Atlas

As automation, AI and economic forces put new pressures on the labour market, there is an opportunity for lifelong learning and reskilling initiatives to help learners build in-demand skills to access economic opportunity. 

Our vision is to democratise access to acquiring skills and opportunities by making it accessible, flexible, and industry-aligned. Through our free crowdsolving platform, learners build technical and soft skills by solving real-world challenges sponsored by organisations. We incentivise collaboration through social peer to peer learning and personalise challenges to meet learner’s goals and skill level. Learners can build and showcase portfolio of skills and real projects, connect with employers/opportunities, and grow their networks enabling them to thrive in a rapidly changing world of work. 

While our solution is for everyone, we focus on equalising access to people who will be most impacted by automation: non-traditional learners, women and people from low-socioeconomic backgrounds.

Today we have people who struggle to find meaningful work and companies that struggle to find skilled talent. Why does this costly mismatch exist? 

We live in a time of rapid transformation in the nature of work due to automation, AI, and economic trends. In the next decade, 1.2 billion workers will be impacted by the adoption of automation technologies and AI, where 50% will need to upskill or retrain to avoid under/unemployment. 

The current educational system is not aligned with industry needs. Often it is theoretical, impractical, and does not equip learners with the 21st century skills (e.g.creative problem solving) to keep pace with changing demands of the labour market and respond to systemic shifts. Second, the current status quo is designed for a one-size fits all for a homogenous group of people who can spend time and money for training. The reality is that 40% of learners don't fit this description and have diverse needs. There is lack of flexible, accessible and affordable opportunities.

If we close the global skills gap by 2030 we could potentially add US$11.5 trillion to global GDP, but we can also equip people with the knowledge and skills for a more inclusive world.

We aim to democratise access to acquiring skills and career opportunities by making it accessible, flexible, and industry-aligned. We combine learning methodology and crowdsolving technology to make it happen. Our solution is a free platform that helps learners solve real-world challenges to build and showcase skills to employers.

We use the challenge-based learning framework which is a research-backed pedagogy that helps equip learners with 21st century skills (e.g. cross-functional skills like complex problem solving, technical and soft skills).

We partner with industry to host real-world challenges and through our  platform we bring together learns with interdisciplinary and diverse backgrounds to collaborate in small teams to solve the challenge. We focus on social peer to peer learning, and incentivise collaboration over competition. We also help with guided learning and mentorship opportunities.

It is learning by doing, giving learners real-world opportunities to build and showcase skills via a portfolio page, collaborate and grow their networks, and access career opportunities. In the future we plan to personalise learning using AI to fit each learner’s needs and customise specific challenges and opportunities at specific points in time in the learner’s journey.

Our solution is free and available for everyone, but our overarching goal is to address the widening inequality that can result from automation. We aim to provide access to opportunity for non-traditional learners, women, and people from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. 

Globally, 30-45% of the working-age population is unemployed, inactive, and underemployed. Women are the largest portion of the untapped labour with 655 million fewer women are active compared to men. Today 40% of the learners are non-traditional. 

We remove cost and time barriers to equalise access to learning and skill acquisition opportunities. With our free platform we offer flexible pathways to train, grow networks (social capital) and get connected to career opportunities. 

To develop our product, we’ve conducted continuous user research to understand specific problems facing our target user group. Using the design thinking process to conduct empathetic research, we’ve learned about pain points, challenges and needs and have translated this into our core product features to help our learners. We run regular experiments to validate our assumptions and ensure that we remain user-focused.

As automation and AI put new pressures on the labour market, lifelong learning and reskilling initiatives like Atlas, through its challenge-based learning platform, help people stay competitive in a rapidly changing world of work while unlocking economic opportunity. We also helping organisations access skilled talent for the jobs of the future. Our solution is addressing the costly skills gap problem which fits within the equipping workers with durable skills dimension of the Challenge.

We use pedagogy (research backed teaching methodology) powered by crowdsolving incentive and technology design. Most competitors offer technology/edtech products without rigorous impact evaluation or pedagogy behind it resulting  in non-effective solutions and low-engagement rates among learners. In crowdsolving, crowds usually are given tasks to perform or competitions to enter which don’t necessarily help them effectively build/showcase skills and collaborate meaningfully. 

