In the second sprint, we looked at ways to bridge that gap by re-connecting children with teachers over the phone, using video calls over WhatsApp.
We provided 200 further children with laptops, and video content. Now that we knew video content ‘worked’, Deaf Reach teachers recorded and shared further videos to cover four key subjects: Urdu, Science, Mathematics, and English.
This time, half the participating children were given a smartphone, and we ran a series of onboarding sessions to help them learn how to use it. They were asked to make WhatsApp video calls to teachers, twice a week.
Again, we ran tests with the children at the start and end of the sprint, and conducted surveys with them and with their parents.
The children who had been given smartphones didn’t spend more days per week learning (as we’d expected), but they did perform 35% better in tests than the children without smartphones. 93% of users with smartphones found the expanded content ‘easy to navigate’ – compared to 73% of non-smartphone users. This might have played a part in the improvement.
Of course, providing smartphones added a lot of cost, and wouldn’t be easy to scale up. If they get used at all, the best use of smartphones might be to provide them to under-performing children, where the extra direct teacher contact can make the biggest difference.