What causes education inequality and why does it matter?

Education is a key driver of social mobility, enabling individuals to improve their life outcomes. Moreover, the returns to education are highest for people who are least educated, suggesting that education is particularly impactful in developing countries as each year of schooling increases earnings between 10% to 30%. 

Despite this potential, however, ‘learning poverty’ is a limiting barrier to better life outcomes. Children from the poorest families are an average of 4.5 years behind their peers from the richest families in reading and math skills in countries like Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and so on. This impacts more than 500 million students globally; and this achievement gap continues through K12 education where higher income families (top 10%) end up occupying more than 90% of the top higher education spots, furthering the life-outcome gaps between themselves and their less well-off peers even more. The earlier we can intervene to close achievement gaps in education, therefore, the better the chance for equitable life for all.  But what causes these gaps between low and high income peers? 

The key is ‘access’. Higher income students have 1) access to better Teachers and 2) access to supplementary Resources that support and boost their learning. LiveBook’s solution to this problem is to level the playing field by enabling easy access to the same factors to all students despite their economic condition so that everyone has a meaningful chance for upward mobility. 

Main drivers of educational inequality are 1) lack of quality teachers (‘effective teaching’), and 2) lack of quality supplementary resources between rich and the poor (‘resource gap’). One of the sides involves teachers and the other students. Our holistic solution, therefore,  is to provide resources to both teachers and students at the same time. How do we do it? Through an Augmented Reality (AR) platform for schoolbooks.  

LiveBook is easy to use; students and teachers point their camera at their textbooks, our computer vision technology recognizes the subject, retrieves all related content and services, and presents it to the user in a categorised way. Users can add files as well to share peer-knowledge, effectively turning each page of their books into a rich wikipedia of quality information.

Our indexing technology is aligned with the national curriculum. It crawls and aggregates the best content so that users don't waste time and data searching from disparate sources on the web. So if a student leaves class with a gap on a certain skill they scan the subject and we show them all the best videos, study notes, exam samples, quizzes and peer Q and As for FREE so they can boost their learning independently, overcoming ‘resource gaps’ on the student side. 

It’s the same for teachers. Since national textbook serves as the main reference for all educators, they can scan or specify what they are teaching and our lesson-planning tool loads all required information, ranging from lesson objectives, suggested activities, media, assessment, and instructional content so that even undertrained teachers can follow simple step-by-step guides to improve their teaching immediately and enhance ‘effective teaching’. 

LiveBook’s holistic solution empowers teachers to have access to practical resources to improve their efficacy, and allows for students to fill their gaps whenever they fall behind.  

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