In 2017 I was fortunate to be invited to the World Innovation Summit in Education by the Qatar Foundation International. This remarkable conference, held every two years in Doha, opened my eyes to the educational innovations being developed globally.
I reconnected with the WISE team in early December following a lecture I did at an educational research conference in Zhuhai, China. The staff prompted me to take a look at the six 2024-25 finalists for the WISE Prize for Education to see what socially impactful educational innovation looks like. How right they were.
All of the finalists will receive financial aid and capacity-building support from WISE and its program partner, Dalberg Advisors. This takes the form of mentorship, conditional grants of $125,000 to each team to support the development of its MVP (minimum viable product), and membership in a community of innovators. The winner, juried by an international panel, will be awarded the $1 million WISE Prize for Education at the WISE12 Summit in Doha next fall.
To understand what this type of recognition means to an organization I contacted Executive Director Tyler Samstag of Remake Learning, which was a WISE Prize winner in 2022. Remake Learning, a free peer network for educators and innovators that helps people connect, exchange knowledge, collaborate on new ideas, improve their practice, and find funding, has been widely acclaimed for its ability to create equitable learning opportunities in the Pittsburgh region.
“We were founded in 2007,” Samstag explained, “and followed a very organic model of growth for our first 15 years. The WISE award allowed us to be recognized and legitimized internationally. We felt we really were becoming part of a community when we joined WISE. It allowed us to partner with great organizations. Now we have people and organizations that come into Pittsburgh and see our work and then say, ‘How do we replicate this in our city.’“
Remake Learning is not the first American organization to win recognition from the WISE selection committee. That honor goes to High Tech High School founder Larry Rosenstock, who was named a WISE prize laureate in 2019. In addition, two other U.S. projects reached the semifinal round for the 2024-25 competition: Day of AI from MIT and SayKid’s Toybot.
I spoke as well with Isabelle Hau, the Executive Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, who is a member of the jury that will select the winner of the 2024-25 WISE Prize. Hau provided high praise for the organizations that have developed these innovative programs.
“I was deeply inspired by the remarkable innovations reshaping education and creating solutions for a better world,” she said. “In an era of AI and emerging technologies, we face both immense opportunities and significant risks, particularly the widening of global inequities. The WISE Prize stands as a beacon, uniquely elevating visionary leaders and empowering them to achieve transformative, global impact. Take Tumo Path, for example — a groundbreaking initiative scaling a network of AI hubs in Armenia and beyond, where teenagers are empowered to explore, create, and become the changemakers of tomorrow.”
Here is an overview of the current finalists.
TUMO Path
Students begin their journey at TUMO by logging into their personal TUMO Path account and selecting a handful of 14 learning targets to explore. Based on that selection, an algorithm generates the optimal route for them to take through the program. The journey includes learning activities completed directly in the Path and corresponding workshops led by instructors. The learning plan is dynamic and constantly adjusts to their pace, preferences, and progress. If a student decides to switch learning targets, needs to repeat a learning activity, or takes a workshop at another time, the software will generate a new path for them with another combination of options.
The program was developed by the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Armenia. TUMO targets learners ages 12-18.
There is a focus on hyper-personalization: The software generates a unique educational path for each student, adapting to their progress, interests, and achievements. Similar to a video game, TUMO Path updates itself based on the student’s speed of progress and evolving interests.
The assessment and monitoring tools built into the software ensure students complete necessary prerequisite learning activities before entering their chosen workshops.
FastTrack+
FastTrack+ was developed by Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative (AREAi) in Nigeria. It aims at providing foundational literacy and numeracy skills to out-of-school children. The program focuses on refugee children aged 7-14 in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, which house over 3 million people across Nigeria.
FastTrack+ employs three main teaching approaches:
Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL)
Mavis Talking Book and Pen (via MIT Solve)
Bilingual Teaching
The program adapts to each student’s progress and interests. Like TUMO, the design borrows from the principles of gamification.
The program has shown significant success, with 95% of 1,500 beneficiaries demonstrating increased proficiency in double-digit addition and subtraction, as well as improved reading skills.
The team that manages FastTrack+ is ambitious: It hopes to provide services to 1,000,000 children by 2036. The need is dire. In Nigeria, only 27% of children aged 7-14 have foundational reading skills and 25% have foundational numeracy skills.
Darsel
Darsei is an innovative non-profit organization focused on education technology, founded in 2021 and based at Stanford. It provides a text-based learning platform designed to improve math learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. It is free.
The organization is the brainchild of Abdulhamid Haidar, who began working on it in the summer of 2020. Haidar received support from the Stanford Center for Entrepreneurial Studies’ Botha-Chan program.
Darsel functions in low-resource, low-connectivity environments, accessible via SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. It uses artificial intelligence to create an interactive and personalized learning experience for students via a chatbot.
