10 Minute School isn't news anymore. When it arrived in mid-2015 as a website catering to the learning needs of college students and university admission seekers, it may have needed an introduction. Now with around 1,500 visitors every day and 127,000 followers on Facebook, 10 Minute School has become a household name for students across the nation.
But if you haven't heard of them, go to their website at www.10minuteschool.com and check them out. They're an open education website in the Khan Academy vein, with each video lesson and interactive quizzes being kept under 10 minutes.So what's new?Live classes on Facebook, of course! With the university admission season coming up, the school has launched a free admissions coaching programmes. Classes started on June 1 and will continue till December.
The classes are around 1-hour long and they cover intermediate physics, chemistry, biology, Bangla, English, general knowledge, management and accounting. Students can get the routine and notices from a group called “10 Minute School LIVE Admission Coaching.”
During Ramadan, the school is taking one class each on Tuesdays and Fridays at 10pm. But after Ramadan, there will be two classes four days a week.
The first few classes have gotten around 5,000 students while they were live - arguably the biggest classroom in Bangladesh ever.
The programme was made possible through a generous sponsorship from Robi. This is a long way from the days when the founder, still a student then, would scrape together his income from tutoring to fund all the efforts.
At the home of one of the members, which was being used as the company's workplace for the day, Ayman Sadiq, founder CEO (no, it's chief everything officer), sheepishly admits that full financial viability is still not in sight.
“Of course, we're getting some wonderful support from Robi right now,” he adds. However, the school is still looking at several options to be self-financed.
But the uncertainty does not seem to bother the talented IBA graduate, who instead of settling down in a cozy corporate position, as is the wont of his lot, has decided to lead his brainchild as a full-time job.
His confidence is understandable, considering how many hurdles the school has successfully jumped over to get here.
“I spent money on two professional web development firms, but they couldn't deliver. Then I spoke to Raied. He and I are neighbours.”
Buet student Abyad Raied, the school's chief technology officer, is the man who singlehandedly built the first version of the website.
“I didn't know any coding when Ayman bhai asked me to do this,” Raied replies when I ask whether he is thinking of a programming career. “I learned how to build websites for the school.”
But when they went live for the first time, the site went down in 4-5 hours from the traffic overload.
“In the end we had to put the money together to get a dedicated server,” the CTO says. Further down the line, Raied wants to bring the cost of using the school website down as much as possible.
“This includes optimising the site's performance so that it takes less data to load,” he says. “But eventually, I want the site moved to a local server for better speed, and we will try to remove the data charges for our users.”
He is also planning to make learning on the website more interactive. Students who have signed up as users on 10 Minute School can earn points through quizzes and watching videos. Recently the leaderboard was changed to weekly (from permanent), giving students more of a competitive edge.
Geneticist Shamir Montazid is the most popular teacher on the website. He has been around since before the days of the website when he'd upload lessons on YouTube and Facebook. He is currently doing his masters in genetics at Dhaka University. For his biology and chemistry classes at the school, Shamir has adopted the curious moniker of Heisenberg.
“People say they find similarities between me and that character,” said Shamir, meaning the TV series Breaking Bad's chemistry teacher character Walter White, who takes the name Heisenberg when he becomes a drug kingpin.
And his students just think it's cool that they're learning chemistry from Walter White.
Shamir believes 10 Minute School can break barriers to quality education for students. “Wherever you are in the country, whichever school you go to, no matter what time of the day, you can come to our website to learn. All you need is the Internet you're already using.”
“To be perfectly honest, our real target audience are the backbenchers,” he says. The lessons are designed to explain the basics and include a range of study hacks that are bound to make life easier for any student.Whither from here?10 Minute School is planning to provide skill training and other essential knowledge bases for people who have dropped out of the school system and for unskilled workers at home and abroad.
“At the end of the day, school-going childen are only a small portion of the population. Learning is for everyone,” says Ayman.
“Everybody talks about education, but nobody talks about learning, When you're taught something, you need to be able to use that knowledge in real life.”