While Indonesia has the fourth-largest education system in the world with over 50 million students and four million teachers, it is one of the lowest performing. The country ranked 62nd out of 72 countries in the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a benchmarking study by the OECD which assesses the achievement and application of key knowledge and skills of 15 year-olds.
Ruangguru was launched in 2014 with the ambition to tackle these challenges. Ruangguru is a tech-enabled education provider whose first product was a tutoring marketplace. Since then, the start-up has launched a slew of products aimed to accelerate educational outcome. Its flagship product, RuangKelas, is a freemium Learning Management System (LMS) that helps students prepare for exams using content tailored to the national curriculum, and helps teachers to crowdsource educational content and distribute it to students. With this service, Ruangguru is supporting the Indonesian government in its move to advance the national education system.
Ruanggurru received a grant from the GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator Innovation Fund in April 2017 to launch an online marketplace for personalised education where teachers and tutors generate content, and students access content for free or request personalised advice for a fee.
The start-up has forged partnerships with 32 (out of 34) provincial governments and more than 325 city and regency governments, many of which are using RuangKelas to help students prepare for high school entrance exams. As of end January 2018, Ruangguru, now an established business with 254 staff, had attracted over 7 million registered students and reached 900,000 monthly active users (students not only registered on the LMS but accessing other Ruangguru services).
Complementing RuangKelas is a range of paid supplemental education services Ruangguru offers outside of school, including:
- RuangBelajar: an integrated learning video subscription service;
- Ruangguru Digital Bootcamp: a social learning education solution for group-based distance learning;
- RuangLes: a private tutoring marketplace;
- RuangUji: an online exam simulation product; and
- RuangLesOnline: an on-demand tutoring service.
The GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator Innovation Fund provides selected start-ups in Africa and Asia Pacific with equity-free funding, technical assistance, and the opportunity to partner with mobile operators in their markets to help scale their products and services into sustainable businesses with positive socio-economic impact. Applications for Round 3 will open on March 12, 2018.
The Ecosystem Accelerator programme is supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Australian Government, the GSMA and its members.
