EdTech startup Funzi and UNDP Syria have partnered to deliver mobile learning to vulnerable populations in conflict areas.

In a war zone, the sad truth is that education often becomes one of the first casualties, as it is – understandably – pushed back in favour of more urgent and immediate needs such as food and healthcare. The tragedy of it is, however, that this not only affects people’s ability to cope with their immediate situation, but also hampers their post-conflict chances of building a long-term future.

Education often becomes one of the casualties in a conflict situation
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Funzi and UNDP Syria are collaborating to deliver mobile learning to vulnerable populations
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Conflicts in Syria have resulted in shortage of jobs and infrastructure, as well as lack of security in certain parts of the country. This erodes livelihood prospects of Syrians and makes access to relevant information and quality learning evermore essential. Yet UNESCO policy guidelines for mobile learning affirm that mobile devices can help ensure the continuity of education during times of crisis.

Conflicts in Syria have resulted in shortage of jobs and infrastructure
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To help address this, and strengthen the resilience and socio-economic stability of individuals and communities in Syria, Funzi and UNDP Syria have started collaboration to deliver mobile learning, with training modules expected to be launched later this year.

“Mobile learning leverages technology people already own,” explains Tero Salonen, Funzi’s CEO and Founder. ”The cost of mobile teaching is only a fraction compared to traditional means of teaching, making mobile an efficient and effective channel for knowledge transfer, especially in areas of crisis.”

Since essential information and training content are available via mobile phones, he says, learning can happen in areas and at times that may not have been easy to reach

 

“With our service performing well in slower networks and on feature phones, training is easily accessible to vulnerable populations in areas with poor infrastructure. It is also a major step forward towards helping mitigate educational disruptions during times of crisis through mobile learning in order to support swift recoveries of these countries.”

This is a significant milestone for Funzi, a Finnish start-up we covered previously on Tech Trends which is an active member in the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan. When I met their founder Aape Pohjarvita in Helsinki, he was keen to emphasize how he believed mobile would be the most disruptive method of delivering effective learning globally, specially in conflict areas (at the time they had already deployed courses to over 40,000 people in Iraq).

“We at Funzi are committed to supporting the world in achieving peace, meaningful livelihoods, and happiness and health for all through quality education. Thus, this project is a significant milestone that takes us closer to achieving our vision,” agrees Salonen.

Funzi’s service – which is free to end users – delivers learning specifically designed for mobile and personalizes the user experience using similar mechanisms as those leveraged to make mobile games “sticky” such as behavioural and usage patterns.

Mobile learning leverages technology people already own
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Funzi founders Chief Evangelist Aape Pohjavirta, CEO Tero Salonen and co-founder CXO Miemo Penttinen

This is also an important as a test case for exporting Finnish education and for the viability of mobile learning as a delivery mechanism for learning opportunities to vulnerable populations in conflict areas around the world.

Funzi uses mobile gaming mechanisms to personalize learning for its users
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Tailored training modules for UNDP’s local partners and their beneficiaries will be launched as mobile learning on a dedicated site starting late 2017. The goal of the partnership is to promote long-term participation, sustainability, and self-sufficiency of UNDP local partners.

The first phase of learning will equip aid workers, while the second will help vulnerable populations
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Training will be delivered in two phases, with the first one developing essential program lifecycle management skills for UNDP and NGO field staff and the second offering training to vulnerable populations like the displaced, and women- and youth-headed households to support them in achieving social cohesion and sustainable livelihoods.

“Our participation and experience in developing and implementing mobile learning services for displaced populations allow us to create learning programs that are effective in knowledge transfer and skills development, while remaining cost-efficient and scalable,” Salonen concludes.

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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Bringing Mobile Learning to Syria appeared first on Tech Trends.

17% growth expected in the Education Technology sector over the next  4 years according to EdTechX Global and IBIS Capital report.

Mendeley is one example of a start-up that thrived in the London Education Technology ecosystem
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The fastest growth is currently being experienced in Asia, showing that the current dominance of US companies in that space is shifting. The UK looked set to play a large part in that trend, as the country had experienced something of an EdTech boom in recent years. It’s unclear, however, how the decision to leave the European Union will affect the technology industry in general,  the Education sector in particular over the long term.

