Developing the digital skills of educators

If students are prepared for the future, $11.5 trillion could be added to global GDP. A huge part of being prepared for the future is being digitally literate - recent studies by McKinsey state that up to 95% more work hours will be spent applying technology skills and that digital skills relate strongly to higher income. Real world application of technology has therefore never been a more critical part of education - it helps prepare students for an unknown future and improves chances of social mobility.  

However, whilst 64% of K12 teachers believe technology education should expand, only 10% are confident they can teach technology and digital skills. As a result, despite this part of education being crucial to students’ success, it is all too often not prioritized. This has only been exacerbated by the pandemic - time spent on non ‘core’ subjects has all but disappeared and teachers are burnt out.  

An absence of technology in education means that billions of children are being failed by a system charged with preparing them for successful futures.  Where it does exist, it is unevenly distributed - often available only to the most elite schools that can attract the minority of highly skilled teachers and afford costly resources. As a result, despite the potential for technology to be an equalizer, the majority of companies hiring for technology skills replicate many of the old systems that value traditional (and expensive) university education. 

We believe we can tackle this inequality by improving the quality of technology education in schools, but there are three fundamental barriers to integrating technology education effectively:

1. Confidence: Teachers don’t usually have a tech background and have not been provided training. They can see technology as risky and unfamiliar.

2. Content: Technology is constantly changing. Curriculum can therefore become quickly outdated.

3. Community: Teachers don’t have a community of practice or peers to learn and share ideas with.

BSD Education has designed a comprehensive digital skills and coding education solution that can be used by teachers of any skill level or background.

We enable educators to bring real world digital skills to every classroom by empowering them with the skills and resources they need. To do this, we provide: 

Professional development & support

1. BSD Fundamentals and Coding Fundamentals CPD Standards Office Certified courses

2. Monthly webinars - our webinars give educators opportunities to explore different areas of technology education, such as artificial intelligence and constructionism. They hear from experienced educators and are provided with key insights and resources that can be used in their classrooms. 

3. Teachers Meet Businesses - free networking events that aim to build a community among educators and businesses with the shared goal of preparing students for the future of work 

4. Educators have access to coaching sessions, day and night instructional or technical live chat and our educator community site with over 100 self learning resources for BSD’s solution as well as the teaching and learning of digital skills and coding.

As part of our solution, we are currently working to expand our professional development offerings. We currently create a variety of webinars on different topics that would be useful to educators. Based on feedback and responses, we are further developing the webinars into full 3 hour, certified, self-paced courses for educators. At present we are developing an Introduction to AI course and have the following courses planned: Beyond Blocks, Using Design Thinking and Co-Creation to Develop Technology Rich Curriculum, Web 3.0 for teachers: Crypto, NFT’s, blockchain, decentralized apps, metaverse; What does it all mean? 

Curriculum  

• Our learning library has over 600 hours of curriculum content covering basic web development through to more advanced topics such as digital marketing and artificial intelligence. 

• Our curriculum uses professional tools, is scaffolded for ease of learning, is rooted in personally relevant topics and allows for personalization and customization. It can be used in person or virtually and allows for taught, self-guided and supervised learning. 

• To prepare students for undefined futures where artificial intelligence, augmented reality and data privacy are all emerging topics with tremendous impacts on society, we embed 4 approaches into our curriculum that have been identified as future proof and fundamental: 1) Computational Thinking, 2) Design Thinking, 3) coding/programming, and 4) Digital Citizenship.

• Our curriculum has earned the Research-Based Design Product Certification from Digital Promise. The Research-Based Design Product Certification uses a competency-based learning framework, developed in consultation with Digital Promise’s Learner Variability Project advisory board, expert researchers in the Learning Sciences field, and nearly 50 educators across the United States. 

 Online Learning Platform - BSD Online 

• BSD’s platform is enriched with features that aid the teaching and learning process, be it in-person or virtual, for educators with no prior experience 

• Key platform features include: 

  • Professional inspired interface

  • Sandbox mode for extension activities

  • Lifetime access to student project portfolio

  • Live view of student progress

  • Hand raise & 1:1 teacher-student chat 

Enabling educators in formal and informal education delivers the capacity for millions of students to be taught digital skills and to achieve these opportunities. The role of educators has never been more crucial for the future of the job market and global economies.

