Social impact learning activities store

A platform for reusable and easy to deploy learning activities designed for high social impact

Humanity's developments in technological power are ramping up the exponential growth curve, but foresight and cultural adaptability is often lagging too much behind. Unintended consequences of the systems we create, like climate change, call upon our ability to foresee and adjust in time. With more disruptive technologies on the horizon it is becoming clear that we do not sit idly by this combustible mixture of power and ignorance growing in society.

Solving such social and technological issues we face in the future often means rethinking how we use technology or design the social systems that govern society. To resolve this we believe education should foster traits like critical thinking, problem solving, a developed moral awareness, and a strong sense of justice can motivate students to take on these tough challenges. Although this policy is not new, education has struggled to deliver the intended level. To achieve a breakthrough, we believe a new approach to designing learning activities is needed. We believe it must recognize and prioritize solving the following obstacles.

The students' learning experience should:
- Provide clear motivation as to the value of what they are learning—to them and to the health of society;
- Be an engaging experience that can compete in today's attention economy;
- Emphasize higher order cognitive and affective traits (rather than e.g. just rote-memorization).

The teachers' teaching experience should be
- Easily adoptable within the limited time they have;
- Scalable to larger classes with limited overhead;
- Clearly explained as to where it fits into students’ learning trajectory (required knowledge and competences).

To discover and share what works best for such a learning experience, we've created a platform where we are gathering learning activities from leading teachers and educational scientists. Anyone can submit a proposal. We analyze these for social impact and vet for certain properties to assure they meet the criteria above. In this newly emerging landscape of modern didactics, we select the most promising Learning Activities and will build the tools to support these. By automating administrative and laborious chores, for example, we make Learning Activities easier to adopt for educators and scalable in the classroom. Through feedback and iteration from both students and educators we iterate through versions of both content and supporting technology. At the same time we will promote an already upcoming culture within educational institutions to increase open reuse and sharing of learning content and technology with other educators.

By enabling and accelerating this process we hope to create a shift in education where the standards of learning can make a leap forwards.

We applying the first principles analysis approach of engineering to social issues; analyzing the problem down to the behavioral causes, designing learning activities intended to cause the needed change in cognitive and affective traits, reusing the already existing infrastructure that is the educational system as a multiplier to scale this solution up to the scope where it can make a difference.

In the products we create we applying the strategies often used by successful social tech companies to the domain of education where this a relatively novel (like attention to user experience first and mapping growth pathways).

The platform to share learning activities is an ambitious webapp, as well as the technology to support executing the learning activities. The speed of development with our limited team wouldn't be possible without modern web technologies.

Gather several dozens of high social impact learning activities from teachers and experts. Setting up a partly automated process for evaluating the social impact of learning activities. Selecting one or several which we aim to support with an excellent student and teacher experience. Promote use of the learning activities store among education institutions and iterate to optimize adoption growth of the selected learning activities.

Learn what learning activities meet the goals of student engagement, motivation mentioned before. Implement several dozens of learning activities that cultivate the before mentioned critical traits very effectively, with the technology matured for worldwide mass adoption.

This will likely include for example;
- Growing our development team to increase development capacity.
- Translation of our platform to other languages.
- Set up an API to allow other developers to host highly tailored learning activity segments on our platform (things like the well illustrated math practice problems of Khan Academy which provide automated feedback, or the game theory example of https://ncase.me/trust).

Our current userbase will be exposed to several adoption pathways like during the creation process of learning activities we already support.

Contributors (and their institution) will be clearly credited on the learning  activities. Institutions or individuals can receive a separate domain with a pre-applied filter to the store showing all their learning activities. Such social mechanics are used to encourage investment and early adoption.

For institutions who have a license of our platform we also plan and promote the store to teachers together with the institution in collaboration with the staff during the educational design process.

As of writing we're in the process of releasing the store to our production environment as well as working together with about a dozen teachers to document their learning activities.

The next 12 months several hundred teachers on our platform will be exposed to the store, and the option to read, copy and apply a learning activity in their course. Over the next 3 year we hope increase the number of contributors to over 100, have several institutions which regularly use the store during their educational design, with applications of learning activities in real courses number in the thousands. With each course consisting of 10–1000 students, once can do an order of magnitude estimation of the amount of students reached.

We've already managed to assemble a strong design and engineering team which previously has proven itself by creating products which have made us financially self sufficient and growing. This project technically requires no fundamentally new techniques from what we've already employed. It will require developing our ability to make scientifically sound evaluations of the social impact of learning activities. We have 3 employees with a scientific and philosophical background. We aim to work with experts in the field, take their feedback, do research and refine our methods over time.

We currently have already sold a suite of tools to educational institutions for several years. This effort has proven sustainable while revenue is growing as we're improving our market fit. This new project will add in our value proposition to educational institutions while requiring relatively little investment to develop on the existing technical infrastructure of the platform.

Public exposure within the network of Solve can help adoption and with that multiply social impact. Considering Solve is also concerned with social impact of education, the network might also bring us in touch with experts or other parties who we could collaborate with. Funding is of course also always of help but probably not most significant value.

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