Pop-Up Learning Tanzania
International Rescue Committee - Airbel Impact Lab, Tanzania | 2022 | Project Management
Designing and implementing a fully at-home adaptive learning program for children in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures across Tanzania.
Roles & Skills:
Project management, project strategy and synthesis of insights
User research, human-centered design
Communication with partners and project reporting
This work was done in collaboration with Airbel Impact Lab in Tanzania.
Project Initiation
In March 2020, the Tanzanian government closed all schools due to COVID-19, leaving 10 million children to be without education for months. In July 2020, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) set out to respond to this question:
How can the IRC meet out-of-school students where they are physically and cognitively to provide them with access to engaging learning without the need for a skilled teacher during an emergency situation?
We set out to design a tablet-based adaptive learning program that could provide children whose education had been disrupted by crises access to an engaging educational programming.
Building off of the IRC’s Pop-Up program, which uses personalized game-based learning software and trained facilitators to provide supplementary education to children in need, we designed and adapted the program to be the IRC’s first fully at-home educational program. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, we created a Pop-Up program where students could learn in the safety of their own homes without the need for a skilled teacher and caregivers were responsible for charging and storing the tablet and motivating their children to use the tablet.
Design Phase
I joined the team during the design phase of the project - a six month phase to test the most efficient, COVID-19 safe ways of distributing and collecting tablets, upskilling caregivers and children on tablet usage, and providing remote support and encouragement to children and caregivers. We distributed 190 tablets reaching 313 children over 6 months.
I synthesized findings from household surveys, caregiver experience interviews, and IRC staff interviews and then identified the root causes of the major challenges experienced. Using these challenges, I led the team through brainstorming sessions on how we could change the program going into the pilot phase. Our revisions were rooted in a desire to rely more on existing systems and infrastructure.
Pilot Phase
During the pilot phase, we set out to implement the changes made to the program and measure their impacts on the efficiency of distributing and collecting tablets and providing remote support. We also were able to test the program at a larger scale and analyze the cost of program implementation. Overall, we distributed 688 tablets reaching 1,239 children over 6 months.
Following the pilot phase, I led semi-structured interviews and surveys with caregivers, teachers, and IRC staff to learn where the pilot phase and the overall project succeeded and where challenges arose. I also gathered tablet analytic data to track how much time tablets were being used. Over the course of the pilot phase, there were 573 users with at least one session of tablet usage, nearly 85% of the 688 total tablets distributed. This is most likely a low estimate, as many tablets in rural areas may not have been able to connect to the internet. During the pilot, active users averaged:
54 minutes of tablet usage per day per household
2.4 times the tablet is engaged with per day per household
33 literacy and numeracy learning units completed per day per household
100% of caregivers believed their child(ren) enjoyed learning on the tablet
Project Report
To close out the project, I synthesized our learnings, developed best practices learned from the project and compiled a final report. The Pop-Up project helped the team to identify overarching recommendations for future projects that need to be implemented on a short timeline with dynamic environments and constraints. As a result, while the report summarizes the Pop-Up project, it also lays out eight best practices and provides details on how we incorporated (or failed to incorporate) the recommendations into our project. While the insights from our project may not apply to projects in different settings and contexts, my hope was that the insights could serve as a guide to future programs to be highly impactful and effective in emergency situations.
