Shikkhok.com is an ultra-low cost MOOC platform developed in Bengali to provide educational resources to rural students in Bangladesh and India who lack access to quality education. It uses volunteer educators and crowdsourcing to develop courses at a total cost of only $15, and innovative distribution methods like USB drives and Raspberry Pi computers to deliver content to students without internet access. Evaluation of user engagement found that localization of content to the local language and culture as well as mobile optimization were highly effective strategies for reaching rural audiences.

1. Shikkhok.com - An Altruist-built,
Ultra-Cheap MOOC for Pennies:
Building an Open Content Education site for Rural
South Asian Students
by Ragib Hasan, University of
Alabama at Birmingham

2. Shikkhok.com – an Ultra-cheap
MOOC for Rural South Asian
Students
Winner of 2013 Google RISE Award
by Ragib Hasan, University of Alabama at
Birmingham ragib@cis.uab.edu
Keywords: Education, MOOC, IT4D
Industry/Category: Education, e-Learning

3. 1.A Real World Project with high impact
Low-income and rural students in South Asia with limited knowledge of
English do not have access to quality education.
How can we provide top-quality education at a very low cost to
the millions of students in rural Bangladesh and India?
•Goal: To design Shikkhok.com - a free Massive Online Open
Content (MOOC) education site at an ultra-low cost , specifically for
rural underprivileged students
•To allow students with No Internet Access to be able to benefit from
Shikkhok’s educational content
•Development Timeline: Summer 2012 - present

4. (pronounced Shik-khok), is a
Bengali language word that means,
literally,“One who teaches”

5. 2. Stake holders
Dr. Ragib Hasan, founder and developer of Shikkhok.com,
Assistant Professor of Computer Science,
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Volunteer educators:
Researchers, Educators,
and Scientists spread all
over the world
Bengali speaking students in all levels in
Bangladesh and the State of West Bengal
(India), with
-Limited English proficiency
-Limited access to higher education
-Living in geographically remote villages

6. 2. Stakeholders – how they benefit
Students in rural Bangladesh and West Bengal (India) will benefit from the Shikkhok.com
project because
• Students in rural schools do not have access to quality study material or teachers,
and lag behind students in cities
• There are not enough openings for higher education in colleges and universities, so
many students drop out after school
• Education in non-public institutions is expensive – not all students can afford it due
to poverty
• State of the art topics are hardly covered by many educational institutions
• Existing e-learning projects are based almost invariably on English language, and the
language barrier prevents students from benefitting from them.
• Finally, almost all (if not all) the MOOCs use the Internet as their delivery
mechanism, which may not work for rural students. Shikkhok provides an alternate
supply chain mechanism to deliver it’s teachings.

7. 2. Stakeholders - Background
• Bengali is the 4th
largest language in terms of native speakers
(250-300 million speakers in Bangladesh and India)
• Students in rural areas often do not have access to quality
teachers, books, or good schools.
• Higher education opportunities and content is scarce in
Bangladesh and India
• Only 50,000 opening in Bangladeshi universities and colleges
for incoming freshmen, while there are more than 300,000
eligible students
• Many students drop out due to lack of cheap higher
education opportunities or extreme poverty

8. 2. Stakeholders - Background: Information
Technology to the rescue …
• While regular computing devices are not
common/affordable in rural areas, Mobile phones and
hence Mobile internet have significantly high penetration in
Bangladesh, even in rural areas (100 million mobile
subscribers as of early 2013, in a 160 million population)
• A mobile-optimized Bengali language MOOC can serve as
an alternative education platform for rural and non-
traditional students
• And an innovative non-Internet based delivery mechanism
can allow rural students with no internet access to get high
quality education

