Remote education in pandemic times - Edge1S

Remote education in pandemic times

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Małgorzata Chmielewska

HR Specialist

The situation caused by Covid-19 has exposed the weaknesses of the Polish education system and has shown how important for its efficient functioning the digital transformation is. The existing system, as in the emergency situation, turns out to be outdated and centralized, and thus completely unprepared for effectively facing the challenges that arise.
Almost overnight, schools had to change their teaching from stationary to remote mode. Many of them were completely unprepared for such a change. The problem occurred to be the access to tools supporting remote learning – both to the hardware itself and the appropriate software for teaching. Suppliers of ready-made platforms and tools enabled access to their websites, offering implementation and operation support. Companies developing new solutions intensified their development work to improve and adapt their functionalities in order to meet the remote learning needs, at different levels.

remotely education

Gold weight e-learning platforms

Modern technologies have introduced innovative solutions for the education and science sector. Naturally, the first match is e-learning solutions, but Edtech is not only about e-learning. It is also about solutions (as applications, platforms or systems) supporting and improving f.e. teaching, managing the infrastructure of institutions, monetization of their resources and communication. Many of them use the latest technologies such as IoT, AR, VR. Everything indicates that they will become an integral part of modern education much faster than expected.
At this point, the Edtech market worldwide offers a huge number of modern solutions. Polish products have also become recognized outside their home market (e.g. Brainly, NUADU or Fiszkoteka). In Poland, Edtech market is currently an area that attracts great interest in investors’ eyes. For example, the total funds raised from investors by Brainly amounted to over 68 million dollars. This is an incredible success of the Cracow startup. 

The technology for education and science is particularly familiar for us. For almost 4 years we’ve been working on innovative IT solutions for this sector as part of our Edtech accelerator – eduLAB.During this time, we’ve established and supported with our technological and business knowledge and experience as many as 14 startups, Including, especially active in the area of school education, Universality and PixBlocks.

Universality i Pixblocks – education-friendly platforms

The Universality platform allows easy transfer of classes to the online environment. What are the possibilities it offers to teachers?

  • Convenient management of student groups.
  • Uploading your own educational materials.
  • Delegating tasks to students and evaluating their performance.
  • Monitoring student progress, both individually and across the group.
  • Access to over a thousand ready-made IT tasks.

The PixBlocks platform, meanwhile, is an intuitive tool for programming education for all people, no matter of age. It helps to learn Python block and text programming and can be used both during IT classes in schools and during individual education. Here are the possibilities it offers:

  • Conducting complete programming courses in accordance to the MEN core programme.
  • Conducting online classes by teachers (creating classrooms, assessment system, doing homework, etc.).
  • Learning of programming with blocks for children aged 6 and over.
  • Learning Python language.
  • Learning programming on examples of video games.
  • The possibility of repetition of already acquired knowledge and learning new issues.

Although remote learning is very questionable for parents, the current situation doesn’t allow for any return to the old teaching model. However, the changes we are currently observing fit perfectly into the needs of the modern world, facing the challenges of digital transformation. This phenomenon should be considered in terms of opportunities and development. Digital competencies – formerly known as the competencies of the future, have become a challenge for the present. 

More information about the startups supported by us are available at: https://universality.io/, https://pixblocks.com/

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