CLOSING THE EDUCATION GAP

A Colombian education technology company has created a device that pools and distributes global teaching resources. It could be a game-changer for the developing world. Words and images by Oliver Gordon.

18 March 2020

The harsh, neon glare of fluorescent strip lighting illuminates a small classroom in the chi-chi Poblado district of Medellin. INEM José Félix de Restrepo is one of the better schools in this emerging Colombian metropolis. It’s humid, and post-storm sunshine begins to penetrate the tropical foliage blotting out the external world, climbing up the room’s porotherm-brick walls. 

Around 20 teenage students fidget away, clamped in the stocks of their archetypal wooden desks. A mildly-chaotic din fills the room as the kids, each brandishing a smartphone or tablet, clamour and appeal in the direction of their teacher, who’s seemingly orchestrating the mayhem by use of a wireless keyboard. As images and questions about the ‘medio ambiente’ (‘the environment’) flash up on a TV at the front of the class, it becomes apparent the kids are using their gadgets to play a series of interactive games and quizzes relating to the subject matter. It feels more like an arcade than a classroom.  

The machiavellian genius behind this baffling parallel universe sits inconspicuously on the teacher’s desk at the front of the class: a cylindrical plastic device simply referred to as “TOMi”. This unassuming little machine, however, is a powerful mini-computer ‘teaching assistant’ that is revolutionising Latin American education and whose creators believe can help bridge the pedagogical divide between the world’s richest and poorest schools. 

“I’ve used TOMi for a year now and it’s allowed me to be a lot more creative in my lesson planning and to really engage the students,” the class’s teacher, Rosa Ramirez, tells me after the lesson. “The kids love it as it makes the lesson interesting and fun. And I love it as it connects me to a global academic community where teachers can learn from each other: everyone uploads their classes onto the platform and the best ones can be re-used anywhere — meaning any school around the world can have access to the best quality education.”

Forging Iron Man teachers

At its heart, TOMi is a piece of technology aimed at simplifying the day-to-day operational tasks of teachers, allowing them more time and resources to create inspiring and engaging lessons. Teachers can use TOMi for a variety of applications: from planning classes with the use of thousands of interactive resources on its supporting platform, to motivating their pupils by awarding them with skills badges, creating tests and marking them automatically, building data-driven school reports on performance and participation, using augmented reality to bring subject material to life, connecting the student’s gadgets to play interactive games and quizzes, communicating with parents, and other such pedagogical delights.

The device can be connected to a TV or smartboard, or just project onto a blank surface; and can be controlled via an optical pen, keyboard, mouse or even a smartphone. Ramirez prefers to use TOMi as a projector rather than linked to the TV. The students connect to the device by scanning a barcode with the cameras on their smartphones; alternatively, TOMi can scan and mark the written answers on their papers. At the end of the exercise, the device sends Ramirez a spreadsheet with all the students’ marks. 

But, for Ramirez, the community aspect of the wider TOMi platform is just as important as its classroom uses. “I really like to put the tools and activities I’ve created onto the platform so I can both help other teachers and get feedback on my own classes. Ultimately, the teacher creates the class but TOMi provides loads of useful ideas and resources to make that class engaging.”

Behind TOMi is a Medellin-based education technology company called Aulas AMiGAS. As well as the technology, Aulas provides training for the teachers. The company will often do year-long implementation projects in specific — typically more deprived — regions. The process involves a diagnostic evaluation of the teachers, who are classified technically and psychologically, and subsequently provided with a personalised training programme and teaching guidelines. 

The device itself costs around $500, and to access the content on the platform there are three tiers of subscription: free, standard ($9/month) and premium ($30/month). The company mainly markets its wares at local authorities of cities and municipalities. But if a teacher wants to buy TOMi out of their own pocket, they have the option of combining the device and content into a monthly subscription. 

