Teaching algorithms aim to change Brazilian education for ever – but where does the teacher fit into the classroom of tomorrow?

It’s 10am on a sunny November day in Rio de Janeiro, and the scene inside the classroom is one of quiet application. At a dozen or so hexagonal tables, pupils work on laptops or in exercise books. At one of the clusters, a teacher sits to help a pupil, while another talks to a group of students at the far end of the room – a large salon in which almost half of the pupils at the school are seated. The rest of the school’s 213 students, aged between 11 and 14, are busy elsewhere in the building, which includes six small, more traditional classrooms.

Through the windows that run the length of the classroom, dark blue sea is visible in the distance, past green hills, while above the school Rocinha favela surges up the mountain in a clutter of concrete and peach-coloured brick.

This is André Urani Municipal School, a technology-focused experimental academy at the foot of Rocinha, which with 70,000 inhabitants is Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela. With almost all of its students drawn from the community, André Urani is a flagship adopter of an innovative educational software developed by a São Paulo startup, Geekie. Launched in 2011, Geekie Labs delivers the entire high-school syllabus in hundreds of digital lessons incorporating text, images, videos and exercises, and also evaluates the students’ performance at every step, feeding real-time data to teachers and the school. A separate, widely accessible app, Geekie Games, has the same components, bar the institutional integration.

Geekie’s content and study plans are aimed at equipping students for Brazil’s national ENEM exams, held annually for final-year high-school students and doubling as an entrance exam for many universities, as well as providing proof of achievement for school-leavers.

In the classroom at André Urani, Yago dos Santos Lahas, 14, is taking a history test on Geekie using an HP laptop, one of 220 in the school, which has a five-year sponsorship from companies including Natura cosmetics and Fundação Telefónica. A question – part of Geekie’s bespoke software for the pre-high-school institution – reads: “In world commerce there are rich countries with more purchasing power, and others with less. The search for better commercial relations between those countries, increasing their profits, is called: (a) competition; (b) integration; (c) association; or (d) financing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students at André Urani school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, learn courses with the help of ‘adaptive learning’ software Geekie. Photograph: Lianne Milton/The Observer

Yago reads the question twice, selecting (a), and a green tick appears. At the end of the 120-minute test, Yago receives his results instantly: 262, displayed beside the average for all students taking the test: 230. How does it feel to see that you are doing better than most? “It’s OK,” he says. “I don’t really think about it. I sometimes do worse than the others, but then you can try again.” The software has machine learning at its core – so the machine, like the students, is also learning, adapting and analysing responses, as more and more data is fed in.

Its pedagogical content is created by a team of teachers and education professionals, also in-house, while the online lessons are given by teachers from private tutorial colleges, who appear in the videos as disembodied voices, speaking over handwritten notes on black backgrounds, and using cursors to emphasise points, or indicate aspects of images. The format of the video segments is inspired by the Khan Academy’s free video classes on YouTube.

In a Geekie biology lesson on the respiratory system, text describing how respiration works is interspersed with exercises and videos. In one video, a teacher speaks engagingly over a diagram showing the transfer of oxygen and carbon dioxide inside the lung. “O 2 and CO 2 take opposite routes, but both move by a process of diffusion, OK? OK.” At the end of the lesson, an “In this lesson you saw” page reprises the content as a list of bullet points.

The transmission of content is one of the platform’s main benefits, says André Urani’s headteacher, Marcela de Oliveira. “You simply don’t need a teacher to carry out this part.” Instead of being lectured en masse on subjects in which they may fail to understand a given element, students, she says, do better when they can set their own pace, return to difficult components in their own time and get things wrong without fear of being shown up in front of their classmates. The idea at André Urani, says Oliveira, is that teachers become mentors rather than lecturers, while the children take a more active role in the study process: “They stop being pupils, and become students.”