Our solution targets educators teaching 8-18 year olds, both in formal and informal education. It will give them the confidence and skills to bring real world digital skills learning to their students, which will help the students go on to succeed and achieve more gainful employment in the future and therefore improving social mobility.  

We launched in 2013 when the founders Chris Geary and Nickey Khemchandani recognised that there was a total absence of relevant, real world technology being taught in education. BSD began by teaching over 5,000 students in all types of schools across multiple countries around the world. We quickly understood that educators in schools have the most power to make the same quality education universally available, but also gained experience of what we wanted educators to do. 

Since then, BSD has spent over 34,000 hours working with educators and students across a multitude of socio-economic, cultural and intellectual backgrounds in order to find the best ways to put technology education into educators’ hands. Educators’ views and feedback were instrumental in the development of our solution and continue to be as we improve and grow our offerings. 

BSD is now a globally remote team of entrepreneurs, educators and technologists. A number of the team are former educators who have developed curriculum and taught in a wide range of contexts, making them relatable to the educators we work with. Our technologists bring subject expertise which gives educators confidence and helps keep our offerings current. 

Our way of operating also means we get regular input from educators. Our team has 1:1 coaching sessions with the educators we work with twice a year which is an opportunity to seek feedback and ideas which are then fed into the product development process. We also seek feedback from educators as follows: 

- Teacher Training: evaluated using kirkpatrick method

- Curriculum and Software Feedback: evaluated and prioritized using RICE framework

- NPS score monitored quarterly

- Bi-weekly thought leadership and educational industry research published publicly

The combination of having educators in our team, BSD teaching programs in schools and working directly with educators through professional development enables us to understand our target population of educators, whilst giving ample opportunity to engage them in the design and implementation of our solution. 

We would love to partner with Solve experts to expand our professional development offerings. We currently offer free webinars and events to all educators and certified professional development to our BSD customers. Based on the feedback to webinars, we are further developing content into full 3 hour, certified, self-paced courses for educators. 

In the future, when our course offering is broader, we will seek to establish the potential to create stackable credential pathways for educators through navigating our ecosystem of courses.

 Solve support would help us develop these courses and reach more educators. We would benefit from help and guidance on business development and marketing in this area, as well as continued support on the evaluation of our product as well as prioritizing topics to be addressed by the professional learning experiences that we will create.

BSD’s product offering has been tried, tested, validated and used by educators in over 200 schools in 21 countries including developed and developing countries. We are focused on working B2B and B2B2C to enable educators.

It is our sharp focus on enabling educators and teaching real world skills that sets us apart and makes us innovative and uniquely positioned to develop the systemic capacity of educators to deliver. We are looking to empower those already working with students rather than replacing them, which we believe to be more scalable, sustainable and socially impactful. 

1. Empowered 20,000 educators this year and 150,000 in 5 years with digital skills knowledge through professional development to significantly grow the capacity of educators to deliver digital skills learning experiences for students.

2. Brought digital skills learning to 250,000 students this year and 600,000 in 5 years  to help them be better prepared for the future, have greater aspiration and understanding to digital careers and the opportunities of the future of work and to be able to evidence their skills to obtain these opportunities. 

3. 95% of our educators rate our resources as being “effective and engaging” meaning the resources give them everything they need to create viral effects and retain educator engagement to persist delivering digital skills learning experiences for students. 

To achieve growth in education is never easy therefore we work towards them with a strong approach centered on partnership. This is partnering with distributors to build awareness of what we do and bring on new institutions to work with us; partnering with schools and ensuring that they fully comprehend the benefits and importance of a foundational digital skills education; partnering with educators to be enabled to deliver, but in a way that we understand is satisfying and motivating for them to continue; partnering with students by creating engaging and transferable real-world-relevant learning experiences that can change their prospects and their lives for the future.

1. Number of educators using BSD Online

2. Number of educators attending professional development

3. Number of students using BSD Online

4. Number of hours spent on BSD Online

5. Educator surveys measuring satisfaction and impact of resources

Our solution, BSD Online, is a comprehensive platform that enables and empowers educators to bring digital skills into classrooms and learning centres worldwide.

