In conversation with Proggo Pratik, Chief Product Officer at Thrive

What is Thrive, and what problem does it address?

Thrive is a fresh EdTech startup that is taking the Bangladeshi institutional education market by storm. We attribute our growth to a few key insights we have about the local market. The high population density in Bangladesh is one of the metrics that contributes to its uniqueness. The complex governance and institutional challenges that come with it make it extremely challenging to maintain the quality of services at this scale. This leads to overwhelming classroom sizes with a limited supply of "great" teachers. They face a unique challenge of delivering quality at scale with age-old methodologies. The great news is, solutions do exist. At Thrive, we deploy certain tools and practices to accelerate the next revolution in the education scene in Bangladesh.

What are some of the challenges you face in delivering your service?

We broadly classify the challenges into three principal groups– access challenges, analytical challenges, and scalability challenges. These three classifications are also the baseline of Thrive Edtech's solutions.

Low digital readiness prevents us from launching technology solutions on a full scale. Institutions too are heavily resistive to adopting tools owing to high switching costs. Finally, people in suburban and rural areas, have a hard time garnering trust for new services and products. These issues make digital tools difficult and unfamiliar to all stakeholders involved in the socio-educational environment.

For Bangladeshi teachers who are mostly cradled in administrative duties, the huge classroom sizes of over 30 significantly reduce the productivity of teachers. Consequently, personalised attention is dropping significantly, greatly hampering the quality of education.

How do you solve this problem, given the challenges in the market?

Through intuitive interface designs, we are perfecting the recipe to digitise educational institutions to address the access challenges; this includes paper-to-digital transference, datafication, user engagement, actionable insights, and advanced analytics.

We believe that education needs to be personal and adaptive for students, assistive and insightful for educators, and efficient and automatic for admins. Our cutting-edge learning analytics platform is our answer to the analytical challenges. Our systems are content-agnostic and learns from user behavior. This allows us to work with everything from BCS to IELTS.

To address scalability, we developed our platforms from scratch with superior future-proof technologies. Scalability challenges were the easiest for us to address.

What are learning analytics and insights?

Learning analytics is the staging area of personalised education. Through student interactions with learning materials, a system can access the student's inputs to compare and combine them with historical data. Then the system throws suggested content and insights for that student so they can develop by focusing on their weaknesses. The more they interact, the more heuristic the process becomes. This whole process of interaction from analytics to insights is what revolutionises learning.

What is your mission at Thrive?

Thrive's initial mission is to add a digital layer across institutions that allows digital tools to be ready for plug and play. Once that's ensured, we provide advanced learning management tools to be used on top of that layer.

The global education industry was valued over $6 trillion in 2018 and is about to become a $10 trillion industry by 2030. This puts Bangladesh at the very crux of growth, with the population's education needs rising along with its expendable income. Our mission at Thrive EdTech is to connect classrooms with state-of-the-art technologies to unlock the next level for education.