Case study / Education
A learning app for 12,600 students on old phones and expensive data. Lessons download in small pieces and keep working without a connection.
Students had old phones and expensive data, so video lessons were unusable. We rebuilt the lessons as text and audio that download in small pieces and work offline. Completion rose from 31 percent to 74 percent.
The programme was built on video lessons. Students on cheap Android phones and expensive data could not watch them. Roughly 40 percent stopped opening the app after the first week, and teachers had no way to see who was falling behind until the end of term.
The content was good. The delivery assumed a connection and a device that most students did not have.
We rebuilt the learning experience around the constraint instead of ignoring it. Lessons became text first with compressed audio, lessons download in a few megabytes, and progress is stored on the device until a connection is available. Teachers get a simple view of who is stuck, not a dashboard nobody opens.
Completion moved from 31 percent to 74 percent. The average lesson now weighs about 8 megabytes, and the app is usable on the devices students actually own. The programme added two more regions without changing the delivery model.
“Students stopped disappearing when the data ran out. That was the whole problem, and it took a redesign rather than a bigger budget.”
The next phase adds downloadable audio packs for feature phones and a shared tablet mode for classrooms with one device. The offline design already supports it.
Your version
If your users are on cheap data and old phones, the software has to meet them there.
