an AI-personalized learning support for those that need it most
Why Rori?
The solution to many of our shared global challenges begins with education; yet across the world, education is in deep crisis, and progress towards the education-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is badly off track. This is a crisis of equity, quality, and relevance that is affecting every country in the world. While slow-burning and often unseen, the education crisis is already having a devastating impact on the lives of millions of young people, particularly the most marginalized. Unless we act now, its impact on our collective pursuit of peace, justice, human rights, gender equality, and sustainable development will be felt for decades to come.
- 6bn children were hit by school closures in 2020/21. In West Africa children spent less than 35 minutes per day on education related activities, more than a 90% drop on normal education hours. (IDInsight 2021)
- Approx. 244 million children and youth are out of school
- And even if children are in school, they aren’t learning: In Africa, 88% of children finish Grade 9 without learning to read, write or do basic maths, impairing their future life chances. (UNESCO 2017; Kaffenberger and Pritchett 2020)
- But despite the growing size of the private tutoring market, access to high quality provision is out of reach for the vast majority of children. (LEK & SACMEQ 2021)
….. With RORI we can change that!
Here comes RORI!
RORI is and AI-powered chatbot that provides personalized maths tutoring via WhatsApp.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to reach and support millions of students who would otherwise have inadequate or no access to education.
RORI is developed by YOU FOUNDATION`S longtime partner organization RISING ACADEMY. Both YOU FOUNDATION and RISING ACADEMY dispose of deep knowledge of the education sector in West Africa!
From June to August 2022, RORI has already reached over 1750 students with approximately 94,000 interactions.
The need and demand for personalized tutoring across low and middle income countries is enormous. We have the networks and know-how to build a tutoring platform with the potential to reach and support millions of students who need it.
RORI already scooped awards from Schmidt Futures, the Jacobs Foundation, MIT Solve & Falling Walls and early tests in West Africa show very encouraging and exciting results
RORI asks students practice questions and understands their answers. It automatically adapts its content to find the right level of difficulty. Students progress at their own pace. If they get stuck, RORI provides explanations of key concepts from the curriculum library. If they progress further, RORI takes them through progressively more complex sequences of questions.
ABOUT RORI
High quality, high-dosage tutoring is one of the best ways to improve education outcomes and to support the big challenge of the today’s learning crises. (Nickow et al. J-Pal 2021)
RORI asks students practice questions and understands their answers. It automatically adapts its content to find the right level of difficulty. Students progress at their own pace. If they get stuck, RORI provides explanations of key concepts from the curriculum library. If they progress further, RORI takes them through progressively more complex sequences of questions.
Each time a student engages with RORI, it picks up where they left off, increasing engagement and establishing a durable, friendly connection between the bot and the student.
RORI is friendly! Creating powerful, motivation-building relationships.
RORI wants to reach 2m+ students by 2027, and 5m+ students by 2030!
Rising students learn more than twice as much in a year as their peers, with the largest benefit for girls! Children with learning challenges are given the chance to raise their educational performance in the long term.
The goal for the next phases is to expand the RORI content library and to also include sustainable environmental education beyond mathematics…further on STEM.
A SCALING-UP PROJECT!
RORI WAS TESTED ALREADY IN WEST AFRICA AND ARE SEEING VERY ENCOURAGING EARLY RESULTS:
- RISING ACADEMY have so far spent 5,000 hours on the design and development of RORI’s learning conversation flows, using quality world-class academic content.
- RORI has already received more than 30,000 student interactions from children in Ghana as the chatbot was tested.
- On average, these students sent RORI 51 interactions per day and spent an average of 53 minutes learning by talking to RORI.
This is a very good project that will help any child improve their learning.
I’m glad there is something my child can do at home. This reduces the time it spends in front of the TV
When the pandemic hit, I had a hard time getting my child to study anything. I wish RORI had existed sooner.
I sit with my child every evening and we study together.
RORI is very friendly because it does not make me feel bad when I get an answer wrong. It encourages to go on and to learn more and more.
NEXT PHASE of needed funding:
- New grant funding will allow us to quadruple the size of RORI’s content library and enhance its avatar and user experience. Furthermore we wish to increase RORI with “sustainable environment education”.
- It will also support the first large scale testing of RORI with 200,000 disadvantaged children in West Africa. As well as preliminary evidence of efficacy, this will provide key insights into user engagement.
- The testing will yield 60m student interactions, creating a powerful dataset on which to train RORI’s recommendation engine and make the next phase of RORI even more powerful.
RORI's further introduction:
Affordable private schools in different market segments in a number of countries.
State partnerships in several countries to improve the quality of public schools at scale using the Rising system.
Providing content such as curriculum, digital learning tools and school improvement services
With the greatest benefit for girls!
We need YOUR help to further develop RORI and test it with another 200,000 students!