9. 2. Stakeholders - Existing MOOCs are
not enough
• Coursera.com has 208 courses,ALL provided in English language
• The Khan Academy’s excellent online educational videos are also in
English
• Unfortunately, Bengali translation of Khan Academy’s videos are not
popular among the students in Bangladesh and India (most video
lessons have an average of only 100-120 views in 1 year. Example:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL58BD1F917975C9BE).
• Anecdotal reasons include mismatch between the lessons and
academic syllabus in Bangladesh/India, cultural mismatch/”lost in
translation”/artificial and literal translation
• As a comparison, Shikkhok.com’s Culinary arts course videos received an average of 300+ views within 1
week of publication (https://vimeo.com/user14642276/videos/sort:plays/format:thumbnail)

10. 3. Project Requirements
• Education medium must be in Bengali
• Content must be highly optimized for mobile phone
browsers with limited and slow data plans
• Lessons must be short, include both text and multimedia,
and have easy-to-use student registration, feedback, and
evaluation schemes
• Must be highly-available, low access times even in
Bangladesh and India
• Must be designed, delivered, and publicized at a very low
cost, and provided to students for free
• Must not depend on the Internet to deliver content.

11. 3. Project Requirements – Identifying the
Challenges
• Technical: Identifying the best design principles
• Team: Organizing and coordinating a distributed team
• Stakeholder: Getting effective feedback and attention
information from the users

12. 3. Project Requirements – Identifying the
Challenges?
• Cost: Popular MOOCs such as Coursera.com
have millions of dollars in venture capital funding.
• Coursera itself has $22 million funding
• Such funding is unlikely for educating rural
students in Bangladesh and India
• Marketing/advertising such a site to the masses is
also expensive.

13. 3. Project Requirements – Identifying the
Challenges?
• Overcoming the language barrier: Students
with limited English language proficiency cannot
utilize existing MOOCs such as edX, udacity, or
Coursera, so how do we ensure maximum impact
for such students?
• Finding teachers: How to gather teachers with
the right expertise and technical know-how?
• Reaching stakeholders: How to publicize and
deploy content to the intended audience?

14. 4. Our Solution
• Explore Human Computer Interaction
principles and methods to effectively reach the
rural students
• Take extreme penny-pinching measures to
develop the platform at a low cost
• Use social media marketing strategies to
publicize the service to the target audience
• Utilize non-Internet based supply chains to
deliver content to the rural students

15. 4. Solutions - Methods used
Design
– Use an iterative model for creating the most effective
user interface which has to be mobile friendly, less-
graphics intensive, and suitable for both smart and non-
smart cell-phone browsing
– Follow a User Centric Design methodology by
constantly evaluating user responses to lessons and
modifying teaching tools accordingly

16. 4. Solutions - Methods used
Development
– Use rapid prototyping and design methods to develop
courses (lessons and lectures augmented per user
feedback and view counts)
– Use ultra-low cost and open source tools in a
crowdsourced model
– Use Social Media marketing for free, leverage the
power of cloud to distribute content

17. 4. Solutions - Methods used
Evaluation:
– For evaluation of lecture style and content, measure
user responsiveness and attention span for each lecture
(use webpage stats to calculate how long users stayed
at each lecture page, how many users came back to
view further lectures, i.e. user retention)
– Measure user engagement by correlating lecture
views with participation in quizzes associated with
lectures

18. 4. Solutions - (Ultra-cheaply) Designing
Shikkhok.com
• Over summer 2012, we rapidly developed Shikkhok.com
platform
• Total development cost: only US $15.00
• Total number of registered students = 20,000
• That is, cost per registered student = US $0.00075 only!
• Total number of courses designed = 25
• 4500 lecture views per day, from 3000 unique visitors

19. 4. Solutions - (Ultra-cheaply) Designing Shikkhok.com
• To minimize development costs –
• Adapted open source CMS to provide authoring platform
• Mobile-optimized front end
• Host all media/videos on free online repositories such as
Youtube, Dropbox, imgur
• Use Google forms and embedded scripts to automate user
registration and MCQ quiz processing
• Cost: Domain name: $5/year, 100 MB low-cost host: $10/year
(Development (mostly wordpress theme tweaking) done by one volunteer for free)

