Learning Tree: A remote learning platform increasing education access and continuity in low resource, emergency and migratory settings

• In Event: Transforming Education Through Technology: Save the Children's Growing Portfolio of EdTech Programming and Evidence of Impact

Proposal

Learning Tree is an learning platform that was developed in-house by Save the Children originally to respond to school closures in Pakistan due to the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters, which further exacerbated the challenge of soaring numbers of out-of-school children in the country. A mobile application was designed to support teachers and caregivers to provide supplementary remote learning to children in a home setting. It utilizes well established Save the Children-developed course content, has offline functionality, and supports data-driven content tailoring that responds to the progress of students. The tool was piloted with girls aged 11-14 in the Shikarpur district of Pakistan. A quasi-experiment impact evaluation of the pilot (n=500) participants revealed that Learning Tree significantly improved these children’s literacy, numeracy, social emotional learning, and executive functioning skills. A teaching portal was also developed which included professional development content and teacher wellbeing activities.

Since then the Learning Tree platform has been adapted to different regional contexts to respond to new education interruption challenges in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. Specifically, it is now being used to support children learning in situations of conflict and prolonged migration journeys. Save the Children is now considering different scaling pathways to expand the use of this tested solution to the challenge of access to quality education.

This presentation takes a deep dive into the experience of developing and deploying the mobile application in Pakistan. A member of the field office in Pakistan shares the challenges and successes of initial rollout and implementation, what learnings were extracted, and how these were used to adapt and improve the platform for use in Pakistan and inform scaling into Latin American contexts. He also presents in detail the findings of the impact evaluation to showcase user perceptions of the tool as well as the magnitudes of effect on child learning outcomes in numeracy, literacy and social emotional learning. In doing so, this presentation speaks to the theme inclusive education and the enabling of improved education access and continuity through the use of innovative teaching models in low resource, emergency, and migratory settings.

Author

• Babar Khan, Save the Children