In the world of learning we are competing against the traditional passive university model, by offering students an alternative active-learning opportunity. We are also competing against online e-learning (coursera,edX,codeacademy), bootcamps (Le Wagon), and apprenticeships. In comparison, our platform is free (no need to pay to learn, quite the contrary, learners get rewarded for learning), is a decentralised system for collaborating, and comes with the benefit of connecting to employers directly since the challenges come from the industry. 

In crowdsolving, we compete against Kaggle a community platform for data scientists to solve technical challenges for companies. OpenIDEO helps people apply design thinking skills by hosting social challenges. MIT Solve is an open innovation platform that focuses on grand challenges for social impact entrepreneurs. In comparison, we apply rigorous research-based learning methodology to our platform, so it’s not just about getting to the solution and winning, it’s more about learning skills while solving a problem, collaborating with peers and building a portfolio of work. 

What makes our solution unique is that while we use crowdsolving/open innovation platform, we use it as the context for learning and skill building to happen.

We use crowdsourcing technology to build a community to work on specific real-world challenges. We also aim to use artificial intelligence in order to personalise learning and skill-building for the learner. 

Crowdsourcing technology has been used in various applications successfully including: 

• Crowdsourcing for collaboration: OpenIDEO, Quirky

• Crowdsourcing as competitions: Kaggle, TopCoder, InnoCentive

• Crowd curation: Wikipedia, Linux

Artificial intelligence has also been used to personalise learning in edtech products: coursera, edx, canvas, etc.

We use challenge-based framework for skill-building which is shown by research to improve acquisition of 21st century skills due to the collaborative, interdisciplinary problem solving involved in the design of the pedagogy. Apple published several reports on challenge-based learning and acquisition of skills, while Santos et. al (2016) showed through an empirical study that using challenge based learning with scrum methodologies was an effective way to teach learners mobile application development. While there is evidence that challenge-based learning is shown to help with building of skills, learner motivation and engagement, we plan to launch a series of pilots and measure the impact of our product on learner outcomes at a further stage.

Currently serve: zero. We are at the prototyping stage and have used this time to conduct regular user research to build out our MVP product offering and prepare it for launch by September 2020. 

In Year 1: Our goal is to get to our first 10,000 users and have at least 10 customers (employers/challenge hosts). 

In Year 5: Our goal is to grow to 8 million users worldwide with 100+ customers (employers/challenge hosts). 

Throughout our projected growth we plan to rigorously measure whether we are successfully serving our core populations (non-traditional learners, women and people from low socio-economic backgrounds) in order to achieve our vision of equalising access to opportunity and skill building.

1. Access to key partners to help us with our route to market. 

2. Access to funding to help scale and build a diverse team 

3. Competition coming from private sector collaboration with universities 

4. Legal issues in regards to how to protect intellectual property for learners who solve real-world challenges which may lead to innovations and new discoveries

1. In the beginning we plan to leverage our current networks to get warm introductions to potential partners. After acquiring our first few pilots and launching our product into the world, we will measure impact and use data/evidence when pitching our solution to partners to show the effectiveness of our solution. We also intend to be vocal about our vision and mission and will be engaged at industry events, conferences and key networks so that we can connect with potential partners. 

2. To access funding we will start by applying for non-equity funding from government (e.g. Innovate UK) as well as taking part in prize competitions (e.g. LSE Generate). Our aim is to have revenue coming in for year 1 and build a sustainable business model that is not overly reliant on external funding sources to scale. 

3. Competition coming from private sector collaboration with universities may be a barrier as industry will look to go directly to universities. We therefore have started having early customer discovery conversations with employers to understand their pain points and challenges and provide unique solutions for them which can be hard to replicate. 

4. We will seek legal advice to ensure that we have solutions in place to protect learners and challenge hosts on our platform. We will ensure our Terms and Conditions are clear, we will take precautions by having parties sign NDAs if necessary and regularly work with legal advice to uphold fair practices.

Company limited by guarantee (social enterprise)

We currently have four team members: 1 full time, 1 part-time intern, 2 part-time volunteers. 