“Innovation in education is completely dependent on the teachers,” states Aulas’s founder, Juan Manuel Lopera. “They make the real difference in the classroom and if they can’t understand what the students need, no amount of technology is going to make a difference. So we need to improve the capabilities and skills of those teachers.”

Lopera uses the analogy of Iron Man: an average bloke who, equipped with the right hardware and data, is transformed into a superhero. “In emerging countries, teachers are usually just very normal people who are trying their best,” he explains. “In Singapore, you’ll find high-school teachers with PhDs, but in Latin America they’ve typically only completed secondary education. We recently visited Valle del Cauca [a region on Colombia’s Pacific coast] and some of the teachers didn’t even know how to write. So we need to provide the right tools to turn those kinds of teachers into superheroes.”

Closing the gap

Lopera and I are speaking in his office at Aulas’s headquarters. Hidden away in an industrial district of central Medellin, the office is all glass walls, potted plants and bean bags — Medellin’s version of a wanky Silicon Valley corporate campus. 

On first impression, Lopera comes across as mild-mannered and polite while retaining a certain aloof gravitas. He’s only in his mid-thirties and looks even younger, but he has a wise and considered demeanour that replaces those lost years. He dresses in Zuckerberg smart casual, clothes for efficiency over style, and shares the Facebook founder’s slightly vacant, emotionless stare — offering the impression of a binary philosophy that sees life as just a set of problem-solution scenarios. 

Latin American teachers, according to Lopera, are spending too much time on practices that offer inefficient results. That engenders a lack of engagement from the students, leading to high numbers of school dropouts. “In rural Colombia, we have desertion rates of over 60% before eighth grade — that’s horrible,” he remarks. “So we need to save the teachers the time to create amazing classes, and give them the resources to create the kind of classes that 21st century students need.”

His mantra is to “close the gap” in education between poorer and richer students, both nationally and internationally. The UN’s education agency, UNESCO, estimates that in developing countries 200 million people aged 14-25 have not even completed primary school. Technology can help bridge the divide, but often the barrier to its widespread application isn't the money but the capacity of the teachers to use it. 

Lopera explains: “One of the biggest mistakes Latin American countries often make is to try to copy what developed countries are doing. That just meant the teachers were using the technology once and then putting it back in the box and never using it again. But we know teachers love using TOMi because we have 7,000 of them paying for it out of their own pocket — that never happens in Latin America.”

TOMi has been designed to mimic what Apple did with the iPhone, which integrated a mobile phone, mp3 player, GPS, computer, etc, all into one device so they became easy to master for even the most neanderthal technophobes. TOMi does the same for education technology: integrating all the tools teachers need to prepare classes, teach in the classroom, grade exams, learn new teaching techniques, and communicate with parents. And the technology doesn’t require any existing infrastructure in order to work. “Some of the schools that use TOMi don’t even have walls,” comments Lopera. “They’re poor schools in the middle of the jungle. They just hang up a sheet and have TOMi project onto it.”

Lopera is driven by his own experience: he grew up in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Medellin during the brutal violence of the 1990s and puts his own social mobility almost entirely down to one teacher. “He figured out the “gap” I had and how to close it,” he says. “The teacher is the key, so we need to figure out how to close the gap between good and bad teachers if we want to close the gap between poorer and richer students.”

Bello and its beasts

In the 1990s, Medellin was officially the world’s most murderous city. In ‘91, the city witnessed 6,349 killings, a homicide rate of 380 per 100,000 citizens. To put that into context, the world’s current murder capital, Mexico’s Tijuana, has a murder rate of 138 per 100,000. And Lopera was stuck in the hottest part of hell, Bello’s ‘La Mesa’ neighbourhood. 

Although it’s illegal to own firearms in Colombia, they were an ever present in Lopera’s house in his childhood. He had a drug dealer living next door, and if the residents of La Mesa weren’t in their homes by 8pm each evening, they would be shot at by the gangs’ patrolling ‘social cleaners’. Lopera’s grandfather was murdered for not paying a $3 racketeering fee. And tragically, his aunt would eventually suffer the same fate, with his 14-year-old cousin subsequently killed as he tried to avenge his mother’s death. 