Mendeley is one example of a start-up that thrived in the London Education Technology ecosystem; it was founded in 2008 by 3 German Entrepreneurs and later acquired by Dutch Publishers Elsevier in 2013 . It is hard to imagine this type of success story happening as easily without the collaboration and free movement of talent that the European Union fostered, and without London being a gateway to the broader European Market and technology ecosystem.

At the EdTechX Europe summit, which took place in June just before the Brexit vote, the mood had been optimistic. The conference attracted record numbers, and many European companies were ranked as global technology champions in the first “Makers and Shakers of Education Technology Index” published prior to the event. The index highlighted the role of innovators such as Cambridge-based Raspberry Pi and Lego Education in advancing Education Technology.

There is an increasingly pressing need for investment in the sector to accelerate the digitisation of education, especially in Europe
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Stavros N Yiannouka, CEO of WISE – the World Innovation Summit for Education which co-curated the rankings said the purpose of the list was to recognise thinkers and doers pioneering innovative approaches to addressing challenges in education. The criteria used in compiling the shortlist included disruptive innovation, individual vision, impact, and contribution to education.

According to Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloquet, Co- Founder of EdTechXGlobal, the index elevates education innovators and thought leaders to the level of “social rock stars”.

Beyond social recognition for the sector, however, there is little doubt that the enormous commercial opportunities around EdTech remain largely underexplored, in spite of the growth we’ve seen so far. The digital market is now worth over $5tn (this is 8 times the size of the software market and 3 times larger than the media and entertainment industry) yet education is only 2% digitised. There is, the report concludes, an increasingly pressing need for investment in the sector to accelerate the digitisation of education, especially in Europe.

There is little doubt that the enormous commercial opportunities around EdTech remain largely underexplored
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Digital models offer new routes for re-skilling as well as addressing widespread labour shortages
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There is also a growing realisation of the impact EdTech will have in the way the 21^st Century workforce acquires and develops skills, and an acknowledgement that this will be driven by mobile. The most substantial growth is expected across emerging markets, with mobile being a catalyst for delivering and supporting learning. 90% of the world’s population under 30 live in those markets, and it follows that education and vocational training in the area will be led by mobile-first strategies. This is a view that strongly chimes with the strategy set out by Aape Pohjavirta, from Finnish Mobile Learning start-up Funzi.

The report also predicts a continued rise of MOOC platforms such as Coursera (which is set to reach yearly revenues of $30m) as the global demand for education rises and traditional provision models will simply not be able to grow in step with rise in global population numbers. At the same time, we can expect a global workforce crisis powered by extreme automation, a so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ which will see AI replacing not only highly repetitive low-skill jobs, but routine medium-skill too.

“50% of current jobs won’t exist in 2025,” says Vedrenne-Cloquet, “so there will be a growing need to re-train the workforce in order to address current skill gaps and increase the use of continuous learning.”

Digital models, he concludes, offer a way to capture these changes and offer new routes for re-skilling as well as addressing widespread labour shortages.

There is a growing realisation of the impact EdTech will have in the way the 21st Century workforce acquires and develops skills
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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Edtech Market to Reach $252bn by 2020 appeared first on Tech Trends.

“Evangelist” is an overhyped term in tech, yet Chief Evangelist Aape Pohjavirta makes it work.

His enthusiasm is contagious, and after a few minutes chatting about Funzi – the start-up he founded two years ago – I feel like I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid. Maybe it was the strong Finnish coffee that gave me that buzz, or perhaps it was the fact that Aape can use terms like ‘futurification’ without making it sound like empty nonsense. This is clearly a man on a mission, which he casually outlines as we sit in a swanky Helsinki coffee shop:

“We want a world with no wars, where everyone is healthy, happy and has a job.”

But what, I ask, are his more ambitious goals?