20. 4. Solutions - (Ultra-cheaply) Designing
Shikkhok.com
• Site design and graphics: Crowdsourced via
Social network contacts (received 5 submission
from a volunteer within a few hours of request on
Facebook)

21. 4. Solutions - Social Media is extremely
effective Getting content and volunteers
To gather a team of volunteer teachers:
• Posted a request on Facebook
• 10 volunteers signed up in 1 day
• Two courses were developed by day 2
• By week 2, 5 courses were running
• By week 8, 15 courses were started
• By month 8, 25 courses running, with 5 courses
completed

22. 4. Solutions - The power of Clouds for
easy deployment
• Used Amazon’s CloudFront Content Distribution
Network (CDN) to cache and distribute content,
and to reduce bandwidth costs
• CloudFront improved loading times in South Asia
by 50-60%
• Only incurred $0.20 in two months for delivering
content to 50,000+ unique visitors across the
world

23. 4. Solutions - Design principles and
strategies for online education via a
mobile phone
Plain text (not multimedia) is still the king of content
• Users of mobile phones have to pay per-KB, so
less images is better
• For videos, youtube based low-res streams and
downloadable 3gp formats work the best

24. 4. Solutions:A Innovative Distribution
Channel
• A major challenge was to create a non-Internet
based distribution channel to reach rural students
without Internet access
• Solution: Develop innovative distribution channels.

25. 4. Solution: Innovative Distribution
ChannelsOur Approach:
Approach 1:
• Create short 3gp version videos; put a collection of
courses on USB sticks, give out to phone
vendors/shops in rural bazaars.
• Students visiting the bazaars can load the videos on
their phones for free or for a nominal fee (charged by
the vendors, not us)
• (We found this model to be very useful, as rural bazaar
phone shops are already used as a distribution hub for
music videos/songs, and people are used to going there
to load videos on their phones)

26. 4. Solution: Innovative Distribution
Channels
Approach II
• Use ultra-cheap Raspberry PI computers
• Each Pi costs only $35.
• We put a large number of courses on SD cards on each PI,
add a donated keyboard, mouse, and ship this to rural
schools. (No internet needed, we preload everything on
the SD cards, and make a kiosk-like interface easy for even
non-computer users)
• The schools can hook the Pis directly with regular TVs, and
have the video lectures delivered to students

27. 4. Solutions - User engagement strategies
that work …
To engage users in easy discussion, integration with
existing social networks is the best strategy:
• Using wordpress native commenting: about
2/3 comments per lecture
• Using Facebook comments: at least 30 “like”
and 5-10 comments, questions per lecture

28. 4. Solutions - Marketing strategies:
utilizing social media
• Social media based “free” marketing campaigns worked very
well
• Did not use regular advertisements, rather used
Facebook and Twitter to publicize Shikkhok
• Got 3000 fans on its Facebook page within a few days
• Each lecture announcement is viewed approx. by 4200
people within one hour or so (stats via FB Insight)
• Total fans as of May 1, 2013: 9000

29. 5. Our Contributions
• We demonstrated that localized strategies work better
than globalized universal MOOCs (local language based
and cultural context-aware content is more effective)
• Unlike Khan Academy Bangla, we did not translate
existing MOOCs, rather developed localized
content from scratch, which turned out to be more
useful to students. (our video lectures viewed many
times more than the translated content)

30. 5. Our Contributions
• We developed a set of tried-and-tested design principles
for educational content delivery over mobile internet to
rural students
• Evaluated various site design and lecture content to
determine the best possible strategy and content
formats that serve the mobile-internet-using rural
students

31. 5. Our Contributions
• Our user centric design and constant
feedback/evaluation loops allowed us to detect
strategies that work (mobile optimized video,
Facebook Integration) and that do not work (e.g.
live sessions with teachers using Google HangOut)
• Constant user engagement strategy allowed us to
improve our lecture content (lectures with lower
user retention/attention span are re-
written/developed)

32. 5. Our Contributions
• Our biggest contribution is the generalized set of
design and evaluation principles for the
development of a localized micro-lesson model
that can be effectively used by e-learning systems in
other languages in other parts of the developing
world.

