Rocket Learning

7 Nov

MLC Vanguard | Created by Rocket Learning

Rocket Learning is one of India's leading non-profits focused on catalyzing early childhood education (ECE) and community engagement. We link the government school and Anganwadi system with parents, using technology, media and social influence techniques.

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1,000,000 Lives Impacted

Rocket learning impacts their clients through three forms. Firstly, it influences the behavioural change of parents and Anganwadi (day care centre) workers, for instance by increasing in time spent on education with children, measured through user engagement and response rates in the Whatsapp groups. For example, an external evaluation showed that parents in our programme doubled the amount of time they spent on learning-oriented, play-based activities with their children as compared to a control. In terms of engagement on the platform, we see that 30% of parents are engaged with us even after 18 months in the programme.

Secondly, it improves children’s learning outcomes across ECE domains – cognitive skills, physical skills, social-emotional skills (including executive function), early literacy, and early numeracy. We have seen 30% improvement across learning domains for children who engage in our programme over 6-9 months.

Thirdly, Rocket Learning increases parental knowledge, parental engagement with schools and parental confidence. Through parent surveys’ responses, we have seen that parents are far more likely to want to engage with their children and want to continue engaging with their children even after they start going to school. We expect this to have knock-on effects on parental engagement and participation in learning in the long term.

The Innovation

Quality ECE ensures school readiness, substantially increases school completion and lifelong earnings, and frees up parents (especially women) to enter formal employment. However, over 40 million low-income children in India between the age of 3-6 can't access quality ECE.

Rocket Learning aims to solve this problem at massive scale, leveraging recent technology headwinds in India and building a unique behavioral change product specifically for the low-income parent and child. India is a country with almost 750 million smartphone users and 500 million Whatsapp users - 70% of low-income children going to government daycare centers have smartphones in their household and this number will reach 90% soon. Capitalising on the high use of the app, we built our platform through Whatsapp, limiting our content to <5MB per video so we don't breach their data limits. We work with a low tech front end but a very sophisticated back end - our tech platform lets us send academic content to parents in thousands of groups everyday at the same time, rather than going through the leaky information cascade (state->district->headteacher->teacher->parent) which makes it hard for the content to trickle down to the parent level.

Our core model consists of a two way communication, live presence of a facilitator (teacher or supervisor) and group peer effects. We also use motivational and behavioral nudges - our tech lets us send real-time "report" cards based on participation, badges and certificates, and weekly video compilations of children's activities to keep parents and teachers engaged. Currently, we’re developing models to automatically grade responses and send personalised support to individual parents and children - this is aided by the 17 million parent and teacher responses we’ve received so far and the 75 million views of our content. Our end goal is that Rocket Learning allows public schools in developing markets to create a home-school digital connection in the form of a first of its kind National Parent Platform.