Beginning with a brief test and a survey on the goal of each user – the purpose of study, and which subject and university, if any, the student is aiming for – Geekie creates study plans, selecting content according to each student’s needs: more economics for aspiring maths candidates, for example. Then, as a student uses the software, it gauges their abilities and presents lessons in personalised sequences, adapted over time as each student’s aptitude evolves, and as the algorithm understands it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Geekie co-founders Claudio Sassaki, right, and Eduardo Bontempo have revolutionised education in Brazil Photograph: Renato Stockler/NA LATA Production

In practice, it’s relatively simple: if a user responds well to certain types of content, it will resurface in similar lessons; and as it gauges students’ performances based on levels of difficulty, it will select lessons pitched at similar levels in other areas of study, too. If a student tends to study best at a particular time of day, the app can send push notifications reminding them what’s next in the study plan. As well as providing structured study plans, Geekie can also, says Claudio Sassaki, who, with Eduardo Bontempo is Geekie’s co-founder and co-director, detect some of the obstacles hindering students. Those might include poor reading comprehension leading to difficulty in understanding maths problems, for example; or missed classes and misunderstood lessons causing knock-on, diagnosable problems later on. Geekie also compiles data to identify, for example, specific areas of knowledge that are prerequisites for more complex subjects, producing material that can be analysed and incorporated by Geekie’s human education professionals.

The more the student uses the software, the more successfully targeted its teaching can become, says Sassaki, and the same is true, he says, of the entire platform: the more students use it, the better it becomes for everyone. “Scale is everything,” he says. Speaking at the company’s São Paulo headquarters, Sassaki explains that operating with as many people as possible using Geekie is essential to capitalise on the exponential properties of the algorithms. “The machine is making correlations all the time, discerning and understanding patterns,” he says. “The more data we have, the better it can do that.”

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It’s partly for that reason that Geekie has an unusual buy-one-get-one-free policy: for each licence purchased by a private school, a public school student is given free access. Sassaki says he is someone who has benefited from the transformative effect of education, and got into the business to make a difference. When his grandparents arrived in Brazil from Japan, they became indentured agricultural servants, before escaping to São Paulo. Sassaki earned a degree at the prestigious public University of São Paulo, then an MBA and an MA in Education at Stanford, before going to work on Wall Street where he spent 10 years in finance.

Providing the platform free to some public-school students is partly an altruistic gesture, he says – but also good business. “Brazil is very diverse. It’s crucially important to have information coming in from students all over the country, because they are so completely different. Having that range of data helps to create a product capable of catering for an ever greater number of people.”

Sassaki is quick to note that achieving scale is also a major factor in the company’s reaching its business goals. Finding its way into Brazil’s public-school system is at the heart of Geekie’s ambition. “We want to position ourselves as the default digital platform in Brazilian education,” he says. “I don’t think this a market in which you’ll end up with five platforms like Geekie. There might be one, maybe two, but not multiple. So there’s an element of timing: you either go for it, or you’re not going to make it. And someone else will.”

Geekie made huge strides in its reach in 2013-14, when promotional partnerships with G1, the news portal for Globo, Brazil’s largest media conglomerate, racked up millions of registrations for its Geekie Games app. It has so far reached a total of five million users, it says, with 30% of those adults working towards high-school certificates that they missed out on as teenagers. With a presence in 650 private schools, Geekie is also in use in more than 4,000 public schools, a huge proportion in São Paulo state, where the state government reached an agreement with the company this year to give free access to students in their third and final years, a total of 415,000 students.

