Ready to Launch
Sam Bhattacharyya
Ready to Launch
Hi all,
We began dot Learn with the crazy ambitious idea of making online learning work for the 6 billion people without laptops or broadband, and today we got just a little bit closer to that vision.
After months of hard work by our team, both in Accra and Boston, we’ve finally launched our pilot service in Ghana: a data-light Khan-Academy like app enabling students in Ghana, and soon in Nigeria to study for the WASSCE exam, the West African version of the SATs.
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Our app[/caption]
The road to launch:
Over the last two months half of our team has been in Accra doing usability tests, focus groups and interviews with students all over the city, trying to understand the lives of Ghanain secondary students at a deep level, and build something that really works for them.
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Focus groups with students[/caption]
The other half of our team in Boston has been putting in days and nights developing our core technology, and building our student-facing app.
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Emiliano discussing our video vectorization work[/caption]
The road here hasn’t been easy.The first time we should our prototype to students we were quite humbled. Basically, out product sucked. But with tight-knit teamwork between our market research team in Accra, our development team in Boston, we were able to rapidly iterate in a number of design sprints until we converged on our beta platform.
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Iterating on our design[/caption]
You can check out the app in the playstore here, using the promo-code “BLOG”.
Next steps:
I’m extremely happy and fortunate that we’ve made it thus far, but this is just the beginning and we have a very long way to go. For us, next steps include expanding our content base and growing our userbase and make sure we can solve this problem in Ghana, before we expand to Nigeria. It does feel slow at times, given our decision to focus on a student-facing app. As a bunch of engineers by trade, concepts like marketing are new to us (by the way, we’re looking for a good Ghanain marketer if you know one!). But we’re dead-serious about tackling this global problem, and making online education accessible, one student at a time.
-Sam