The content is aligned with local curricula, making it a supplemental tool for K-12 school systems. According to an FAQ on the Darsei website, the platform includes “500,000+ curriculum-aligned math questions range from basic numeracy to advanced algebra, and cover topics including probability and statistics, series and sequences, geometry, and others.”
Darsie has been used in Jordan, Thailand, and Egypt for several years and is expanding to India, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Its management team is aggressive as well and hopes to improve learning outcomes for 10 million students by 2025 and 100 million by 2030.
Bonocle
Bonocle is an innovative braille-based education and entertainment platform developed by a Qatari startup to improve the lives of visually impaired individuals. Founded in 2016 by Abdelrazek Aly and Ramy Soliman, Bonocle combines hardware and software to create an accessible and engaging braille learning experience.
This is one of the few innovations in the WISE finalist group that relies on a hardware solution. A handheld, mouse-like device with a “braille cell” consisting of three buttons and haptic feedback provides access to interactive apps and games for teaching the braille alphabet, spelling, math, and chemistry. Initial pricing is set at $499.
The management and design team behind Bonocle has focused on creating an accessible solution for blind communities worldwide. Bonocle’s first batch of devices has already been sold in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The company is ramping up its production to meet demand in the Middle East and North America.
Bonocle relies on an open platform so the plan is to develop a growing library of educational applications and games. The company has released a software development kit.
Aprendo En Casa Connecta
This is a collaborative Latin American initiative developed by Fundación ReImagina in Chile. It serves as a digital platform connecting educational organizations across Latin America to support learning during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The collaborative provides access to a wide range of educational materials, including videos, activities, games, and downloadable resources. It offers content across various subjects, including arts, sciences, social studies, language, and math. Aprendo en Casa incorporates different types of resources such as online courses, tutorials, webinars, and interactive activities.
Much to my delight, the pedagogical approach behind the instructional model emphasizes the development of skills crucial for the modern world, including socio-emotional learning, creativity, digital literacy, and the full panoply of 21st Century Skills.
Like Darsei, Aprendo En Casa is designed to function in low-resource and low-connectivity environments, making education more accessible across the region.
Iqrali.jo
The Queen Rania Foundation for Education and Development (QRF) has identified a critical gap in early childhood education in Jordan and the broader Arab world. QRF has uncovered alarming statistics that highlight the urgent need for intervention in early literacy development. In Jordan, while 9 in 10 children under 6 spend most of their day with their mothers, less than 1% of parents read to their children on a typical day. The scarcity of age-appropriate books in homes and the lack of reading habits among parents have contributed to a situation where 6 in 10 children are not developmentally on track in literacy skills.
These findings have driven QRF to develop innovative solutions to address the literacy crisis. Educational initiatives include:
Edraak.org, launched in 2014, now reaches over 9,000,000 users across the Arab World. It is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform offering courses in entrepreneurship, communication, health, IT, design, filmmaking, and K-12 subjects.
Karim and Jana (K&J) educational mobile app series has over 2,500,000 downloads across the first five apps, all free. The focus is on numeracy skills and socio-emotional learning.
The Parental Education Program (PEP) has reached 17,000 parents since 2017 and built a regional community of over 500,000 parents active on social media. This is an eight-week virtual training program.
QRF’s school library program has developed 63 libraries since 2022 and will have set up over 370 classroom libraries by the end of 2024, with children checking out around 100,000 books to date.
A Global Approach to Educational Innovation
A review of these innovative programs makes us aware that education issues are global in nature. They do not differ in essence – merely in degree.
Students in the U.S. struggle with literacy and numeracy, a problem that has grown worse since the pandemic. Rural and economically challenged households struggle with access. Parents and guardians struggle with providing their children with learning opportunities at home. The challenges facing special needs learners are self-evident.
If the drive to incorporate AI into the classroom has taught us anything is that teachers don’t just want a shiny new thing that adds to their repertoire – they want a shiny new thing that brings efficiency and effectiveness to what they already do.
In a recent blog for Getting Smart, I explored the changing role of the teacher in an AI-powered classroom. I likened this role to that of the conductor of an orchestra, who manages both the musicians and the instruments they play. What the WISE Prize shows us is that the musicians (learners) may be playing the same instruments (tech tools), but the music they produce varies from country to country, based on need, culture, policy, and purpose. Ultimately, though, we want the music to be harmonious, and the learning to be impactful.
For me, there is one discordant note. As a life-long advocate of project-based learning, I am struck by the lack of pedagogical focus among these programs and tools. The focus is indeed on curation, efficiency, awareness, remediation, access, and engagement. These outcomes solve foundational issues in a hierarchy of educational needs. This is an understanding I need to reflect upon. Pedagogy, my life’s work, may not be primal.
Let’s continue to value innovation in education, regardless of the source. Supporting learners is the only thing that matters.
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