“I can focus better with the software than I can using books,” says Otavio Couzenn, 18, a student at Mater Dei, a private school in São Paulo, whose 462 students pay fees of R$33,800 (£6,000) a year – three times the minimum wage – and where many have high-flying parents in politics or the entertainment industry. Mater Dei students use Geekie in an average of three to four classes a week, mainly science, in contrast with André Urani, where the software is used in the classroom from 40-80% of the time.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students on lunch break at André Urani school in Rio – Geekie software is helping students to learn at their own pace. Photograph: Lianne Milton/The Observer

Couzenn, who is dyslexic, finds the video lessons in Geekie easier to follow than ordinary lessons. “The coloured text helps, and I like that I can go back and forth on a lesson until I’m sure I understand.” Tatiana Kostiuk, also 18, likes the clarity of having the entire syllabus at her fingertips, and Geekie’s straightforward approach: “With textbooks, I sometimes find it hard to work out what I’m being asked to understand,” she says. “Geekie shows you exactly what you need to know.”

Mater Dei’s biology teacher, Aleksej Kozlakowski Jr, reports a 30% improvement in performance on digital tests since Geekie Labs software was introduced in 2015. Kozlakowski is also Geekie’s designated “ambassador” at the school, in charge of incorporating it into lessons for the school’s eldest pupils. According to Sassaki, teacher engagement with the software is crucial. “Students who are interested will use it no matter what,” he says. “The challenge is to get it to students who are not interested.” It takes someone with commitment to help the tool achieve critical mass within a school, he says, and for it to become an integral part of the study process. In some of the public schools in which Geekie is available, he says, it can be difficult for it to gain traction.

Fláudio Azevedo Limas, director of the 196,000-strong State of São Paulo Teachers Union, would agree. Teachers need to be given a chance to get to grips with new technological tools, he says, to be able to use them effectively.

“They can be extremely productive if teachers are included in the process, rather than simply being confronted with the new technology,” he says. There is a danger, he warns, that students can end up simply parked in front of computer screens. “But it doesn’t work that way – they can do that at home. What they need are decently renumerated, properly supported teachers to guide them.”

Professor Glaucia da Silva Brito is research leader for the Technology, Teachers & Schools study group at the Federal University of Paraná, in the city of Curitiba. Research carried out by the group shows strong teacher interest, she says, in incorporating digital tools into their teaching. “But at the moment they are leaving university without any training in the proper use of technology in the classroom.”

In the hallway between classes at André Urani, a handful of students lounge about on beanbags, many absorbed in their phones. “There’s no point in banning phones at school,” says Oliveira. “They’re part of students’ lives, and part of our lives too.” Geekie software is optimised for smartphones, so students who can’t get to school on a given day can work on their phones or tablets, if they have them, even if they have no internet at home. Many André Urani teachers also run Facebook or WhatsApp groups for their students. “They ask a lot of questions on there,” says teacher Luana Rezende, who runs a WhatsApp group for her class.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Software allows school to create lessons and class activities, with students working in groups and teachers assisting them. Photograph: Lianne Milton/The Observer

Just as Geekie’s systems are tailored to students, the platform also provides modules for teachers and school managers, and in the state system can feed performance data to state authorities, too. “The information it gives me is the best part, in terms of management,” says Sueli Cain de Oliveira, academic director for the six private schools that, with Mater Dei, make up the Weducation group. Where Cain de Oliveira previously created her own charts and statistics, Geekie provides them in real time, evaluating the performance of teachers and principals, as well as of students, and allowing her to splice the data in different ways. “I can use it to propose targets for school directors,” she says, “and they can do the same for co-ordinators and for students.”

Is there an issue with privacy, given that data on student – and teacher – aptitude and performance could become widely available within organisations both private and public? It’s information that has always been gathered by organisations in one form or another, says Sassaki. Yet the centralised, easily transmittable nature of electronic data – often cloud-based, unencrypted, and accessed via “bring-your-own” devices belonging to employees – could make it easy for it to find its way into unforeseen places in future, with similar implications for student privacy as those raised for patients by the use of electronic health records.

Sassaki doesn’t appear to have considered it. He looks thoughtful. “That’s true,” he says. “But ultimately, the data belongs to the institutions themselves.”

