Bug fixing for edtechs with Shikho

Nazmun Nahar (pseudonym) is an 11th grader at the Mohammadpur Model College in Dhaka. As a science major, she had to take five separate tuitions for physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and English, which cost her parents a hefty Tk10,000 in tuition fees every month.

In February this year, her mother bought a course on the learning app Shikho, a Bangladeshi edtech platform, for Tk2,800. The three-month learning sessions were so helpful that the mother-daughter duo decided to buy the classes for the next quarter as well. 

"Although in the beginning I thought the animated video lessons and the classes were too childish and colourful, with time, I found it helpful. It helped me with my basics," Nazmun said. And for her mother, the price was good — less than half that of monthly tuition fees. 

Shikho, which started its journey in 2018, provides online education for Bangladeshi students starting from grades eight to 12. Currently, they have lectures for the science group, and they have plans to elaborate the learning lessons for the arts and commerce group students, along with lessons for university admission test students. 

The subjects and topics are based on the national curriculum. The chapters are designed with live and recorded classes by teachers, which are accompanied by animated explanatory videos, quizzes, tests, solve classes and PDFs of notes. They also provide report cards based on the student's performance. 

The courses can be bought through mobile finance platforms bKash and Nagad. 

Backed by some of the major global venture capital firms like Learn Capital, Wavemaker Partners, Anchorless Bangladesh, Sturgeon Capital, Goodwater, and Strategic Angels, Shikho was the first start-up in Bangladesh to raise $6.5 million in seed capital funding from investors. 

Shikho was even featured in the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list in 2022. This year, the company was selected by Bloomberg Catalyst for bold thinking and breakthrough actions on 23 August. 

It was in November 2020 that Shikho rolled out an app to provide students with easier access to its content. But as they later found out, the tech part of edtech is just as challenging to deal with as the education part. 

Students like Nazmun have faced several bugs while accessing the lessons on the app. On Google Play Store, Shikho's app has a 3.5 rating with more than 15,000 reviews. In those reviews, the users mentioned how "while playing recorded classes, the app suddenly switches to another app like Facebook or Messenger", "the video doesn't stop" or "the downloaded video lectures show a black screen when offline". 

Arifuzzaman Sunny, one of the students and users mentioned, "Sometimes when the first video is clicked, the second video starts playing." 

One of Shikho's customers, Nasif Tanjim, subscribed to a course for his HSC aspirant sister earlier this year. He paid Tk10,000 for the course, but was disappointed with their services from the very beginning. 

"During the initial registration process, there was a hiccup and they were not very helpful. Eventually after everything was settled, the classes began. But even though the package promised live classes leading up to the HSC exams, those stopped in April. We complained but they fell on deaf ears. Eventually we decided to not waste any more time or energy on this and move on," said Nasif.

According to the Shikho team, the app has already been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and every day, more than 2 million students take lessons from the platform. And 60% of their students are from the rural areas.

But although the Android app has more than 100,000 installations, technical bugs led to several thousand uninstallations as well. 

Shahir Chowdhury, founder and CEO of Shikho, said they are trying to remedy this. 

Shahir Chowdhury. Sketch: TBS

"We do not want to create hype and then just vanish. Our focus is on ensuring quality education. And then we are improving our app with the feedback," Shahir said. 

"As a technology platform, we have incorporated detailed engineering to design the daily lessons, homework, exam-prep, animated video lessons — which make us a proper education technology platform, and not just an e-learning platform," he added.

Bringing in outside help

On 24 March 2022, Shikho signed a partnership with Bongo, a popular video streaming platform as well as an OTT tech provider in Bangladesh, to improve the video delivery experience for online learners and also get better video analytics. 

"We were getting feedback from the users of Shikho that they could not access the videos, or the videos took time to download and took up a lot of storage. This is the reason we needed support for video delivery for Bongo. They help us with the video resolution," said Ishmam Chowdhury, the VP of Shikho.  

"We are supporting Shikho as a tech company, not as an OTT platform. Bongo takes care of the video delivery infrastructure and encoding of Shikho. We provide a special feature called the alternative bitrate, which allows seven profiles of a video starting from a minimum resolution or video quality to the highest. So that students who do not have a high-end mobile phone can also access the videos," said Mamun Atik, the deputy chief of Business Development at Bongo. 

Shikho currently has 290 personnel on its team, with 12 teachers, 40 designers and engineers that take care of the technical aspects, and 10 people in the customer care department.

The teachers are from the top public universities in the country. Every subject has a subject programme management team of 10 people which is led by a teacher. 

'1.5 million downloads don't look like success yet' 

To Shahir, these numbers are important but what he would call success is when all 42 million students of Bangladesh will have the same quality of education — be that in the cities or in rural areas. 

"I also believe that it is not possible for a single entity or organisation like us. We need schools, educational institutions, parents, other e-learning platforms and local government to step in. And the day that will happen, we will consider ourselves a successful company," he said. 

"We want to provide quality education at an affordable price, no matter where the student is. I would like to see as many students learning on Shikho as possible," Shahir added.

But the challenge is to reach out to more and more students due to a gap in the internet arena. "However, my experience says that this gap will reduce over the years. When I visited a distant school in the border areas of Sunamganj, I saw every family has at least one shared smartphone at home. What the rural people don't have is quality teachers in ample amounts. We are taking the best teachers to them," the CEO talked about his future plans. 

When we asked about being on the Forbes 100 Watch list and the Bloomberg Catalyst announcement, he said, "All I have to say about this is I am extremely lucky to have my team that worked really hard to make this possible," Shahir said, adding that skilled and smart people is the secret recipe here.  

"We never tried to be on Forbes or Bloomberg, we did not even apply for any of this. Being on Forbes is not our target. We have a goal to make quality education accessible to all and we are focused on that. I think that is the most important thing," Shahir further said. 

"Our neighbouring country India has some amazing edtech platforms, for example, Byju's, Unacademy, Physics Wallah etc. So why can't we do something like this? We are still improving ourselves, and there is still a lot to do," he noted. 

According to Shahir, 95% of the educational institutions of Bangladesh operate offline. Now the main challenge of an edtech like Shikho is to habituate people with distance learning. 

"We started in 2018. The pandemic happened in 2020 and 2021. What it did is make students, teachers and parents acknowledge online learning platforms. Now what we want to do is maintain the quality and habituate them with this," Shahir said. 

According to Shahir, digitalisation is a global trend, which will eventually reach Bangladesh as well. The future generations will be more tech-savvy. So there will be a growing need for online education platforms. 

"That being said, we cannot replace offline education completely with online. For tests, exams, etc., the students will need physical classes. So what we have envisioned for the future is hybrid classes," Shahir explained.

Shikho has opened two hybrid classes so far, one in Cumilla and the other one in Narshingdi. The capacity of each classroom is 100 students and they are complet ely booked, according to the CEO.