How education technology is speeding up assessment

While that worried their principal and teachers, students liked it that way because they did not like taking their performance report forms home. 

Tucked in the interior of Homa Bay county, the school has no access to electricity, and most students come from poor families. The lack of report forms made it hard for the parents to monitor their children's performance closely.

However, in 2020, Maurice Omollo, the principal, enlisted the services of Zeraki Analytics, an educational technology (edtech) company, to expedite analysis management and generation of students' academic databases, including performance report forms.

"When we started using Zeraki, it became effortless to analyse and create performance report forms in a short time. We can finish exams in the morning and close in the afternoon with everything done excellently," he says.

To address the problem of students hiding their reports from their parents, the principal says, through Zeraki Analytics, he sends the parents their children's results even before closing. 

Isaac Nyangolo, an engineering alumnus of Harvard University and Mang'u High School's top student in the class of 2001, founded two sister edtech companies in 2016: Zeraki Analytics and Zeraki Learning.

Nyangolo was after finding solutions in a programme that he was working on in another company before he moved out to run his start-up. From 2010 to 2014, he was one of the heads of technology at the Equity Group Foundation and the Wings to Fly programme.

As the company's tech expert, he ensured their systems ran smoothly. However, he says they had difficulty collecting students' performance information on time. At the same time, the company was looking for a way to help the students who were falling behind in class to boost their performance.

Having a tech background and responsibility in the company, he moved to find ways to solve these challenges. It was out of this that Zeraki Analytics and Zeraki Learning would arise in 2016.

SAFE CLOUD-BASED SOLUTIONS 

Zeraki Analytics uses technology to analyse and manage big data from students in the nearly 50,000 Kenyan schools where it is being used.  Besides managing students' databases, it analyses their performance, measured down to the classroom CATs, and generates performance reports with the touch of a button.

Zeraki Analytics prides itself in staying on the cutting edge of the edtech frontier through cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions.

"We built it to primarily work on the phone because almost every high school teacher has a smartphone," Nyangolo says.  

"They need to download the Zeraki App and do data entry on the same phone without a need to go to the school's office."

By the system being cloud-based, it means that a task that was formerly tied to a specific geographical location can be done from anywhere if one has access to the Internet and a device, such as a smartphone or a tablet.

The app has a dashboard where a class teacher has access to their class and can thus view real-time the performance of their students as teachers update the results anytime, anywhere.

The app also has a dashboard for a parent or guardian of every student, who can also view real-time the performance of their child even before schools close. 

Nyangolo says the parents' dashboard has proven to be robust in tracking a child's performance, as a parent can closely monitor their child's performance without necessarily waiting for class meetings or academic clinics to be scheduled by the school.

"About two years ago, I was chatting with a teacher from Maryhill Girls' High School, and he said they published an exam and a particular class had not done well," he said.

"Two days later, parents started streaming to the school to inquire about the dismal performance of their daughters."  

For parents who do not have a smartphone, the application enables bulk messaging. Thus, when an exam result is out, an admin can prompt the system to send the results to the parent.

To protect the students' data and privacy, the parents' dashboard is tailored to be viewed by a particular registered parent, and they can only access their child's performance.

For each school, there is an admin who can add or remove students and parents from the platform. The admin has more exclusive rights than other people, such as teachers and parents. For example, a teacher can view the results of all students in a school but can't change them unless they are a class teacher with rights to the class teacher section. However, a teacher can add and edit the results of their subject on the system. 

Nyangolo says having a school database on the cloud is more secure than in the computer "because even if your device gets corrupted, your data will still be safe".

Principal Omollo said when he got Zeraki Analytics, he bought a solar panel and a printer for his school. "So we do everything on the phone, but for physical reports and accountability, we print them and give copies to students," he says.

Zeraki Analytics came as a problem solver because we had challenges and we would end up not getting the results at the end of the term

VIRTUAL CLASSROOM

Nyangolo says Zeraki Learning was also created to augment the classroom lessons by a teacher, "so that students who fail to grasp the concept taught in class can refer to another teacher, albeit a digital one".

Due to increasing numbers of students in classrooms, he says, likely, many students in a class won't get the concept being taught in class unless it is repeated.

