A Holistic Approach to Creating Inclusive Employment Opportunities for Low-income Communities

Abstraksi

As the world changes rapidly, education and training need to evolve to ensure that future generations have the necessary skills to prepare them for the workforce of today and the future. While education needs to evolve, it also needs to become more accessible to the millions of young people who are restricted from education by poverty, diversity politics, gender, disability, armed conflict, and displacement. Technology is a viable solution to this. Today, smartphones and the internet touch the lives of many of the people that education currently fails to reach. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index Report in 2018, by 2022, 60% of the world will have a basic smartphone with intermittent internet connectivity. The education technology industry has identified this opportunity and is creating software with this particular target market in mind. However, the current educational innovations are not affordable to all and instead perpetuates the cycle of inequality by prioritising learners who can afford their products and services. Most education technology products are created for well-developed broadband networks on high-end devices, yet most broadband networks in emerging markets are not well developed and the most sophisticated access point is a low- to mid-end smartphone. We believe software systems for Education Technology (EdTech) can be designed to function with low bandwidth, intermittent connectivity, and low computer-power. To develop such technology is a challenging task and one which is rarely tackled because of its low monetary returns. Moreover, the vast majority of the existing products assume users’ motivation to learn. We understand that when learners are marginalised from education and employment, it is nearly impossible to be motivated to learn. With this in mind, we use evidence from successful game developers to create a game so engaging that learners become addicted to playing, and to learning. Once that motivation has grown, the path is set for learners to develop a deeper motivation to become lifelong learners. At Solve Education!, a not-for-profit EdTech organisation, our vision is a world where all learners can empower themselves. We seek to use technology to bring free, engaging educational software to mid-range phones with intermittent internet connectivity that will soon cover the globe. We believe that when one can modify traditional pedagogical approaches to ride on prevalent technologies and broadband networks, one will be able to create a scalable and sustainable approach to education for large numbers of the young, especially the marginalised. In this paper we will elaborate our 3Es approach, which stands for Educate, Evaluate, Empower: Educate We created a complex yet accessible Android-based game application called Dawn of Civilization (DOC) to help young people develop their thirst for learning and improve their income prospects. We combine learning and game mechanics frameworks with social media elements, artificial intelligence, and data to develop engaging educational opportunities to learners who otherwise would not have access to good quality schooling. We linked pedagogical practices to concrete game mechanics which are directly related to player actions. By doing so, we hope to engage and retain young people in a stimulating learning environment by creating an app that offers a sense of novelty and virality. The DOC architecture is divided into two significant parts: a meta-game and mini-games/bite-sized lessons. The meta-game is designed to retain learners so that they will continue learning. The meta-game is a city simulation game where learners can create and manage a city as a mayor. They can construct buildings, place landmarks, or earn taxes from their citizens. To build things in the city, they need resources and reward cards, which can be obtained by playing the mini-games. The mini-games are essentially the curriculum, designed to help learners learn knowledge and skills in an engaging way. Evaluate To monitor and evaluate the teaching and learning process, Solve Education! has created a web-based learning analytics portal called Learnalytics. The platform was created to cater to the needs of those who hold an interest in following the learning progress of their learners through DOC. It provides personalised learning scorecards and learning behaviour reports, all through highly intuitive visual presentations. Not only does Learnalytics provide individual student reports, but it also accommodates group analytics for leaders of large student groups such as teachers or training managers. Based on the analysis of the learners’ lagging areas of learning, Learnalytics also provides suggestions for extra activities that will assist them in catching up. Our focus on learners’ learning process and behaviour to leverage their learning outcomes are what primarily distinguishes Learnalytics from other learning analytics platforms. Empower To incentivise learners' learning progress, Solve Education! is developing an online job portal called Solve Employment! (SEmp!) as an exciting extension of DOC. We link learners’ success in DOC with internship and employment opportunities in SEmp!. After learners reach a certain level in DOC, they are invited to access the platform where they have the opportunity to work on crucial micro-tasks such as indexing, labelling, localisation, and many more. SEmp! is a safe place for underserved youth to refine their skills before they go into a more competitive marketplace. Specifically to the Indonesian context, we have grown our learning community, particularly in Indonesia to 9150 learners who typically come from a low-income background with an average household income equal to or lower than USD11 per week. We have also monitored and evaluated over 20,515 learning hours within 28,295 sessions through Learnalytics. The number would not be possible without our ongoing partnerships with local communities on the ground who helped us reached out to our target beneficiaries. To conclude, what we do has the exciting potential to enable transformative learning experiences for learners in Indonesia and across the globe. Although we believe in the power of technology, we are also a strong proponent of a holistic approach to delivering the educational intervention to the learners. That is why we actively engage parents, schools, and local organisations on the ground to collaborate and help learners realise their full potential to break cycles of poverty and participate in the future of work.