Overview

Bangladesh has nearly 100,000 primary and secondary institutions spread all over the country. It is a challenging matter to ensure the proper development of teachers from rural areas. For this reason, The government’s “Aspire to Innovate” (a2i) program launched the “Teachers’ Portal” (locally Shikkhok Batayon), a nationwide online platform for teachers’ professional development​.

A2i partnered with Riseup Labs to develop this portal, creating a one-stop digital hub where teachers collaborate, co-create content, and solve classroom challenges​. The result has been a groundbreaking transformation in Bangladesh’s education landscape – connecting hundreds of thousands of teachers, crowdsourcing 585,000+ learning resources, and improving teaching quality nationwide.

The Challenges

Bridging Gaps in a Traditional Education System

Before the Teachers’ Portal, faced severe hindrances in educators’ professional development due to lack of accessibility, in the traditional system.

>> Infrequent Training & Support: Conventional teacher training workshops were rare and reached teachers infrequently – many educators waited years between training, leaving skills outdated and support limited to occasional sessions​. This meant a new teaching method or curriculum update could take years to penetrate all schools, slowing innovation in classrooms.

>> Limited Access to Quality Materials: Rural and remote teachers often lacked up-to-date textbooks, digital content, or forums to exchange ideas, widening the urban-rural quality gap​. Creating new lesson materials relied on a few experts, a bottleneck that left many teachers without modern resources​.

>> Isolation and Lack of Collaboration: There was no unified platform for teachers to share best practices or seek peer advice. A teacher’s knowledge only remained within their school. This isolation meant missed opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, mentoring, and collective problem-solving on a national scale.

These challenges underscored the need for a scalable solution to empower teachers through connectivity, knowledge-sharing, and continuous learning.

The Objective

Building a Collaborative Digital Ecosystem for Teachers

The vision for the Teachers’ Portal was to fundamentally change the way teachers in Bangladesh access training and resources. The project set out to create a unified digital ecosystem to make professional development collaborative and accessible. 

Key objectives included establishing an online platform where every teacher – from big-city schools to remote villages – could train, share, and learn at their convenience​. This meant developing a rich repository of quality, teacher-created multimedia content freely available to all​, and fostering a vibrant community forum for educators to discuss pedagogy, technology in education, and classroom challenges​.

Critically, the portal aimed to close the rural-urban gap by enabling peer-to-peer collaboration nationwide, so that a teacher in a rural area could benefit from the same knowledge network as one in the capital city​.

The Solution

A Nationwide Platform Powered by User-Generated Content and Mentorship

Riseup Labs engineered the Teachers’ Portal as a robust, user-friendly web platform that brings the vision to life. Working closely with a2i, the team developed features that promote collaboration, content creation, and continuous learning at scale. 

>> Crowdsourced Digital Content Repository: Teachers can upload their own educational materials – from video lessons to blogs and lesson plans – which are stored in a central repository for all to access​. 
A built-in rating and feedback system allows teachers nationwide to comment on and improve each other’s content, driving collective refinement of lessons​.


>> Gamification and Recognition: To spark engagement, Riseup Labs implemented gamified elements that celebrate contributions. Every week, the platform automatically highlights three “Best Content Developers” – teachers whose uploaded lessons earn top ratings and reviews​.

>> Offline Access: For areas with low internet connectivity, the platform’s content was made available offline thousands of these model lessons were distributed on portable media to schools in remote regions​. This hybrid approach ensures even the most isolated teachers can benefit from the portal’s resources.

>> Scalable, Secure Infrastructure: Under the hood, Riseup Labs ensured the portal’s web architecture can support a huge user base and content volume. The system handles hundreds of thousands of users and serves millions of page views per month without performance issues​.

Features like cloud-based load balancing, a content management system tailored for multilingual support (Bangla and English), and mobile-responsive design were implemented so that teachers can seamlessly access the portal anytime, on any device.

By combining these elements, the Teachers’ Portal became a comprehensive solution – part social network, part e-learning library, and part mentorship program – custom-built for the needs of Bangladeshi teachers. Riseup Labs’ expertise in user-centric design and scalable development was instrumental in turning a2i’s ambitious vision into a practical, reliable platform that teachers trust and love to use.

The Impact

Transformation at Scale – Numbers that Speak Volumes

Since its launch, the Teachers’ Portal has ushered in a dramatic transformation in teacher empowerment and educational quality across Bangladesh. The initiative’s success is evident in the metrics and outcomes achieved:

>> Nationwide Teacher Engagement: What started as an idea in 2013 is now a thriving community of educators. Over 6,500,000+ teachers from all corners of Bangladesh have registered on the portal, collectively building a repository of more than 700,000 digital lessons and multimedia content pieces for classroom use​. Every subject – from primary science to high school technical courses – now has locally created digital resources that any teacher can freely use.

>> High Activity & Collaboration: The portal isn’t just a static library; it’s an active network. Teachers have published 2,70,000+ blog posts sharing insights and best practices​.

The platform sustains over 6,50,000+ active users per month, driving around 50,000 page views.

>> Improved Teaching Skills: Perhaps most importantly, the Teachers’ Portal is measurably improving teaching quality. Teachers nationwide improved their communication skills by using the portal and enhanced their content creation skills (developing better lesson plans and materials)​. Additionally, a huge amount of teachers reported improving their classroom facilitation techniques after applying ideas from the portal​.

>> Empowering Rural Educators: One of the portal’s most striking impacts is how it has empowered teachers in remote areas. Thanks to equal access to resources and recognition, rural teachers have shined on the national stage – a huge amount of the weekly “best content” award winners have come from rural schools​.

This was almost unheard of before. The platform effectively leveled the playing field, allowing talented educators outside the major cities to earn recognition for their innovative teaching methods and ideas.

>> Global Recognition and Replication: The success of Bangladesh’s Teachers’ Portal has reverberated beyond the country’s borders. The initiative received the prestigious WSIS (World Summit on Information Society) Award in 2024 being honored as one of the top 5 global champions in the e-learning category​.

The portal also received the UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICT in Education in 2025. The model has now been adopted in three additional countries: Nepal, Rwanda, and Ghana of the top 5 global champions in the e-learning category​.

a2i and Riseup Labs have partnered to replicate the Teachers’ Portal for Uganda’s education system, taking the lessons learned in Bangladesh to empower educators abroad.

By transforming teacher training from a periodic chore into a continuous, community-driven experience, the Teachers’ Portal is helping Bangladesh build a more capable and connected teaching workforce. 

In the words of one Bangladeshi educator, “This portal has turned our teaching community into a family – we learn, create, and succeed together.” 

The Teachers’ Portal is a shining example of using technology to break down traditional barriers in Bangladesh’s education system and Riseup Labs is proud to have been a key contributor to this journey of advancing education through innovation.

This page was last edited on 7 July 2025, at 4:49 pm