Launching a teacher survey mobile app in Ghana

"Teacher Tapp began in the UK with a mission to help the world better understand the daily lives of teachers and to help teachers gain daily insights into their work. It is a simple app that asks teachers just three questions at the end of each day, then tells teachers how others have responded to the questions and provides them with a short piece of professional development reading to help teachers reflect on, and improve, their classroom practice.

It has been hugely popular, with over 6,000 teachers a day using it, and as a result we get daily requests from all over the world to launch in new countries. However, we feel particularly motivated to launch in developing countries where the daily lives of teachers are less well understood and where teachers do not always have good access to frequent professional development.

Ghana provides ideal conditions for us to learn how Teacher Tapp can be used in developing countries. In general, its smartphone penetration and mobile broadband rollout is good, and we know that about 80% of teachers have a smartphone. Teachers in Ghana all have high standards of English, so translation of our existing materials is not necessary. We are fortunate to have a local Ghanaian partner, the Ghana Society for Education Technology, who are equally passionate about using technology to improve education.

Launching in a developing country brings three key challenges that this feasibility study aims to support:

**1\. Is smartphone penetration and mobile broadband rollout good enough across Ghana?** Unlike other professions, teachers work everywhere that people live! So it is important that we learn the extent to which we can use our existing technology to reach teachers in Ghana.

**2\. Do teachers like Teacher Tapp and are they prepared to use it?** Teacher Tapp works on the basis that teachers use the app for a few minutes every single day. We need to learn whether our style and structure of providing questions and readings suits teachers in other countries.

**3\. Does the education community value the data that Teacher Tapp produces?** Our goal is to learn if there are organisations in Ghana with sufficient interest in researching education or advertising on the app to enable monetisation via survey questions and research insights."