33. 5. Our Contribution:The results?

34. 5. Our Contributions - Results – some stats
• Since it’s start on August 1, 2012, Shikkhok.com has
• 25 online courses on diverse topics such as
Bioinformatics, Neuroscience, Computer Programming,
Finance 101, Calculus, Cloud Computing
• Total number of students registered for all courses:
20,000 (actual student count larger since registration
isn’t mandatory)
• The Computer Security101 course alone has 2000
registered students
• Total number of quizzes/tests taken: 30,000

35. 5. Our Contributions - Results – some
stats
• Total unique visitor count in in 8 months: 369,108
• Total lecture views in 8 montsh: 1.1 million
• 80% visitors are from rural Bangladesh, using mobile
phone browsers
• Shikkhok.com is getting 2000-3000 unique visitors a day

36. Visitor data as for 2012 (Q3, Q4) and
2013 (Q1, and ongoing Q2)

37. 5. Our Contributions - Results, that matter
• Shikkhok.com is the first e-learning MOOC site in
Bengali language, completely free and open for
everyone
• Students from rural Bangladesh and India regularly
contact the founder to express their satisfaction:
• “I wanted to study Computer Science, but had to
drop out of school due to poverty. Shikkhok.com
has given me the chance to enter the wonderful
world of computer science once again” –
testimony from a user from Jamalpur, Bangladesh

38. Awards
Winner of 2013
Google RISE Award

39. Awards
From Google’s RISE award citation:
•http://www.google.com/edu/rise/recipients.html
“The Shikkhok.com project aims to provide free online
education and high-quality courses in Bengali language to rural
and disadvantaged students in Bangladesh and India.They
bring together educators and researchers from all over the
world for to create content in Bengali language on both basic
and advanced topics, to develop a model for ultra-low-cost
online education for students in the developing world and to
serve as an open, free, and cheaper alternative to traditional
educational institutions.”

40. Future goals
• To create a complete set of courses for grade 6-10 of
Bangladeshi school curriculum
• Project timeline: Summer 2013
• Teams of teachers already formed in April 2013
• Technical content development begins from May 2013
• Content distribution and pilot studies in several Bangladeshi
schools: September-October 2013.
• To create a complete set of courses for grade 11-12 of
Bangladeshi highschool and college curriculum (Fall-winter 2013)
• Reach at least 100,000 students and 100 schools by the end of
2013

41. 6. Summary:What did we learn from
Shikkhok.com?
• It is possible to design successful MOOC e-learning sites at ultra-
cheap cost via an altruistic volunteer model (Shikkhok cost only $15
to develop and deploy compared to $22 million for Coursera)
• Attention to HCI design principles such as user centric design can
allow better retention of users and improved attention to content
• To reach rural students, focus should be more on non-Internet
based textual content designed for low-bandwidth mobile phone
browsers
• Localized, native language education is more successful than the one-
course-fits-all approach by many well-known MOOC sites

42. To view Shikkhok.com in action
• Please visit: http://www.shikkhok.com
• Media coverage: Front page news in 10 top Bangladeshi newspapers,
including:
• Daily Kaler Kantho: http://bit.ly/Rj5Sym
• Daily Prothom Alo: http://www.prothom-alo.com/detail/date/2012-
09-14/news/289111
• Daily Sun (English): http://daily-sun.com/details_Virtual-school-wins-
google-award_420_1_19_1_2.html
• Covered by Deutsche-Welle – the German International Radio’s
Bengali language world service http://bit.ly/WXjsyP

43. Thank You!
Questions