crisis

Need which Innovation Targets
We at CHALKBOARD EDUCATION understand that schools are keen on ensuring continued access to uninterrupted teaching for pupils in low and middle income communities by rolling out a distance learning programme during this COVID-19 crisis.
We ensure seamless distribution of the content to geographically scattered audiences while ensuring continuous, uninterrupted access to courses while tracking activity and progress while supporting teachers implement distance learning via technology for the first time with no previous training.

How the Innovation functions
Our application is unique in that we responded to the national need to support teachers in 3 ways during the COVID 19 school closures;
1. We provided them training to reskill themselves from trained in person programmes to online and distance learning teachers. We developed content relevant to our reality in terms of connectivity, devices and factored in cultural and social norms.
2. After the training, teachers rolled out distance learning programmes via our application, this was the first time they adopted technology in teaching and learning. They were able to create, distribute, track and adapt their classes based on data they analysed on our dashboard.
3. Pupils received and continued their learning directly on their devices, this ensured that the interruption to their learning was minimal. Our low data consumption model ensure that students did not drop out owing to the financial cost of e-learning.

Business Model
Our business model is a B2B approach where we would partner with financially capable institutions to whose corporate social responsibility focuses on education.
These institutions would therefore sponsor teachers, meaning it would be free of charge to the teachers .
Our partners would attain their corporate social responsibility goals by supporting teachers obtain continous professional development.

Sustainability/Scalability
After the first phase of the pilot, we will roll out a business to client approach and the teachers would pay a subscription fee to continue their professional development. We would on board 1,000 new teachers each quarter and target $10,000 per quarter.

Impact/Success
Client: Jackson Educational Complex
Country: Ghana
Date: 2018-2020
Project description: The e-library consists of an electronic version of the modules used in teaching and learning at each stage of the academic pursuit at Jackson College of Education.
Chalkboard Education is distributing training material from Jackson Educational Complex to over 10,000 of their students in all 16 regions of Ghana.
Client: Opportunity International
Country: Ghana
Date: May 2019-December 2019

Project description: To develop and pilot a customised learning management system (LMS) to support schools in the EduQuality program. The EduQuality team developed an LMS to digitally deliver core components of the holistic school development program that serves school leaders and teachers. With offline capability, the adapted digital content is available after a one-time download via
mobile tablets. This will complement in person training facilitated by a team of local Education Specialists.
Client: Opportunity International and Instill Education
Country: Uganda
Date: September 2019 to March 2020

Project description: To develop and pilot a customised teacher training program to improve the in-service teaching outcomes. The project was highly adaptive and involved creation of training material as the programme was ongoing.

With access to our management dashboard Opportunity International assessed user-engagement data that informed the development of the next training programme.

Video on Innovation