Despite significant improvements in school attendance rates in the last 20 years – in part as a result of the means-tested Bolsa Família benefit, and before that, Bolsa Escola – only 45% of Brazilian adults aged 25-64 completed high-school, compared to the international average of 75%, according to figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. International rankings, based on maths and science test scores at the age of 15, placed Brazil 60th out of 75 countries in a set of May 2015 results, also published by the OECD.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Geekie promotional video

There remain deep-seated problems in Brazil’s education system, including low levels of competence in the management of many public schools and a lack of accountability, says Sassaki. He says it is also a result of the failure of Brazilian society to demand better education. “It’s a very complex set of problems. Without strong pressure from the population, I doubt many politicians would be prepared to tackle it.”

Yet when May’s OECD report was published, the organisation also released calculations suggesting that, given universal enrolment in high school and the achievement of “basic skills” for all students, Brazil’s GDP could increase by 751% by 2095 – that is, over the lifetimes of today’s 15-year-olds. If those figures are anywhere near the truth, the question becomes how much longer Brazil can afford to fail its schoolchildren. Technological innovations like Geekie seem to indicate that at least part of the solution might be less complicated, expensive and arduous than it once seemed, offering a generation of children new chances to do better.

While recognising the potential, Fláudio Azevedo Limas sounds a note of caution. “Incorporating technology into education is important,” he says, “as long as it isn’t intended to substitute for real teachers.” He points to schools that achieve outstanding results under difficult circumstances with almost no technology: “They could be out in the sertão,” he says, referring to Brazil’s impoverished, north-eastern backlands – but still manage to serve their students better than schools with all the technological solutions in the world.

What students need most of all, says Limas, are well-trained teachers – “and for tech to stay part of the process, rather than becoming the process.”





CAN SOFTWARE TEACH BETTER THAN TEACHERS?



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Knewton is an adaptive learning company based in New York. It works with several US schools and has students worldwide

What is adaptive learning?

A highly personalised online learning method that adapts to users’ needs in real time. Software provides feedback that helps learners progress at their own pace. It knows who you are, what you’ve already understood (or not) and decides what you’re going to see next based on your performance.

To plot a student’s most effective learning path, adaptive learning systems also need data about other users’ actions. This allows them to anticipate what types of content and resources learners need at a specific point to progress. In a class using adaptive learning software, each student will be learning the same syllabus, but at their own pace, taking different paths and, in the most advanced systems, using different types of lessons.

Who are the main providers?

Adaptive learning is making waves in the US education system. Knewton, based in New York, is a big provider to schools and claims to have 10 million students worldwide. It also has an office in London. Cambridge University Press, Macmillan, Pearson and ELTjam are its partners.

Aleks (Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces), owned by McGraw-Hill Education, is also used widely in US schools. Facebook is developing adaptive learning software with US schools, while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded research in the area and given grants to US colleges and universities to launch adaptive courses.

Is it being used in UK schools?

Not widely, but interest is growing. Exam board OCR, Cambridge University Press and Raspberry Pi partnered with adaptive learning platform Cogbooks in 2014 to add personalised learning to computing GCSE massive online open course (Mooc). It was used by 20,000 students in 2015.

CogBooks is also working with Cambridge University in 120 UK schools and is hoping to expand this year.

Jim Thompson, CEO of CogBooks

What are its limitations?

It can be expensive to develop and can require schools to invest in technology up front. Classrooms may also need to be restructured.

Adaptive learning systems often use multiple choice questions and some subjects – such as computer science – are obviously much better suited to being taught in this way than others.

Will teachers lose jobs?

Probably not. Jim Thompson, CEO of Cogbooks, says that in the US teachers have found them to be useful tools.

Some systems help teachers track students’ progress in real time, enabling them to spend more time with those who need extra support. Many systems also allow teachers to make their own curriculum.

But there is a long way to go until adaptive learning is standard in schools. Teachers will probably have to be trained in how the systems work to ensure students receive the benefits of adaptive education.

Natalie Gil