Nigerian startup LLH, which stands for “Live.Learn.Have fun”, has launched version one of its social learning platform GENIUSES, aimed at improving the quality and accessibility to learning while promoting collaboration.
GENIUSES went live in May, focused on SS1, SS2 and SS3 students – basically senior high school – and aiming to help students learn in an interactive and collaborative way.
The app – which currently runs on browsers but will soon be available via Android and iOS – provides various forms of learning content, such as questions, definitions, video lessons and formulas, and allows a user to connect with their contacts on social media platforms.
It monitors the user’s progress in school and feeds content based on that information. Users interact with the content on their timeline, scoring points, commenting, sharing questions and assignments, and collaborating.
Co-founder Cyrus Majebi told Disrupt Africa GENIUSES had been developed to fill two major gaps.
“On the one side, the non-consumption of good quality education by a large number of students attending government-owned schools, stemming from issues like outdated teaching models and curricula, poor state of teaching infrastructure, and a misplaced focus on “passing” exams and just “getting by” instead of tackling the root cause of the problem,” he said.
“The symptom of this is a high failure rate in terminal exams across Nigeria and West-Africa. But this is merely a symptom of a deeply-rooted and pervasive problem which is an educational system that is rife with lapses and inefficiencies.”
GENIUSES also sets out to solve what Majebi calls the “isolation problem”.
“By building products that foster collaborative and interactive learning, connecting students to other students as well as teachers and tutors, and providing them with great features and quality content, consumption of good quality education becomes a matter of having a smartphone and data subscription,” he said.
“This circumvents the “system problem” and makes quality education accessible to anyone who needs it.”
Bootstrapped thus far, the startup is in the process of raising enough capital to improve the product and encourage more frequent and deeper usage.
“Our plan is to start with a small niche market and demography, perfect our model and operations, dominate it, and scale to larger markets and serve a wider demography,” Majebi said. “The expansion road-map includes scaling the platform to serve the whole of West Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Revenues will be obtained through weekly and monthly subscriptions, but Majebi said the startup was not thinking about monetising GENIUSES at this stage.
“We want to build a product that no one will be able to resist simply because it offers an overwhelming amount of value and soothes major pain points for them,” he said. “Once we’ve gotten the product to a point where users will experience that “Aha” moment, we will begin to scale and monetise.”
