for Innovation in Education and Learning
Access to high quality education and learning is of utmost importance to enable further development of our society and economy. At the same time both accessibility and the quality of education and learning could be improved significantly.
Education has many challenges e.g.: encouraging creativity, being able to keep up with ever-faster change, inspiring kids to develop their passions etc. We could do significantly better in preparing kids for life. For example it is visible at the higher education level where university graduates often do not possess the skills needed by the labour market and often need to be re-trained by their employer. On the other hand, employers are struggling to find meaningful tools to up-skill their staff, while there are many solutions for up-skilling out there that do not make it to the hands of these employers.
Challenge
In education we are slow to take advantage of new methodologies and technologies for learning including EdTech solutions.
Key stakeholders, such as: users, practitioners, researchers, innovators, decision makers and investors, are often not working together effectively. In other words, we lack an innovation cycle within the educational system.
Solution
The main aim of Leonardo Initiative (LI) is to improve innovation in education through fostering cooperation between the key stakeholders by coordinating a worldwide network of Education Innovation Hubs or Centres of Innovation of Learning (CE).
The main task of the CE would be to organise the innovation cycle in education, to enable the creation of improved learning solutions and methodologies. This is done by testing and researching new solutions in learning. When a valuable solution is found, it is disseminated through CEs network to be implemented by users.
The knowledge of new valuable solutions is also shared with the LI which disseminates the information about the solutions to the CEs globally.
Issue 1
Teachers often struggle with implementing modern methodologies and technologies for learning.
Solution to Issue 1
Coaching programme, which supports teachers in sustainably converting from traditional methods to modern methods for teaching.
Issue 2
Innovators lack a go-to organisation that would be able to give them timely and meaningful feedback and bridge them with initial users.
Solution to Issue 2
CE becomes the go-to organisation for innovators. CE will have expertise in evaluating new innovations. Also CE will organise testing of the innovations in a real learning setting, facilitated by coaches.
Issue 3
Knowledge from research on learning is hardly reaching the hands of learners.
Solution to Issue 3
Researchers are invited to study the innovations that the CE is facilitating. The CE will facilitate dialogue between the researchers and the innovators. The innovators will do their best to implement the knowledge gained from the researchers. This will create a natural flow of knowledge into practice.
Innovation cycle in education
Opportunities for Leonardo Initiative
We recognise that the stakeholder groups in many cases have difficulties understanding each other (different language and culture). So it is the task of the LI to provide a good platform to enable the stakeholder groups to come together for a fruitful dialogue.
There are existing organisations that resemble CEs. For example centres of excellence for research of learning can be found at university faculties for pedagogy. For example a centre might be really good in deep research about VR in learning. But they might not have the connection to the entrepreneurs or policy makers and hence the research is not reaching the hands of users.
Also there are some organisations that implement new learning solutions, for example offering STEAM programs after school. However they often lack the connection to researchers that could run unbiased research of the implemented solutions. Also they may lack a global network to get access to the best solutions.
The LI shall become a neutral collaboration platform to bridge the stakeholder groups.
Where needed, LI needs to support the stakeholder groups, the existing research centres etc. to add missing elements to their practices. In the same way the LI can help entrepreneurs to work with researchers, or help, the policy makers to learn about other stakeholders and innovations that the other stakeholder groups are working on.
The LI will invite existing organisations that resemble CEs to join it's umbrella with the aim of forging cooperation between these organisations and the other stakeholder groups. Where needed LI will support the creation of CE's.
We are thankful for your feedback and cooperation!
Peter Fagerström
Founder and CEO of Educraftor
Advisor to the board, Edtech Finland
peter@educraftor.com
Märt Aro
Co-Founder of DreamApply
Chair of Nordic EdTech Forum N8
mart.aro@dreamapply.com