Title of Innovation: The iSchool CLOUD Artificial Intelligence Virtual School & MultiBOOK Framework

Year of implementation: 2010

Website: www.ischoolcloud.org

Implemented by: The iSchool CLOUD Framework

Country/Countries where the Innovation is being implemented: Nigeria

Problem being solved

Across Africa, the number of out-of-school children is escalating. Many among those that are in school are being tutored by incompetent teachers. As sub-standard private schools sprout up everywhere, it is rather impossible for governments to regulate, monitor and assess the quality of education from early years to primary, secondary and tertiary. And these non-government schools hardly use prescribed curricular and learning models. Textbooks that can be considered as adequate for learning in this age are way too expensive.

Description of innovation

The iSchool CLOUD Framework is a complete computerization solution for education.

By implementing simple but effective Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality concepts, It makes it possible for established schools to enroll hundreds of thousands of more students from outside their immediate geographical locations into their Virtual School programs.

This system allows standard schools to partner with individual tutors and smaller schools in remote locations and less-privileged areas, given them access to the schools' resources to use in their own classrooms.

For example, a village teacher that gathers his/her pupils under the shade of a tree can now connect to the virtual classroom of a bigger, established partner school (even in another country) and use their lesson plans and notes to teach his/her own pupils.

Not only that, these children (in remote, less-privelged areas) will be bonafide students of the partner schools as they will be enrolled into their systems and have all their leaning activities graded.

As for governments, The iSchool CLOUD now makes it possible for regulatory / supervisory officers to carry out their oversight functions remotely.

Inspectors can now sit back in their offices and access all crucial processes of all schools under their jurisdictions through the screen of their computers!

Also, The iSchool CLOUD is fast-tracking the evolution of textbooks with MultiBOOK Project. Presently, we are test-running the first 1,000 MultiBOOKs which are interactive, dynamic rich-multimedia contents for each topic in all major curricular for early years and primary / secondary schools.

Outcomes and Impact

Since 2010, we have put The iSchool CLOUD in some 23 private schools across Nigeria and it has helped most of these schools to cut their costs of operation by at least 50% while at the same time, helping them to increase their general efficiency rates by more than 100%!

Another area where The iSchool CLOUD is helping schools is the issue of teachers' incompetence. With the proactive AI assistance teacher feature, it helps teachers to avoid basic mistakes.

It also enables parents to get more involved in their children's day-to-day school lives as they can now take moments of work to check into their children's schools through the Internet!

Potential to be scaled and replicated

Already, we have started giving out The iSchool CLOUD to schools FREE! The only payments involved are the costs of dedicated web servers (since it's cloud-based), set up and training. To replicate the solution across the continent, we have concluded a self-deployment system that will enable schools to register and start using the solution immediately. We have also started working on a web-based training portal.

To upscale The iSchool CLOUD, we shall be moving into the next phase of the project which the bold ambition to  put know-it-all, always-ready-to-display-any-information robots in the classrooms as assistants to the human teachers!