Competence Compass

A blended-learning program to help teachers develop 21st century skills while solving the challenges of their day-to-day life.

Problem:

Teachers in developing and emerging countries have very limited opportunities for personal and professional development. Furthermore, teacher’s training often lack modern methodologies and do not enable teachers to bring 21st century skills development to their classrooms. Brazil and Morocco are very diverse countries but are facing similar challenges: low recognition for teachers, high drop-out rates and low investment in infrastructure and training.

Solution:

With the Competence Compass, we are applying NOW’s experience in working with 21st century skills, blended-learning programs and empowering communities to offer teachers a 3-month learning journey that allows them to dive deep into the topic of 21st century skills from a very personal perspective. The Compass includes:

• A blended learning program with immersions and online learning content around new methodologies and resources around the 21st century skills.

  • The online learning elements are organized in micro-learnings and triggered through self-reflection and multiple-choice questions. Like this, the app offers an individualized and adaptive learning experiences where the teacher’s learning is embedded in their day-to-day experiences.

  • The immersions bring teachers from the same regions together to experience leadership training, learn more about themselves and their profession while building a community.

• The community-building focus of the program is crucial for boosting motivation and creating an energy of mutual accountability. Participants will start feeling part of a community of like-minded teachers who can share resources and support each other in their quest of becoming teachers for social change.

• The gamified element of the Compass app which allows to track and visualize the 21st century competences that teachers’ develop during the training, such as “critical thinking”, “empathy” and “problem solving”. This allows teachers to get a grasp of what “superpowers” they already have and the ones they are building up, which boosts the teachers’ self-confidence and make them the protagonists of their own personal development.  

• A the end of the program, each participant receives a personalized certificates that show their core strength and personal growth.

Impact:

The program’s objective is to build participating teachers’ resilience by helping them develop 21st century skills and gain awareness of their strength, by giving them access to a network of like-minded teachers and by introducing them to new tools and methodologies.

By participating in the program, teachers turn into multipliers: they learn how to stimulate the development of competences in their students and get an opportunity to exchange ideas and methods online and in in-person meetings.

By expanding our work simultaneously to Morocco and Brazil – where we have local team members – we are also building an opportunity for south to south exchanges and building a first step for a global network of empowered teachers for social change.

The Competence Compass is unique because its app allows to visualize, value and boost 21st century skills in an adaptive and fully personalized learning experience.  The reflective element of the app turns it into something more than “just” the duolingo of 21st century skills, it allows participants to harvest learning moments from their daily lives and test their competences in action.

To make sure participants stay motivated, the app is embedded in a blended-learning experience in which teachers become part of a community and keep each other accountable. An extra motivation boost comes from the immersions – regional  in-person meetings.

So far, we have been working with a combination of existing tools to make our blended-learning programs work (from slack to the google tools). We have been able to reach 100 participants in the first 2 years of the organization and are now ready to scale our approach. That will only be possible if we are able to translate our work of tracking and stimulating the development of 21st century skills into the Competence Compass app. Besides bringing everything into the same tool, we will be able to reduce workload and add components of gamification.

Within the next 12 months we want to run pilots of this program modality that focuses on teachers in Brazil and Morocco while developing the first prototype of the app.

We also want that our current for-profit business leads into customers which will allow us to boost development.

The app will be a crucial step for us to scale both our own programs – for teachers and marginalized youth – and our consultancy work. The latter is crucial for us to be able to fund our non-profit work. But we are also looking mainly for consultancy work where we can create a positive impact and use our app. So for each white-label solution of the app that we can sell, we will provide the same amount of non-profit users with our solution.

Non-profit: The app will be embedded in a blended learning program and delivered through our network of volunteers.  

For-profit: The app will be accompanying a bigger effort of mapping the competences relevant for the company / school / NGO and helping the customer set up a framework to stimulate and measure these competences.

In the last 2 years, we have been able to include 100 participants in our transformative learning programs and have reached approx. 200 additional people with our webinars and other online offers.

With our different pilots planned for the next 12 months we will be able to reach approx. 500 people.

In the next 3 years, we are hoping to be able to scale the solution and reach 5000 people in total.

• Business and organizational development: NOW is an agile organization with fast prototyping loops

• Program design: we are bringing NOW’s experience in creating powerful learning experiences with us.

• Competence mapping and boosting: Over the last two years we have created methods to help our participants pick learning goals, accompany them in their development and track their development individually through formative and summative evaluation.

• Community building: in the two years of our existence, the organization has attracted a community of over 200 like-minded people who we can tap into for establishing new contacts and spreading our wings.

We are currently pivoting towards a hybrid model in which our consulting work ensures the income for our own programs. The Competence Compass will become a crucial selling point for our consultancy services which focus on 21st century skills mapping and measurement.

We believe that participating in Solve can give us a huge boost in the development of the App by giving us access to networks, resources and know-how. With that, we will be able to develop and scale the solution faster, which can be a crucial step in ensuring its sustainability.

• Access to target group: accessing marginalized youth and presenting our solution in a way that makes sense to them has been one of the core challenges for NOW. Our local networks have been a crucial help in that but we keep learning to adapt our language and really listen to the needs.

• Making it stick: similar apps – like for example Duolingo for language learning – have a very high drop-out rate, people are eagerly learning for a while but then move on to something else. We want to make sure that the development established is sustainable