He laughs, but there’s no mistaking that the goals are deadly serious, he’s got an  impressive track record to back them up. Having been involved with education technology since the 80s, he collaborated with some of the early Apple pioneers. Over the decades that followed, he experienced the hype around e-learning and multimedia as well as the meteoric rise of social media and mobile. But, he says, they all failed to live up to the promise of truly revolutionising education.

“The education industry is fragmented and works in silos. There is no global driver. When you look at EdTech companies they usually start off by segmenting themselves by topic, language and geography, so you cannot scale, you’re always just jumping from niche to niche.”

As a friend of his – Chief Technology Officer at Stanford University’s School of Education Paul Kim – once put it, the current education system is simply incapable of reforming itself because everyone in the system is already a product of that system, so disruption needs to come from outside.

“You don’t need any new inventions in order to digitise the whole system of education delivery. Everything you need is already there. The only reason why this hasn’t happened is because publishers of educational books have always been hugely profitable, so disruption in that space won’t come from them. We’re doing to education exactly what Google did to search. We’re destroying other people’s business because other people’s businesses have been wrong.”

We want a world with no wars, where everyone is healthy, happy and has a job
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In order to really shake things up, they started by first looking at how people were using their mobile devices, and how they would best learn through them. Funzi essentially works on the premise that when people can focus on learning the things that they’re good at, and that they’re interested in, education – delivered through technology – can have a much bigger impact

“It’s not about doing the same things better, but about doing better things. We’re using mobile to liberate people from education so they have the freedom to learn.”

Their business model is based on learning outcomes, where user have access to all the content for free, but pay for certification if they wish to validate that learning externally. It’s a powerful concept, since users can be confident that the course works for them before ever making a payment – if they make it at all. And looking at the numbers, that strategy does seem to make the product very ‘sticky,’ meaning that 20 out of every 100 users that try it come back the next day, week and month, with sessions averaging 8 minutes. Impressive stats in an age of information overload and short attention spans.

“It’s a false choice between free learning and monetising, you can have both in this system. We can optimise the way that any learning is delivered anywhere, and we can do this at not cost to the user while still enabling the creation of valuable content and lucrative businesses.”

Another false paradigm, he says, is that EdTech is a competitive market: “This is a 6 trillion dollar a year industry that has to be digitised. 1 percent of that is still $60 billion. Divide that among a thousand different companies and that’s still $60 million each, so could you please tell me where the competition is?”

It’s not about doing the same things better, but about doing better things
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“We’re empowering people with skills to build their dreams” Aape says, pointing to the fact that over 40,000 people have taken their entrepreneurship course in Iraq alone. “We see from implementation how practical knowledge drives the birth of new communities and adds life to existing ones. It’s the desire and curiosity to learn new things that keeps us humans alive.”

At the same time, the global refugee crisis broke out, and like many in the tech community, Funzi felt compelled to help in any way they could (TechCrunch Editor Mike Butcher has been organising such global initiatives under the Techfugees umbrella since last year), so they leveraged the platform’s capabilities and scalability to help streamline the arrival and assimilation process for refugees—from finding reception centres and applying for asylum, to figuring out schools, work permits and the local language.

We’re empowering people with skills to build their dreams
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The next step in scaling up will be working with partners to reach users and deliver learning that’s relevant to them. “We know, for example, that there are 471 million Facebook users on mobile who said they were interested in education. Those are the people we’ll be targeting,” says Aarpe, who’s also cautiously optimistic about Facebook’s own education ambitions:

“We were at F8 (Facebook’s Developer Conference) this year and when I listened to MZ’s (Mark Zuckerberg) keynote it sounded like he was using my script,” he recalls. “From what I heard, he understands the huge responsibility that his organization has. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, right or wrong, but I do know he has a genuine interest in pushing the envelope in the only field that can ever really change the way the world works, and that’s education. At least he’s doing something… And when you look at the proposition, to deliver personalised, free learning to anyone, anywhere, what could be more beautiful, or more democratising? That’s exactly what we’re going to enable.”

To deliver personalised, free learning to anyone, anywhere, what could be more beautiful?
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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Funzifying Mobile Learning appeared first on Tech Trends.