To address that challenge, Zeraki created a lesson by digital lesson classes for the whole high school curriculum for all the subjects examined. 

To produce the digital lessons, the company partnered with teachers across the country to make video lessons for all 15 high school subjects, from Form 1 to Form 4. The teachers were derived from the traditional "big name" schools and other schools because "we realised there are incredible teachers in the so-called small schools". 

The content was reviewed and approved by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) before it was released on the platform. 

In 2020, the company partnered with the Mastercard Foundation to provide the lessons freely to any students who want to access them. However, the agreement for the partnership ended in 2021, and the company will soon start charging for the lessons. 

Once one logs into the platform, one can watch the lessons or download them to the device for later viewing. 

Zeraki Learning was created in 2016 together with Zeraki Analytics. Still, unlike its Analytics sister, Learning was slowly accepted until the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world and disrupted regular physical class learning.

This year, the company partnered with telco giant Safaricom to make the lessons "very affordable" to almost any student. In the partnership, Safaricom created an affordable education Internet bundle for learners who want to access the platform. 

"In the future, we are planning to charge for the platform in a way that those schools that can afford to pay for the system can pay and somewhat cross-subsidise and leverage the ones who can't afford it," Nyangolo says.

Lawrence Mungai, the deputy principal at Mang'u High School, says Zeraki Analytics "came as a problem solver because we had challenges with the various systems that would come, and at the end of the day, we would end up not getting the results at the end of the term".

He says the platform is a significant source of reference when they write a report or a transcript for a student. 

Mungai says Zeraki Learning has been helpful, especially during the holidays, because it helps learners revise independently.

"Practical experiments for the sciences are also a huge plus to the learners because whether you are in Mang'u or any other school, hardly can you find a teacher repeating all the experiments from Form 1 to 4, but all the experiments have been recorded in the platform, and one can refer any time they want," he said.

Elsewhere in Nairobi, a primary school has embraced edtech for its classroom learning and even exams as it moves away from print materials.

Francis Ndung'u, a teacher at Subi Educational Centre Marurui in Nairobi, says the primary school has been using digital learning materials provided by Kytabu, another edtech company. 

The teacher says the company gave the school the application for free. In addition, the company also donated smartphones to enable pupils from Class 6 to 8 to use digital learning app.

"The pupils access the textbooks, storybooks and past papers on the Kytabu app using the smartphones we were given," he says.

"They also do their exams on smartphones except for English and Kiswahili compositions, which they write on paper."

To protect the integrity of the exams, smartphones are not connected to the Internet, and the books' windows are locked during exams to avoid cheating.

Tony Ndung'u (not related to Francis Ndung'u), the founder of Kytabu, says the application is currently being used in 6,000 primary schools in Kenya. His team is also working to incorporate CBC content and training materials into Kytabu in tandem with the CBC curriculum.

Five years from now, we should stop using printed materials because they are expensive and wear out easily.  We are already encouraging publishers to have a digital version of every book they print

EDTECH'S FUTURE 

Bethuel Kurgat, the implementation manager of Optimum Computer Systems Ltd, another edtech company with a considerable footprint in TVET institutions, says they have started offering their tech solutions to secondary education. 

Currently, they have a presence in 10 secondary schools. Unlike other edtech solutions, which focus on students' learning and performance, Kurgat says Optimum Computer Systems integrates all the systems of various departments for central and easy management.

Prof Charles Ong'ondi, the CEO of KICD, says with the proliferation of technology, many people are coming up with edtech platforms. However, "most of them are picked from other countries, and we reject them because they don't address our children's learning needs".

He says KICD has listed all the vetted edtech platforms on the Kenya Education Cloud for easy reference of schools and parents.

However, the professor says KICD is embracing technology in education because "that's where the whole world is going". 

"Five years from now, we should stop using printed materials because they are expensive and wear out easily. We are already encouraging publishers to have a digital version of every book they print."

To ensure equitable distribution of education technology, the professor says "every child will have a tablet, or they will share with two or three students, just like books". 

There are already efforts in readiness for ICT education in the country. "It's just a matter of time before we fully embrace technology."