Learn-Earn-Yearn (Blog 2)

L.E.Y.

Learn-Earn-Yearn (L.E.Y.) is a student growth program that focuses on three skills: Problem-solving, Leadership, and Communication Skills. Not only does it observe these three skills as the most important for students’ career and professional life development, but also regards them as the most significant in an individual’s professional and personal life.

That is why L.E.Y. is initiated and aimed to help students build the mindset to learn and practice the skills which are necessary to excel in life.

This project was lead by Zorain Tooba with her four core team members, Fareeza Fayyaz, Areeba Jalal, Muzammil Ali, and Saad Saeed under the supervision of the Project Manager, Sir Anis Punjwani, and Program Associate Ma’am Aalia Aslam.

This project has been a success so far, keeping the fact that it only has just begun and is only two months old.

PROGRESS:

The progression this project made is astonishing in just two months. Following are some of the measurable key points to its progress:

1. Our Facebook page named Learn-Earn-Yearn is followed by 159 people, the stats for its people reached is 423 in total. Post engagements were 148 and total likes were 155 on the posts it created. This is a representation of two weeks’ stats.
2. The YouTube channel of this project, Learn-Earn-Yearn has one video currently, having 58 views on it in a week.
3. This project has created two videos, one for the Introduction of the project and the second was for the announcement of its first session on Problem Solving. It also has created 10 posts on its Facebook page.
4. The logo was made twice, the first one was designed by Saad Saeed then it was redesigned by Zorain Tooba which is now the current logo.
5. L.E.Y. has conducted two interactive online sessions on Zoom and Google Meet respectively.
6. The first online session was conducted on Zoom on Problem-solving which was attended by 20 people.
7. The second session was organized as a proper event on Facebook which was marketed thoroughly. This session was attended by 16 participants which had been sent an invite through a proper channel, i.e. a google registration form was created first and then, based on the responses that were collected, a google calendar event invite was then sent to all those respondents.
8. All the posts and online sessions were marketed through Facebook, social groups, Whatsapp, and personal contacts.
9. Moreover, three presentations have been made. One on Problem-solving; second on Leadership and third as a Final Presentation.

Workshop on Problem-solving

CHALLENGES:

This project has gone through so many challenges, following are some of the major challenges it faced throughout the two months.

1. Time limitations, all the project team members had personal and professional commitments, for which to manage this project really well under two months was tough.
2. Inexperience, this project is just two months old, so it was and is still going through a struggle phase. Additionally, the team members were all students and inexperienced as it was their first time running this kind of project.
3. Another challenge was controlling the behavior of the participants that attended our first sessions. In our first session which was on Problem-solving, there were few students that did not follow the instructions described in the session and started writing on screens, which disturb the ambiance of the workshop.
4. Further, organizing two online sessions within a week turned out to be really difficult to manage.
5. Zoom’s non-premium account and Google Meet basic version provided a basic set of functions for which problems occurred like we were only able to allow a maximum of 20 participants in one session on Zoom. We had to let go of other participants that wanted to attend the session.
6. The option to mute everyone at a certain time during the session was also unavailable, for which we had to ask the participants to mute themselves every time.
7. The option to stop screen sharing by other participants and only allow Host was also not available on Google meet basic.

Despite all these challenges, the five team members were able to do their job really well and proved to be a responsible and cooperative team.

SOLUTION:

The challenges that we faced were so gracefully dealt with by each of our team members through hard work, taking the responsibility and sincerity towards the project. Everyone from the team took this project as their own, showed great leadership skills and problem-solving skills to face the challenges and resolve the issues that occurred, on time.

CHANGE IN APPROACH:

“Conducting the online session will be easy to manage”, was the wrong estimation that we made. As already discussed we encountered various challenges during our first session and in order to make sure that we don’t face the same problem in our second session we made two changes in our approach.

1. Firstly, while conducting our second session, we prepared ourselves more by conducting a mock session prior to the main event and distributed everyone a certain responsibility.
2. The second thing that we did was instead of directly sending the zoom link on different platforms. We generated a google form for the registration in order to fetch some details of students who are willing to join the session. What are their names, what field they belong to, how did they hear about us, this kind of information was collected. This really eased our work because we only emailed the workshop link to those who were suitable for the session.

These two shifts in our approach made a lot of our work easier and helped us in carrying our second session smoothly and in a more organized way.

Workshop on Leadership

IMPACT:

The impact that was created was analyzed through a feedback form, which was shared with the participants at the end of the sessions.

Unfortunately, in the first session, when the feedback form was shared, some error was present in the form which was a mistake from our end. So, we were not able to collect feedback in our first session.

On our second session, this time feedback forms were checked and tested before the sessions and this way feedback responses were collected which shows that participants enjoyed the session and were willing to attend our next sessions also.

Another way through which we analyzed the impact is through the quiz and DIY activities. In each of the two sessions, we asked the participants to perform the DIY activity to check their understanding of the topic.

In the Problem-solving workshop, we also added a riddle activity that proved to be a fun activity for the participants and students were laughing and trying to solve the riddle. One student was so happy in the end to finally solve the riddle.

In the Leadership workshop, we added a quiz that was solved by participants during the session to check their understanding and attentiveness during the session.

SUSTAINABILITY:

Learn-Earn-Yearn is a sustainable project as it is totally an online project.

Further, the project does not require a large investment and financial support initially. Which makes it sustainable as it will not be bankrupt or will not be prone to financial loss.

Besides, the project meets the current learning system. Traditional learning systems like physical classes are becoming obsolete and institutions are going online completely. This project also follows this modern teaching system and is hopeful to sustain itself in the future.

Apart from that, there must be some necessary actions taken to ensure the project’s sustainability. Following will be the key aspects that will be established to run this project successfully.

1. Assessing the project actions and sustainability from time to time.
2. Developing a strategy to follow certain standards to make sure the quality of the content and visibility of the project doesn’t get compromised.

We are hopeful that our project L.E.Y. will achieve great heights of success and will have a valuable impact on students’ growth and development.