“Teachers in my neighbourhood generally didn’t put in any effort,” he recalls. “They thought, ‘why try when most of these kids are going to be dealing drugs, locked up, or dead by the age of 16, and none of the rest will be able to afford to go to college’.”

But one teacher bucked that trend. When Lopera was 12, a man called Sigifredo Cortez began teaching his class physics, maths and religious studies. Cortez encouraged each pupil to self-learn in an area that interested them, which for Lopera was programming. The results were transformational and many of Lopera’s classmates would go on to have similarly successful careers. At the age of 17, he graduated and immediately set up a company, which designed software that allowed for remote assistance of computers (mostly used by computer engineers to do repairs over the phone). By the time he’d turned 19, he’d sold that business for $500,000. And with the proceeds, he moved his family out of Bello.

“That’s when I realised just how drastically my teacher had changed my life,” he remembers. “And that inspired me to set up Aulas AMiGAS with my former classmate, Alejandro Sepulveda, in order to create more teachers like Cortez.

Aulas AMiGAS opened its doors in 2009 with a rough-and-ready interactive whiteboard called TOMi Simple. After designing a teacher training programme, Lopera and Sepulveda convinced Colombia’s education authorities of TOMi’s potential. In consultation with its users, the product has evolved over the past decade to its current ‘TOMi 7’ edition. “We’ve had lots of failure cases,” admits Lopera. “We sold loads of devices in the first year but they just weren’t being used. So we developed a training scheme to properly educate the teachers on how to use it, and set up a call centre for technical and pedagogical support. That’s really allowed the concept to take off.”

Today, there are over 100,000 Latin American teachers using Aulas’s technology, spanning Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Argentina and Costa Rica. Every month, over a 1,000 new classes are created on the Aulas platform. The company employs over 200 people, with offices in five Colombian cities and direct operations in Mexico, Ecuador and Argentina. 

Aulas had revenues of approximately $10 million last year, representing 210% year-on-year growth. TOMi was incorporated as a separate company to Aulas in 2019; although it doesn’t have a growth track-record yet, it made $1.3 million last year and Lopera expects 300% revenue growth this year. 

The success of the business saw Lopera named among MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 in 2016. “We’re living in a world of virtual communities of knowledge sharing, but Aulas AMiGAS is going beyond those by several factors,” says Victor Padron, the European University of Madrid’s telecommunications professor — one of the jurors of the Innovators Under 35 awards. “First, it’s improving education in developing countries, which need education as a social-class escalator the most. It’s also providing cutting-edge ICT technology that’s playing a key social role. And lastly, it’s building a global teaching ecosystem that goes way beyond the classroom.

“Bridging the education gap between poorer and richer nations isn’t a job for just one company, or one virtual community, but the role such a company can play in society is huge.”

The best for the poorest

In many ways, the rise of Lopera, Aulas and TOMi has mirrored that of their environment. The transformation of Medellin from anarchic, cocaine-fuelled warzone to Latin America’s current capital of innovation in just 15 years has been nothing short of miraculous. That auspicious journey was capped earlier this year when the city was elected a ‘Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

The numbers tell the story: not only has the city’s GDP per capita risen 25% in five years, since 2010 its poverty rate has fallen by 37% and income inequality by 13%. In the world’s leading innovation index, 2thinknow, Medellin has climbed a record-breaking 158 places since 2013. 

Pablo Escobar’s former fiefdom has encouraged a novel approach to innovation: instead of trickle-down innovating from the private sector’s tech elite, the city has fostered tripartite public-private-academic partnerships aimed at bottom-up innovations for its poorest communities. 

