Znotes Business A2
Lcs Basinger
ZNotes is fighting educational inequality for young people everywhere. High-stakes, end of school exams are entrenched in educational inequality due to (a) lack of relevant high-quality resources, (b) disparities in teaching quality and (c) financial burden to receive personalised support. Students all over the world take the same international examinations but face entirely uneven educational experiences. In the UK, a child from a disadvantaged background is 18 months behind when they take their GCSEs (Education Policy Institute, 2019). And internationally, in low-income countries, 46% of the resources went to the top 10% of students with the highest levels of education (UNICEF, 2020). Private tuition, underfunded schools, oversized classrooms, and unequal distribution of resources create massive barriers to attainment. And if you live in a developing nation where the education system is under-resourced, these inequalities are further exacerbated. Suddenly, this formal exam system is an incredibly unfair playing field.
The accessibility of education underpins many exacerbating inequalities. International qualifications at the end of high school are pivotal to the opportunities that can be accessed and trajectories to be followed. For many, it is the only possibility for them to apply for scholarships and universities abroad. There is an increasing demand for pursuing international qualifications and according to Forbes (2021), the international schools market will hit $89bn by 2026.
ZNotes is a community-led online learning platform providing free access to high-quality educational resources combined with a peer-learning environment. ZNotes enables students to maximise their potential with unlimited access to resources and be empowered to become the producers and distributors of educational resources. By identifying high-achieving students, ZNotes co-creates moderated educational resources targeted to specific curricula and publish it through a globally accessible learning platform.
Live learning experiences: through ZNotes Live we offer a platform for leaders and pioneers in academia, entrepreneurship and sustainability across the globe to equip students with the skills and knowledge to change the world.
Peer-to-peer learning space: through subject channels and group sessions on our Discord, the ZNotes learning community connects students globally, allowing them to share, explore, learn and grow through supporting each other.
By providing access to the resources and support needed to complete English-medium international high school qualifications, we enable access to education for 14-18 year old students and, particularly for those who may be left behind. This may be due to unrecognised/weak national education systems or those displaced from their home countries in the current global crises and having to pursue alternative curriculums. To date, we have over 120k registered users since launching our new platform in September 2020.
The greatest reason for the exponential growth of ZNotes has been the empowerment of youth and taking a community-led approach. As such, each team member is able to contribute to the decision and direction of the organization whether it is through setting up initiatives, sharing their ideas across teams in our regular town hall meetings.
The organisation has evolved into 5 subteams each with their own lead: content, community, tech, growth and outreach each of which has a robust support structure including regular check-ins, a knowledge base of tutorials and a culture book to induct new team members. Further, the Leadership Team is composed of the CEO, COO and CSO.
The advisory board is made up of past team members who have deep knowledge of the workings of ZNotes and leaders of other youth-led projects and social impact start-ups. The board meets every 2 months and is attended by the CEO, COO and CSO. This group of people provide space and critical advice to ensure the projects initiated in the organisation are aligned to the mission and end up successful.
The CEO, Zubair is also the chairman of the ZNotes Foundation board which meets on a quarterly basis. This board is made up of professionals in the fields of education, law, accounting, and ensures that the legal obligations of the organisation are met.
From starting out as a blog, ZNotes has now become a global organisation supporting students all around the world. Our reach has been purely organic with students benefiting from the platform without any push from parents or teachers. To date, we have reached: 26,104,523 hits and 3,560,452 visitors on the ZNotes website from 196 countries, 112,077 registered users since launching our new platform in September 2020, 12,338 Discord members engaging in peer-to-peer learning.
Mentorship has been key to the growth and success that we have achieved. Our approaches and directions have benefited from industry-leaders and academics. The particular areas we want to focus on include networking opportunities for partnerships with corporates and universities, supporting human resources and technical capabilities and knowledge from those with on-the-ground knowledge.
Having been through the application process of MIT Solve Youth Innovation Challenge and being selected as the top 20 finalists gave us the opportunity to interact and meet others in similar entrepreneurial trajectories. Although we were unable to reach the finalists stage, the opportunity of sharing ideas with and receiving support from the panelling judges and those involved enabled us to expand our social network and find relevant contacts.
There is a sharp distinction between the materials available openly and at high premiums in the international education market. Tailored and high-quality content in the form of private tutoring and resources is often not accessible for a large proportion of students, leading to inequality.
Although there are some great educational platforms providing open content, they are often generalised and do not follow the exact syllabi. Peer-reviewed, openly accessible, written by high-achieving students with notes tailored to specific exams, ZNotes tackles this challenge. Additionally, the community-led approach brings a high level of relatability to students and space to engage in peer-to-peer learning, a combination unique to it.
With the changing landscape of international education and assessments, it is imperative for us to be more attached to our philosophy than a specific offering. As such, over the next five years, we aim to continue to strengthen our platform with its intrinsic self-organised community-led infrastructure. This means we will continue to work alongside our community to build features and form novel resource types for our users to engage and contribute towards.
To achieve our social mission, we must continue to expand our reach and provide further support to each of our learners. Our strategy to increase the support of new exams and subjects is by partnering with NGOs and schools in specific education systems and leveraging their high-achieving student base to write and grow the content. We have been able to increase our capacity for content development by having a bespoke technological platform catering to our needs, a robust process of application induction and moderation, and a growing team of interns who support this operation.
In the long term, ZNotes will have steady revenue streams through licensing and sponsorships. To further personalise the revision experience, a system will be integrated to identify profiles and suggest improved materials and learning methods. We will also continue to expand our notes content by including more international exam boards and subjects to make our platform more inclusive for students globally.
We critically assess the impact our offerings have had. This includes academic progress, social capital redistribution and the development of global change-making attitude and entrepreneurial spirit. We have increasing levels of influence on those involved with ZNotes from the website visitors to those who contribute and become team members. We expect a certain level of commitment from our interns and so it is imperative that they receive a highly educational and rewarding experience during their time with us. We monitor the development and progress of each influence sphere through pre and post surveying.
Our Social Impact Analyst maintains a metrics dashboard on Notion that include 30 unique processes and reach metrics. This dashboard makes sure we are maintaining and increasing our growth rate as well as keeping all of our team members engaged and motivated. In addition, we receive feedback on specific events through feedback forms that we disseminate. Finally, we receive testimonials in the form of text and video on the community and the impact of resources on individual educational outcomes.
We are currently developing the ZNotes theory of change model, validated through pre- and post-surveys run on the Discord server followed by the development of an API that allows for the corpus to be fielded and tagged in the academic subject channels. We have achieved partner status on our server with more than 11,000 members and this would be the space to explore further questions on self-organised learning communities.
The ZNotes Theory of Change looks at the footprint ZNotes work has on the educational planet from both a top-down satellite view: looking at how ZNotes impacts the educational sector as a whole and a more bottom-up approach: of why this footprint is shaped in such a way and how long this imprint may last.
As various offerings and processes have evolved since its inception in 2014, our detailed theory of change model describes the emergence of four distinct populations (users, community members, contributors and team members), how each benefits from the interventions categorised in five interconnected pathways (learning platform, extracurricular, community, contributor and internship), and the resulting 6 outcomes we wish to see:
c80f0f1006