Solution description

The final product is a new model of educational platform supported on the teacher-to-teacher (T2T) concept, where educators will have the opportunity to monetize their digital content. We aim at developing an educational platform that provides a complete course tracking, interactive and specialized class videos, and a place for extra curriculum consulting hours. This platform will integrate multiple well-known education and communication solutions in one simple environment. For instance, whiteboard integration is one of the crucial features for remote teaching and must be interconnected through the educational platform. Based on the pre-defined metadata, our platform enables tracking and matching of the content submitted/used by the platform users, which creates the opportunity to provide content matching suggestions or peer review requests to the registered users.

The key performance indicators are defined as:

• the amount of content packages shared
• the number of peer-reviewed content packages
• the content consumed based on the clicks
• the number of minutes on the platform/content per user  

By enabling a seamless environment envisioned towards content sharing on educational thematics, the proposed platform brings a number of benefits to the challenge owners: (i) applicable content creation to enable effective knowledge sharing, (ii) ample networking possibilities to enhance knowledge gathering and possible future innovation projects, (iii) financial restitution and constant income from the platform users through an ethical approach to content monetization, (iv) thriving environment to understand and foster innovative educational approaches that can be further explored.

Solution context

Due to the pandemic, educational institutions were forced to switch to online teaching swiftly and abruptly, without any preparation on digital learning skills and content creation. We performed a number of interviews with both students and teachers in order to assess the most prominent challenges of this “new teaching/learning normal”. Teachers have trouble creating content for lectures, maintaining class discipline and order, as well as interest among students. On the other hand, students had focus problems rooted on multiple distraction possibilities, lack of self-motivation, lack of clear comprehension of the knowledge provided by teachers, and an overall disappointment with the continuation of traditional, presentation-oriented classes within a more selfless and dehumanized environment. 

Solution target group

The primary focus are educators, especially high school teachers, extra-courses teachers and undergraduate professors. Secondary target groups are educational content creators and students that look to enhance their pedagogic toolboxes with specifically designed digital teaching/learning tools.

Solution impact

The first impact is on enhancing digital teaching creativity and effective knowledge sharing in a digital environment. This can be measured by the number of content packages created, shared, edited and consumed on the platform between educators (primary user group). Additionally, the platform will enable the creation of an innovative teaching community that focuses on the challenges and innovative solutions for hybrid and online teaching. This community can be measured through the number of unique users and the number of relationships (connections) established between users. Another impact is to motivate educators to create additional content for their courses and lectures, since the platform enables the possibility to monetize editable content packages shared between users. The measurement, in this case, is through the number of created and shared content packages, as well as the revenues obtained per user.

Solution tweet text

Your digital content has value, and we help you to host it.

Solution innovativeness

Although the online learning market has expanded in the last two years, our solution is based on a teacher-to-teacher model and that’s what makes us different from others in the market.

Besides, our solution aims at integrating multiple education and communication tools in one seamless environment. The toolbox we proposed owns good originality.

Solution transferability

Since the platform is designed towards the creation of hybrid and online teaching/learning, there is not a restriction on the subject of contents being created and disseminated. Additionally, the tools provided for content creation can be used for innovative content outside of the scope of the platform, for instance, to enable interactive digital webinars, presentations, pitch-sessions, and other forms of knowledge sharing outside the scope of education. Therefore, this concept can also be replicated in corporate conditions.

Solution sustainability

The initial phase will focus on content creation through free uploads and peer review requests, the second phase shall focus on promoting peer reviewed content and receiving commissions from the sale of the peer reviewed content.

We also have a development roadmap for the platform, in which we look to reinvest the short-term revenue into securing an in-house IT department focused on implementing AI and data-driven solutions for our platform during the mid and long-term. The overall purpose is to provide suggestion services tailored for students and their parents considering the students current school/university grades, and this would greatly enhance the sustainability of the platform.

Solution team work

Teamwork and division of responsibilities was a key factor to a successful completion of the hackathon. Since we all came from quite different spheres and moreover, we collaborated online, it was necessary to clearly point out our strengths and weaknesses from the very beginning. Before and during the Hackathon Day, us EIT Manufacturing Alumni community kept in regular contact through online meeting and messaging platforms. Through constant communication and cooperation, we managed to fulfill what we set out to do and we could work together again on some other challenge in the future.