BSD Online equips educators with ready to teach curriculum in the form of guided interactive projects that students can build for their own portfolio using up to date technologies ranging from HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Scratch, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality.

Our intuitive classroom mode streamlines the lesson and student management processes for educators. They can easily set up as many classrooms as they like, and import their students with ease. Educators can create personalised and relevant real-world learning experiences for students with a minimum of time and effort.

Our content library interface can be accessed by an educator at any moment while learning progresses. Educators can use the onboard tools to add resources and content (ranging from videos, interactive quizzes, PDF resources and more) in realtime to support the diverse needs of individuals and cohorts of learners. Data is presented and accessible to teachers at an individual and student level to inform progress and guide educators on the best possible interventions to support the student learning experience. Where educators lack domain knowledge or expertise themselves or find themselves in a situation where a student has exceeded their own technical competency, our platform provides model answers, definitions and comprehensive glossaries to support the educator in responding to student needs.

Should any educator require assistance, our inbuilt live chat support connects them to a support team member for real-time human support that performs with an average response time of 5-7 minutes. 

Our content curation tool allows our team and third party educators to create interactive engaging code experiences directly on BSD Online. Each step of the project has its own code objectives which are carefully written by our educators and are flexible enough to accommodate a range of student answers. Educators can access content curation tools within the classroom interface to create their own digital content to infuse a BSD created learning experience or to deliver and enhance their own content. These tools help educators create learning experiences that allow their students to interact with real-world, industry standard technology. 

All student work in BSD Online is presented in a shareable portfolio that students can use to evidence knowledge against their transcripts in support of college and career applications.

We have created a unique error checking algorithm within our IDE that employs abstract syntax trees to verify accuracy of pre-determined and free-form student responses to problems within project stages. This delivers friendly-worded hints and feedback in normal comprehensible language to users. This reduces abandonment of learning and provides educators further support when working with large groups of students. We are now exploring the potential for this algorithm to be improved to utilise machine learning on top of the large volume of anonymous error data generated to begin to personalise feedback for students.

In order to support educators on a global scale our platform is hosted on a worldwide content delivery network (CDN). Our back-end runs in several regional data centres in the cloud, complying with privacy requirements of our global customers. 

BSD Education is an equal employment opportunity employer that aims to foster a working environment that enables everyone to operate at their best and value integrity, excellence, respect, inclusion and collaboration. No potential applicant or employee is discriminated against on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, relgion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, ancestry, or national or ethnic origin. BSD creates solutions mindful of these delivering inclusive positively impactful opportunities for educators and students within communities, with a commitment to measure the positive effects of these solutions to validate their positive impact, always seeking to improve and innovate further and be open to criticism and feedback to embrace the opportunity that it presents for continuous development.  

 Our team is: 

• 45% female

• operating across 7 different countries

• made up of 9 different nationalities 

• 64% BAME 

• ⅓ of our leadership team is female 

 In our curriculum development, we are mindful of hidden messages that are shared, and seek to lift those who have been oppressed. We share stories and inspiration from diverse perspectives. 

We are currently forecast to break even/ reach profitability within 2022. In the coming 5 years we will expand the revenue streams based on our current product offerings and related developments to these e.g. the expansion of our professional development course offering. We will continue to sell to schools, districts, governments, educators, learning centres and universities. 

Progress will center around consistent annual growth in institutional customers to reach over 2000 customers. More aggressive growth will be achieved through selling the BSD product directly to teachers following the post pandemic trend in the rise in educators spending more of their own money or individual budgets on educational technology. 

We will also seek further investment capital of up to $14m as particular growth initiatives reach aspired milestones. 

BSD has brought in $1,000,000 in revenue year on year since 2018 as we have refined our product and approach to supporting educators. 

We have successfully established distribution channels in multiple countries over 3 years that now enable us to develop an opportunity pipeline valued over $4million in new business.

Over the last two years we have refined our product development processes and reduced operating expenses by over 30%.

 We have brought in $4.2m of investment since 2016.