Our small team comes from diverse backgrounds with interdisciplinary skill sets. We have team members from five nationalities (UK, US, Armenia, Malaysia, India) with experiences in industry, academia and social impact spaces. 

We have domain expertise in education and learning technologies. Our founder worked at Engaged Learning + Research Centre at Cornell University where she worked closely with the director to design alternative education projects. The Centre later acquired sufficient funding to scale into a university wide initiative. Having experience in the education space in delivering innovative learning solutions within this context equips us with key understanding about specific pedagogy and how we can embed it in our technology products. 

We also have community building and crowdsolving expertise having grown communities in ethical AI and social impact spaces: from growing a peer to peer exchange community on learning ethical AI in London, to building a community of journalists to collaborate on a human in the loop product in addressing misinformation online.  These experiences helped us gain understanding of incentive design, how crowdsolving works, what social learning and collaboration looks like in practice.

Our solution is free for the learners to ensure they have equal access to skill acquisition opportunities. 

We have a B2B offering where we charge a % of the prize money if the challenge has monetary rewards or charge a set-up fee to deliver the challenge for the company.

From the prototyping to the MVP product launch we will rely mainly on equity free funding sources (grant finding, competition prizes, etc.). Once we make our product live we can start bringing in revenue through commercial partnerships (challenge hosts who either pay for set up fees or pay % of monetary prize reward). Because we are keeping our team lean, small and mainly remote, we plan to ensure low costs until we get to product market fit stage. We’ll mainly rely on revenue by selling our product and equity free funding to take us to this stage. Afterwards we’ll evaluate our options and determine whether raising further funding will be appropriate for us to scale, whether we need to launch new products or come out with new revenue sources to keep growing.

MIT Solve is a perfect partner for our mission-driven venture given its impact-driven networks and community. We are drawn to its community and believe it could be of great support through peer exchange with other solvers and mentorship. Since one of our hurdles is access to partners/customers, the MIT Solve networks and facilitation of connections would help us to accelerate our route to market and drive towards impact more effectively. In the immediate term, we are applying for the funding to help us launch our MVP product in the coming months by bringing on core technical skillsets.

• Advice/mentorship on business model, strategy and revenue models.
• Board members with industry experience, domain expertise and skillsets that complement our team's skillsets
• Once we launch and can show impact help with marketing and exposure to build awareness

Our vision is to democratise access to acquiring skills and career opportunities by making it accessible, flexible, and industry-aligned. Our solution directly targets adults impacted by technological disruption and changing nature of work to help them build skills effectively on their pathway to meaningful careers.

Through our free crowdsolving platform, learners build technical and soft skills by solving real-world challenges sponsored by organisations. We incentivise collaboration through social peer to peer learning and personalise challenges to meet learner’s goals and skill level. Learners can build and showcase portfolio of skills and real projects, connect with employers/opportunities, and grow their networks enabling them to thrive in a rapidly changing world of work. While our solution is for everyone, we focus on equalising access to people who will be most impacted by automation: non-traditional learners, women and people from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. 

We’ll use the funding to grow the team by hiring full-time technical talent to build out the personalisation feature through AI and build out the MVP with more robust features.

Our vision is to democratise access to acquiring skills and opportunities for adults by making it accessible, flexible, and industry-aligned. Our solution directly targets adults impacted by technological disruption and the changing nature of work to help them build skills effectively on their pathway to meaningful careers. We focus on technical, digital and cross-functional skills.

Through our free crowdsolving platform, learners build technical and soft skills by solving real-world challenges sponsored by organisations. We incentivise collaboration through social peer to peer learning and personalise challenges to meet learner’s goals and skill level. Learners can build and showcase a portfolio of skills and real projects, connect with employers/opportunities, and grow their networks enabling them to thrive in a rapidly changing world of work. While our solution is for everyone, we focus on equalising access to people who will be most impacted by automation: non-traditional learners, women and people from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. 

We’ll use the funding to grow our team by hiring 1-2 technical roles to build out the core features of the product and partnerships/sales expertise to help with customer development. We are at a stage where we are actively looking for pilots, and we’ll be thrilled for the opportunity to partner with the Calouste Gulbenkian foundation to do a pilot in Portugal.