Ottiya: Co-Creating the Future of Creative Learning

Ottiya is an international magazine and platform to discover, learn, and share information about what creative learning looks like all over the world. Content is co-created by youth, educators, and creatives with a common passion for shaping the dialogue about creative learning and education.

Making Sense of Quality Education for the 21st Century 

In the global education reform movement, insights from youth, educators, and creatives are significantly undervalued compared to those from researchers and experts. We need to adopt a more organic, intergenerational, and international approach to navigate the changing currents in education together.

Democratize Conversations about Quality Education

Important decisions on curricular changes and education budgets are often made behind closed doors with a heavy reliance on on standardized academic data. We need to be more deliberate in including the voices of the stakeholders of education who matter the most--especially youth and educators. 

What if we could make storytelling, creativity, and sharing more common in international education dialogue, which is dominated by standardized data, assessments, and competition? Finnish education expert, Pasi Sahlberg, explains that "big data alone won't fix educational system" and that we need to embrace "small data-- information about human behaviors and personal experiences". 

Ottiya dreams of a grassroots educational revolution with youth, educators, and those passionate about education leading the way. 

Ottiya is a microphone for children, educators, and practitioners to suggest creative and thought-provoking ideas for learning and education. For educators and families, we are a toolkit with enriching articles and hands-on activities. For researchers, we are a light house to look into the future and discover creative practices and new areas to explore and study. 

Anyone with access to the Internet will be able to discover and share content on the Ottiya online platform. Our magazine will be curated from submissions by contributors. 

Track new users created in the database - 500 Contributors join our platform as contributors

Visit counts, likes, analysis of frequently used phrases and comments; increase in Ottiya Magazine sales - 100,000+ teachers, administrators, researchers, and parents visit our site and use our content to make creative learning experiences

Google ads, print ads, sponsored articles; subscription/sales - $500,000 increase in advertisement revenue on platform and magazine and subscription revenue

Ottiya seeks to be the one-stop resource for meaningful discussions, connections, and ideas about creative learning and education. On our website, contributors will be able to upload and share their thoughts freely without the approval of an editor. 

By combining the power of AI translation capabilities and a team of volunteer translators (like Amara for TED), people will be able to communicate across language barriers. We will also use the online space to promote our print/digital magazine and ask for submissions, thereby encouraging quality content sharing and streamlining online/offline content creation and engagement.

With the help of the Solve community, we will develop a more inviting and fully functioning online platform that embodies the same philosophy and vision of the magazine, which is co-created by youth, educators, and creatives. Our platform will be an inviting and engaging place for contributors and readers to converse, share, and collaborate together.

Anyone with access to the Internet will be able to view and interact with content and contributors on our platform. By combining the power of artificial intelligence's translation abilities and volunteer translators, we will make our content accessible across language barriers. People will also be able to purchase curated content from our digital/print magazine. 

By increasing advertising revenue and high-end subscriptions, we hope to be able to grant digital access for schools and communities who cannot afford it and print magazines translated into native languages for learning communities with limited access to the Internet.

Our two-pronged focus on the curated magazine and open platform will allow us to maximize impact while making our venture financially sustainable. This strategy is similar to the Aravind Eye Hospital Model in that we are using a freemium business model to offer a basic value proposition to all users and additional features and premium content for paying users. 

More specifically, we will be generating revenue through crowdfunding, publication sales, individual and group subscriptions, and advertising. We will also be hosting freemium online/offline professional development workshops for teachers, educators, and creatives. To increase the value of our publications, we will incorporate AR/VR technology to make our content more engaging. 

Our team has some of the internal capacity needed to redevelop our current website to become a fully functioning Ottiya platform. We also have a network of readers and contributors to our magazine from over 20 different countries (from countries as different as Indonesia, Australia, and Denmark) who are interested in sharing and discovering more content on our online platform. However, with limited financial resources, it is difficult to devout our full time and energy needed to fully develop this platform. We also need to recruit talent and pay for production and maintenance costs. 

https://issuu.com/ottiya/docs/ottiya_issueone_issuu_preview

https://www.instagram.com/ottiya/

https://www.facebook.com/ottiya

To develop the technical aspects of the platform (e.g. integrate AI translation capabilities), we need more tech and design support. As a Solver at MIT, we hope to recruit tech/design/marketing talent for our platform and magazine. We also hope to be able to access funding opportunities, meet investors who can share in the the importance and urgency of our mission, and to increase subscribers and sponsors for our magazine so that we can quickly scale up our solution.

Ottiya's current sponsors are HelloGeeks, Write the World, Seoul Foreign School, West Point Grey Academy, Fanny and Alexander and 130+ people who funded us during our spring 2017 Indiegogo campaign. 

https://montessorium.com/

https://ww2.kqed.org/education/

https://sharemylesson.com/