With the remnants of the pandemic that left an increased growth of learning gaps and the education system’s inevitable evolution, an academic digital platform continues to navigate in bringing quality education even in rural places in the Philippines.
Teachmint is a digital infrastructure for education that offers tools for better school management for better learning outcomes.
“Since education moves the world forward, we believe that it deserves the best technology,” Teachmint CEO Mihir Gupta said in an exclusive interview.
“What you see is that unlike other sectors, education hasn’t got the kind of technology attention…there is a significant and meaningful way in which technology can play a role in education, but somehow because of a lot of factors. This has been one of the last sectors to gain digitization. So that is what Teachmint does. Teachmint brings meaningful technology to education as it is used,” Gupta added.
Teachmint was established in India in 2020 after seeing how well teachers received it.
It then launched in various countries, including the Philippines in 2022 following the increase of download rate.
“Us discovering the Philippines, the market interest came naturally to us. We started seeing a lot of downloads of Teachmint. It was kind of organic [that PH chose] for us,” he said.
“If you go on Youtube and search Teachmint in the Philippines, you will see a lot of videos created by Filipino teachers on how you use the product. So we saw a lot of love from the Philippines,” he added.
‘Closing the gap’
Teachmint’s commitment to transforming the Philippine education landscape is highlighted by the mobile-centric software that ensures accessibility.
With the 2023 Statista report, where 98.8 percent of Filipinos use mobile phones for internet access, Teachmint ensured that their platform is within reach of all, with 85percent of users interacting solely through mobile devices.
According to Gupta, this has allowed Teachmint to “create digital replicas from a classroom with the same users, the same vendor” to cater to the learning gap.
Although these digital replicas of classrooms are primarily private schools, according to Gupta, they cater more to them; the company still extends its interest in adapting Teachmint to public schools in the future to ensure inclusivity.
“In [the] Philippines, so far, we have been focused on the private school market, and that’s where the current attention is, but we understand that the Philippines is also one of the progressive geographies when it comes to school education, a very mature public school system as well. So we are exploring on how we can add value there as well, but still early right now focus on the private,”
Last year, the DepEd’s Learner Information System forecasted that most Filipino students would enroll in more than 47,000 public schools in the country for the 2023-2024 school year.
Gupta further conveyed Teachmint’s mission to make a meaningful impact on the educational landscape by emphasizing the need to integrate technology to cater to public schools.
“If a company wants to really impact the grassroots, which is since we are an impact driven company. We started with the thesis that we need to add meaningful value to the educational ecosystem. Then you need to, you need to solve the public schools because that’s where a majority of the students are. So, now the idea there is how do you figure out, where do you fit in the value system, how do you bring technology that is relevant to a public school.”
Meanwhile, a study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies has revealed that students from marginalized communities are at a more significant disadvantage when it comes to online learning, with only 27 percent of students in rural areas having access to the internet, compared to 47 percent in urban areas.
In addressing the disparity gap, Teachmint has expanded its services of “classroom digitization,” where they upgrade the infrastructure and provide teaching devices and internet connectivity in rural areas like Tuguegarao City in Cagayan province and Davao City.
“This is where we see a deep passion amongst teachers. We really do justice to their roles in education […]we are seeing actually teachers enthusiastic about adopting technology,” he said.
Teachmint has also partnered with international providers offering SMS services to the Philippines to enhance the accessibility and communication of students and educators.
Last Feb. 26, it announced its partnership with aSc timetable to manage the scheduling of students and educators better, underscoring its commitment to improving the teaching and learning experience for all.
“I think [Teachmint] is just committed to going deeper and deeper into solving our users’ problems. So that’s what we are focused on. And we are getting a lot of learnings by surveying institutions across the road across geographies,” Gupta said when asked what is the next big thing for Teachmint.
He added, “and we are quite excited about the prospects in the coming times. So just spreading a lot more time with our customers and users here and solving their problems.”