MUSE Apps

Pakistan has a learning crisis, with 22 million out-of-school children who either never attended school or dropped out at an early age.
SABAQ’s curriculum has been implemented in almost 2,000 formal schools and non-formal learning centers in Pakistan.
The MUSE application has reached over 250,000 children.
MUSE houses over 800 animated story-based video lessons, over 1,000 interactive exercises and assessments, and over 50 games.
The school dashboard enables teachers and school admin to monitor student progress.

In Pakistani schools, the MUSE applications are used in conjunction with regular lessons to accentuate the learning process.

Key Features

The flagship application, MUSE, is a Kindergarten-Grade 5 digital learning application with interactive games, videos, and exercises to increase student engagement and improve learning. The application offers engaging content in Mathematics, Science, English, and Urdu.

The application includes the following features:

Animated story-based videos: over 800 animated story-based video lessons that have shown more engagement and knowledge retention among children.
Interactive exercises and quizzes: MUSE has over 1,000 interactive exercises and assessments to provide a quick, formative check to identify learning gaps.
Games: over 50 games. MUSE is constantly creating educational games catering to each National Curriculum Student Learning Objective (SLO) to enable teachers to assess students in a more engaging environment.
Dashboard: The school dashboard enables teachers and school admin to monitor student progress.
Flexibility of design and delivery: MUSE can be accessed on low-cost Android phones or tablets allowing it to be used by students easily.

The application also offers exercises, tests, and games that allow interactivity and provide instant feedback that helps children to learn. The application allows transparent student progress to be viewed. Student progress and performance is given by subject and topic to indicate how well students are learning. The content is aligned with the National Curriculum, allowing it to be easily integrated into schools existing curricula.

In addition to this, it also offers teachers additional tools, for example: teacher guides and lesson plans, which aid classroom delivery.

Social Impact

Pakistan is suffering from a major learning crisis, especially in the primary grades. The country has 22 million out-of-school children, who either never attended school or dropped out at an early age. Almost 50% of students in Grade 5 in Pakistani schools cannot perform Grade 2 level arithmetic and reading tasks (Annual Status of Education Report, 2018).

In Pakistan, low-cost, low-resource public and private schools do not adequately cater to students’ learning needs because of inadequate teaching capacity and a lack of resources. This is where MUSE comes in. In these schools, the applications are used in conjunction with regular lessons to accentuate the learning process. We aim to increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes through high-quality digital content that is fun to learn and easily scalable, making it accessible to millions.

The application is used either on an LED TV which is visible to the entire class or on tablets which are shared between two to three students to foster peer-to-peer learning. The students watch animated videos and take the interactive tests and exercises.

The application, therefore, fosters conceptual understanding and makes learning enjoyable, improving learning outcomes as a result.

To make lessons available in districts where there is no school nearby, SABAQ established non-formal learning centers. In these non-formal community-based education centers, the application is used by facilitators as the primary pedagogical resource to teach students who attend these centers for a designated number of hours per day. Therefore, in these centers, the content and the application drive the learning experience.

Impact:

SABAQ’s applications have been used by 250,000 learners in 2,000 schools across Pakistan.
A treatment-control group study carried out by Coffey International of the U.K. revealed improvement in learning outcomes in Math (3 times) and Urdu (2.5 times) among children using SABAQ’s flagship application, MUSE, compared with children in the control group.
A comparative analysis of 948 Grade 1 students conducted by NRSP at Punjab Education Foundation schools showed that 89% of students who were previously low-scorers are now performing at grade level.

Future Plans

SABAQ, in collaboration with UNICEF, designed a customized application for the Sindh Education Literacy Department (SELD) which is adopted by the flagship application, MUSE. The application was then launched by Sindh Education Minister, Saeed Ghani on May 18, 2020. The Malala Fund has given a grant to scale this SELD application and develop a model for sustainable integration of technology-assisted teaching and learning in over 70 of Sindh’s public schools. At present, SABAQ is scaling this in three districts of Sindh; Tando Muhammad Khan, Tando Allah Yar, and Badin. Through this project, the team aims to target 15,000 primary grade children to reduce COVID-19 related learning gaps and improve learning outcomes. Upon successful completion of the project, SABAQ aims to scale this project under other areas of Sindh under SELD leadership.

A web-based platform by the name MUSE Worksheets has been designed and successfully conducted the soft launch. This is a website designed for Nursery-Grade 6 students and teachers. The worksheets are prepared by teachers and are all downloadable and printable. The worksheets are classified by different grades and subjects.The team is in the design phase of a mobile-based application catering content for Early Childhood Education (students aged 2-6 years). This application is designed on Unity which makes it accessible to a larger audience as it will be accessible on both Android and iOS phones. The application provides a guided experience format which will be engaging students through immediate feedback.