Founder and CEO, Teesas, Africa’s learning gateway, Mr. Osayi Izedonmwen, in this interview with Emma Okonji, speaks about the local content built around Teesas’ educational app and how the app will enhance Nigeria’s educational system from cradle. Excerpts:
Teesas developed educational app with local contents that are pre-installed in digital tablets. What is the app all about and what category of learners does the app address?
Teesas is an educational app that focuses on the delivery of education contents to pupils between 2-11 years in English and in local African languages and the contents align with national curriculum and structured to develop the total child both from academic stand point and social emotional learning. The app comes with several products like primary school educational content and the common entrance preparatory product that is designed to prepare children for secondary education. It comes with short videos, fused with animations. It also covers past exam questions of different categories of schools like the National Unity Schools, British Schools, Military Schools, Mission Schools, Private Schools, among others. We also identified the difficult learning areas for children, simplified them and embedded them into the app. The animations that are infused into the app help to meaningfully engage the pupils and give them retentive memory. The contents of the app make learning fun for children.
Who are your partners and what are their contributions in enhancing digital skills?
We partnered with one of the biggest social emotional learning company in the world, called FranklinCovey, and through the partnership, we are going to be their exclusive partner for educational content in Africa. The partnership will give us access to world-class content around leadership, collaboration and in developing some of those social emotional skills in children like accountability, and ownership. It will help us to teach children how to develop critical-centered mindset. So with our educational app, we will be addressing societal ills and teaching children how best to stay safe from societal ills. We have developed a robust educational video content around online bullying and we got one of the top Nigerian actresses, Mercy Johnson to lead the campaign. We also got the best social emotional advisors to help us develop content that will address bullying. Children will be thought how to avoid and resist bullying. Our app stands us out from others because it is a platform that helps to develop a total child. In addition to that, we focus on delivering our contents in local languages. All the major languages of Nigeria such as Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo,Tiv, Benin, Ijaw, are covered in our educational app. So our app can be used to engage children in different localities through animations that ensure learning is fun for the children.
In terms of local content development, how indigenous is the app to meet local demands?
From the structure of our office, 99 per cent of our staff members are Nigerians and we believe in the capabilities of Nigerians who are hard working. I am a firm believer that talent and intelligence are evenly distributed. What is not evenly distributed is opportunity. We employ young Nigerians, give them world-class training that will enable them to develop and reach their full potential. So from our content developers to our cinematographers, to our tech engineers and tutors, they are all Nigerians. Although we have few expatriates who provide high level expert advisory roles to help develop our Nigerian team, but the majority of our staff members are Nigerians. We are Africans and we believe in the development of the African people.
How many schools is Teesas currently engaging with in Nigeria and outside of Nigeria?
Our strategy is to partner a number of schools and at the same time, reach out to parents directly. So we do not really see the number of schools that we partner as a key metric. What we consider as key metric are the number of users on our platform. As of today, we have tens of thousands of people who are using our app on a daily basis and we are getting good feedback from the user experience.
So how do you connect with the large numbers of users on your platform?
We connect with them through our links. For example, at teesas.com, which is our website, we have customer service representative and within the first two minutes after clicking on the site, someone will pop up and say hello and ask if the user needs specific help. Aside that we also have our social media platform, which we use as means to encourage people to talk to us directly. Our app is available on the Google Play Store and the Apple iOS platform as well. Our platform is a multi-channel platform that can link with Android phones, i-phones and the web. So with the computer, Android phone or i-phone, any user can access our app with ease. Our ultimate goal is to carry all learners along without leaving anyone behind.
So what are your targets in relation to the number of learners that you want to reach with the Teesas app?
We have ambitious goals to connect with millions of users and our goals are not limited to Nigeria and Africa alone, and that is why we pride ourselves as Africa’s learning gateway. Over the next five years, our vision is to be in every African country and reaching every single undeserved community on the African continent. Currently we are in Nigeria and we are already making moves to enter into Ghana and Kenya. Before the end of the year, we will cover these African countries.
How did you assemble your team of app developers and what are the parameters for selection?
