Lumiar Global Learning Village

A Mosaic for Each Child: Redesigning Education through Personalized Projects and Competency-Based Learning

Lumiar Education is committed to bringing competency-based learning, personalization, and inter-cultural education, in a scalable and accessible manner. Our work centers on the question “How can we organize learning and leverage technology to provide connected, collaborative, meaningful, and relevant personalized education to learners globally?" We believe that the combination of learning sciences research and new available technologies allow us to effectively answer this question.

Lumiar methodology centers on several key features, all of them structured within the competency-based learning framework. One of our main pillars is project-based learning, through which learners’ interests and passions are used to create an active learning process, promoting a participatory construction of understanding through real world resources and experiences. Another core pillar at Lumiar is the role of the teacher that is split into Tutors and Masters. Masters are experts, volunteers, and members of the community who oversee the content of the project (such as a parent who is a carpenter, leading a project on how to build a gardening structure where the school can grow their own food), freeing up the Tutor (closer to the traditional teacher's role) to not focus solely on content but rather on the broader development and competency growth of learners. It's worth mentioning the pillar that organizes students in multi-age groups, where learners of different ages engage in inquiry and collaborative learning together. We value participatory management in our methodology, where learners take ownership and cultivate the learning environment and community through the Circle, a weekly event where all members discuss processes and concerns about the school in a democratic manner. Finally, all of this is managed through the Digital Mosaic platform, an environment that goes well beyond a Learning Management System that organizes projects and schedules, bringing to education a completely new way of understanding a curriculum while also mapping the development of individual learners across a wide range of competencies and contents.

Lumiar started 15 years ago in Brazil, as a redesigned education methodology to help support learners to be more engaged, curious, and independent, while developing a broad range of critical competencies. Originally supported by a local foundation, in the past 15 years this concept has grown to five schools in Brazil, where we have witnessed the tremendous impact this methodology has had on the development of learners. Our current objective is to support learners around the globe and in many different scenarios. We recently launched two pilot schools in the UK, with a number of others being developed in other countries. The flexibility and adaptability of our project-based and competency-based methodology allows its implementation in a range of contexts, including after-school programs, summer camps, homeschooling, and refugee education. Our digital platform enables the scalability of our methodology, and enabling accessibility to low-income and charity contexts. Our methodology structure, allied with the Digital Mosaic, enables any learning community to come together and collaborate on projects, and the platform brings a rich and supportive learning experience to a wide range of learners around the globe.

Lumiar is a powerful methodology, enabled by an innovative technology, Mosaic. The Lumiar methodology combines long-held approaches such as project-based learning and master/apprentice pedagogy, with innovative structures such as breaking the traditional teacher role into two parts: tutors and masters. The Mosaic platform supports this innovative pedagogy by making it easy to plan projects around learner interests and passions, coordinated through the guidance of Masters in the community, all mapped through an innovative interface that makes it easy to see and understand the development of competencies in the learner.

The Digital Mosaic platform is really what makes managing such a learning environment possible. Digital Mosaic is an intuitive, visual tool which tracks the learning and achievement path of students while allowing a non-linear personalized learning journey.

Our goal is to help this innovative methodology and technology to become accessible to a wide range of contexts around the world – including to support the establishment of new and redesigned schools, and to support more informal and non-traditional learning environments, such as afterschool programs and refugee education. This will be done by bringing new features to the platform and by partnering with masters and learning environments around the world, strengthening our global learning village and allowing richer interactions and exchanges among its participants.

Lumiar vision is to help schools, educators, parents and students to innovate by applying methods and practices that form Knowledge Age global leaders. These leaders are meaning-making, innovative, autonomous, collaborative, global, ethical and digitally able individuals that are prepared to thrive in a world where professional and personal challenges will be substantially different from today’s. Our growth and scalability is composed by i) 2-3 proprietary schools per continent, ii) licensing Lumiar methodology full solution and teacher training to 200-300 public schools around the world, and iii) providing access to the Mosaic platform for learners, educators, and parents.

Lumiar has grown organically since its foundation based on our solid and innovative proposal to Education. Lumiar brand has spread globally by word of mouth, our partnerships are based on well-developed relationship. Our plan is to leverage our credibility and  that cross borders and guarantee that we connect only with hands-on change makers in the education sphere.

600 currently being served, all of which have implemented our full methodology in Lumiar Schools around the world. We are starting to implement our Digital Mosaic platform, which will enable us to scale our operations.

In 12 months, 20K learners; and in 3 years 3million.

Our team are an interdisciplinary and multicultural background education experts, such as Jennifer Groff, Iona Szkurnik, and Fabia Apolinário.

Jen is a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, focusing on redesigning learning environments and experiences in system innovations, co-founded the Center for Curriculum Redesign, and served as technology SME on the OECD Innovative Learning Environments project. Iona comes from Stanford University, applying innovation and scalable technology with strategic and business mindset, and as a Lemann Fellow provides access to global leaders network. Fabia has 10 years at Lumiar, providing real teaching experiences, training, implementation and pedagogical know-how.

Lumiar revenues derive from:

• Dividends coming from Lumiar Schools

• Royalties coming from Lumiar Franchisee Schools

• Service + License fees coming from Lumiar Lab Schools

• License fees coming from Lumiar Digital Mosaic Licensees

Our proprietary schools will be profitable, our licensed public schools will be funded by grants and foundations, and our SaaS platform will drive exponential growth and adoption.

The MIT Solve Challenge provides an unique valuable network connection that Lumiar sees as a leveraging opportunity to help us reach communities, end-users, and distributors world-wide. For exemple, human and capital resources and access to experts are within reach for solutions granted with SOLVE award. 

This Challenge provides collaboration between thought leaders engaged in transforming the world through accessible, exponential, and impact-driven solutions. We believe that the visibility and credibility brought by SOLVE Challenge endorse that not only MIT community but also all stakeholders interested in impacting Education support Lumiar proposal to the future of Education.

Our greatest barrier is changing the mindset of traditional Educators and parents. Ultimately, our society is organized around tests, and milestones that do not take into considerations the research-proven learning and social development. The cultural change is, in this context, a barrier to deploy an innovative learning environment, for example, at Lumiar we assess children's development in a holistic manner with self-assessment, peer-assessment, and Tutor's assessment, discarding regular standardized tests.