Those leading the strategy admit its holistic nature means Medellin will never compete with the likes of San Francisco or London for zero-sum technology advances. But, “what’s the point in Uber if it creates as many social problems as it solves?” Asks Elkin Echeverri, co-director of Medellin’s innovation centre, RutaN. 

“For a long time we’ve stuck to a simple principle: the best for the poorest,” he continues. “We try to use investment to solve the problems of the most deprived — to bring them up to everyone else’s level. We don’t want to become like San Francisco, where you’ve got thousands of homeless people living on the very streets of Silicon Valley! We move forward slower, but together.”

Now, under the aegis of its Fourth Industrial Revolution Centre, the city has set its sights on harnessing cutting-edge technologies to solve its distinctive problems, including using nano-technology to fight illegal gold mining, artificial intelligence to combat gang recruitment of kids, blockchain to battle traffic congestion, among other initiatives. 

Eduardo Gomez Restrepo, who heads up the Centre’s Internet of Things, Robotics and Smart Cities division, explains the origins of city’s metamorphosis: “Out of all the Colombian cities, Medellin has suffered the most at the hands of narco-terrorism. The city has been through so much pain and as a result its citizens have a huge amount of energy to transform their society. All of those issues really bound the people together and forced them to work collaboratively to address the problems. And that spirit they’re now using to not only fix the problems of the past but also to innovate for the future.”

It would, however, be disingenuous to make Medellin out as some kind of tropical utopia that has successfully banished all its demons. The city still has huge inequalities, high rates of violence, and severe housing problems. Although gone are the days of Escobar’s Medellin Cartel operating open and brazen in the city’s streets, the contemporary equivalents — La Oficina de Envigado and the Sinaloa Cartel-linked Clan del Gulfo — still wield significant power in the shadows. Such facts must be borne in mind when considering Medellin as a model city; equally, it also must be remembered that it’s still a city in the developing world and currently has murder rate below that of both Detroit and New Orleans. 

A global army of teachers

Aulas and TOMi are similarly not without their own challenges. At the product level, there are still improvements required to make the TOMi device more effective when not connected to the internet. Without wifi, TOMi operates using the teacher’s phone signal, which obviously depends on their area’s coverage. The teacher can download resources before the class to use offline but that doesn’t include the interactive tools. Improvements in its offline use could make TOMi more effective for teachers in the poorest and most rural schools, suggests Rosa Ramirez.  

At the corporate level, Aulas and TOMi have found it difficult raising the capital needed to scale up globally. “Venture capital funds don’t think emerging-country education is a business opportunity but rather the domain of philanthropy. But philanthropy is slow and often averse to investing outside of the traditional aid/development space,” Lopera explains. 

Nonetheless, Lopera has grand plans for the business. “There are more places in the world that need technology like this — in Africa or India, for example,” he asserts. In September, Guatemala’s new president, Alejandro Giammattei, announced TOMi would be a leading part of his educational reform of the country’s public schools. Lopera is also currently on the hunt for capital to fund a pilot programme for schools in New Delhi. 

Back in headquarters, the twin companies are developing a deep-learning algorithm that measures which teaching resources and activities offer the most effective results on the students’ learning, and guides bad teachers to replicate the activities of good teachers. It’s also designed to identify the needs of different student profiles and to assign the most appropriate educational content for them.

“In order to bridge the gap between the good and bad teachers, we want TOMi to learn from the good ones and teach their practices to the bad ones,” explains Lopera.

In the long run, it all forms part of Lopera’s dream to create a global “army of teachers” just like his own Sigifredo Cortez. Places like Bello, still blighted by drug-fuelled violence and effectively run by three local ‘pandillas’ (gangs), are in dire need of such figures. But sadly, the neighbourhood is one Iron Man down: Cortez lost his job after it came to light he’d faked his university diploma.

“Without a proper education, just by force of will, this guy managed to have such a massively positive effect on so many people’s lives. 

“Just imagine what he could’ve done with one of those,” Lopera says, nodding toward the little plastic device sat on the shelf.