There is a rising demand for tech developers, especially in the Nigerian tech space. For organisation like us that is mission driven, we have a unique advantage to attract people who have the burning desire to add value. The truth is that our vision is not about money making, but to create significant value by transforming the educational landscape in Nigeria and the rest of Africa. That mission alone enables us to attract good talents in app development, using the quality of our mission and goals.
Is there any control on the app that protects its users from falling victims of cyber bullying and online intimidation and from entering into wrong sites like pornography sites?
I will use this question to talk a little about our sister company, call Imose Technologies, which is a core technology company, a leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of kids’ educational tablets. It has a brand of educational tablets that come with strong parental control and pre-installed Teesas educational app. So today we have the tablet and the Teesas educational app that are available at the customer care centres of telecoms operators. The Teesas app comes with the companion parent app because we want parents to be fully engaged with the education of their children and wards. When a child downloads the Teesas app for usage, the parent is expected to download the companion app on their own device so that they could monitor what the child is doing with the app and to also get real time performance feedback about the child. This is an additional service that Teesas provides on its app and it’s a unique selling point for us because not all app has such control and monitoring capabilities. The companion parent app is free for parents to download and it comes with a unique code that is linked to the child’s app to enable parents and guardians keep an eye on what the child does with the app.
How will you describe the ease of use of the Teesas app, given the fact that the children that will use the app are from different family background with different up-bringing?
What we did at the initial stage of the app development, was to carry out what we called focus group research. We had a focus group that we worked with for almost six months, testing different aspects of the app. One of the key things we tested during that period was the navigation, user experience and user interface. The purpose was to ensure that any user of the app, irrespective of the educational background, can immediately navigate and make sense out of the app at the first instance. The focus group, which comprises of app developers and children, worked until we were satisfied that we had reached our objectives. It was from the focus group research that we developed our current user interface, which users have said, it’s simple and easy to use.
What could be your choice for choosing the young age bracket for the development of the Teesas app?
We believe that early child education is key to transform the future of Africa. We also believe it is a sustainable solution to gaining economic prosperity by improving literacy rate and that is why we are focusing on children education, especially at the early stage of children. In developing the early child, we believe we will develop children to love learning, to be principled and to have in-depth knowledge of education.
What is your view about coding as essential part of digital learning, and is there any plan to infuse it into the Teesas learning app?
Coding is essential for leaning, but if I should take it further, I will say it is not advisable to build on nothing. If a child does not understand the basics like quantitative analysis, verbal reasoning, and reading skills, it will be useless building a coding scheme for such child. What I will like to see in the development of tech platforms, is the consideration for the development of a total child. Emerging technology skills like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics and Coding are good, but the child must first understand and get the basic skills on which those emerging technology skills will be built upon.
You donated educational tablets that were pre-installed with educational app to orphanage home recently. What informed such gesture?
Our mission is to liberalise access to quality education and our goal is to eliminate educational barriers. We have since discovered that under-privileged children tend to be left behind as things evolve, but we believe that no child should be left behind, in spite of their socio-economic background. When a child is an orphan and lives in a displaced people’s home, such child could be deprived of basic education if proper attention is not given to the child. So we decided that reaching those under-privilege children will be part of our corporate social responsibility. So we created the Teesas Donate Program and a portion of our revenue is used in funding the initiative. With the donate programe, we are encouraging individuals that have used or damaged tablets to donate them to us. We receive the tablets, refurbish them and make them as good as new and we will install our educational app on the tablets and deliver them for free to under-privilege children for their use. We are glad when see the excitement on the faces of the children when they are using our tablets for the first time. We delivered the refurbished tablets bundled with our educational app to the children and we just delivered some to Little Saints Orphanage (Abule Egba Home) in Lagos recently. We not only give them the tablets bundled with our educational app, we also give them internet access for one year.
How many of the tablets were donated. Are they enabled with internet access?
We donated 25 pieces of the tablets to Little Saints Orphanage in Lagos and the tablets were internet enabled. They come with accessories like charger, and earpiece that could enable them enjoy any content without distracting anyone close to them.
Do you have any form of support from government and the private sector to drive the Teesas Donate Program?
As at the moment, we do not have support from government but we will like to collaborate with government and the private organisations on large scale to enable us reach out to many children who are in need of the digital learning tool. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that the learning processes of children are uninterrupted.
