Soqqle Social Online Learning for Education

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Inspiration

Current online learning software lacks critically important tools to encourage student positivity (eg. mental health due to isolation), engagement, and collaboration needed for personalized learning, which was supported offline before.

After lessons are conducted, teachers and students need to engage for assessments and feedback. Traditionally, teachers manage these with classroom time and practicals, not available now. Online learning needs to not only “meet” the benefits of in-person learning, but exceed it with use of modern digital capabilities.

There are no current solutions that provide both one on one and group engagement effectively.

Existing lesson delivery apps (eg. Zoom) do not fit collaborative assessments especially related to feedback
In a recent external hashtag task about Home Based Learning, 30% were negative-emotion (50% neutral). Whatsapp is difficult for group communication without being bombarded (based on teacher interviews). Forums have a low participation rate(reported 12-16%).
4 of 5 students we interview link mainstream social apps (eg Facebook, Instagram) with personal boundaries not fit for learning

What it does

The mobile application will be a new way for teachers to motivate and engage with their students in a digital way. They can create tasks that are social and digital-native (pictures, images) and encourage peer to peer interactions that are more interesting like likes / comments. Teachers create private codes first, then share it with their students to create rooms. It will be blended into their lesson plans. A website dashboard is also available with learning analytics for teachers to learn more about their students.

How I built it

Firstly in terms of user needs, we speak to a lot of educators to discover their problems with student engagement, especially the transition from classroom to online. At the same time there is a need to understand post-covid use. The good news is that even after going back to the classroom, such a tool is still in demand. Social Learning and Formative assessments (our strength) leading to Collaborative Learning is a rising demand in the education sector.

We started with a simple MVP with AWS, React Native and Node with features that are close to up to date social apps (likes, comments, swiping gestures). We recently had to incorporate learning analytics to help teachers understand the learning progress.

Challenges I ran into

Managing the large amount of learning data that is generated for our beta users. There is seemingly a large potential of how they could benefit from the information. We need to spend more time to understand the learning objectives, lessons plans and blend it into a semester.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We managed to secure 2 best educational institutions from Singapore. Including a few from Indonesia to help us expand and understand user needs better.

What I learned

There is a big opportunity in collaborative online learning for education. There is a need to help educators to manage their students online. One major need is to understand student motivations and emotional issues. Traditionally these was done face to face but is a major challenge online.