dot Learn was borne in the Fall 2015 Development Ventures class at the MIT Media Lab (part of the suite of D-Lab courses), where Sam Bhattacharyya and Tunde Alawode met for the first time. They had a common goal of reducing global education inequality, and believed in the power of technology to transform lives
They’re idea is simple—to make online education work for emerging markets? This lead them to came up with their signature encoding technology—to reduce file sizes by over 10,000x. With this, they could fit a full course into 1 MB, and deliver it to students over mobile networks for less than the cost of sending a single SMS.
They are building a scalable localized education platform for Africa through an algorithm that reduces the file sizes of Khan Academy-style videos to 1MB/hr without any loss of quality. This enables video-based education at the data cost of Whatsapp.
Basically they compress video to expand education
With their tech, they’re bringing online education to millions of students across Africa – starting with their pilot: WASSCE-Tutor, an app to help students in West Africa study for the regional college entrance exam.
Less than 1% of students in Africa and India have the broadband to access Online Education, they want to bring Online Education to 50 million students by 2020.