One of the most fundamental qualities of human beings is our ability to learn from one another. This has been true since the beginning of time, we used to teach and learn from one another by show-and-tell, which gave us an advantage over other species. This led us to specialization, which allowed for more complex social systems, and standardized education has played a crucial role in the creation of modern civilization. Education today is a 7 trillion dollar industry, and the proliferation of Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) and the billion of dollars of investments in them in the last few years show how important this field is and how seriously investors consider this space.
However, I believe the state of online education today is very much like the early internet startups were 15 years ago: a lot of excitement, some bubbles, great opportunities, but still in its infancy and nowhere close its real potential.
Fundamentally speaking, not much has changed in education over the last ten thousand years. We’ve gone from stone tablets to shiny tablets, but in most cases we still have a teacher saying things, students listening and taking tests, then they get a degree or a certificate and hope to get a job. But things aren’t the same as a few years ago. Thomas Friedman notes that “Google had determined that G.P.A.’s (Grade Point Averages) are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless”. In a rapidly evolving and changing market, one where automation is increasing and the the jobs of the new economy are ever more complex, our innate ability to learn from one another must be enabled, fostered, and measured. We need to allow for creative, imaginative, and passionate people, in order to thrive in a new economy. This was one of the motivations that led me to start Esplori (http://esplori.net), an online learning startup that focuses on democratizing the tools for teaching and learning anything, in any language, where professionals of all fields from anywhere in the world can teach what they’ve learned in their life, and where students are not passive observers, but instead they engage in study groups, peer-evaluation, and share their creations with others. And if one truly cared about having a global impact, they should consider that 73% of the world speaks no English at all, and only 6% speaks English natively. Having this in mind, we have developed strong partnerships with companies and organizations all around the world, such as Dotsub, the industry leader in enabling online videos to be easily translated in any language.
We have an international team working on it, from Brussel, Belgium to Sao Paulo, Brazil, going through New York and Italy. We’re currently developing the platform and we’re looking for investors to secure a seed round, and in a few months we’ll be running pilot programs in all five continents to test our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and come out with a Private Alpha. Most importantly, we strive for Universality and Scalability. We aim to make Esplori available anywhere (any device, any language) and make it adaptable to almost any situation, because we keep the platform simple, with the minimum amount of tools that are essential for teaching and learning, instead of adding too many features to please a specific segment. In the future, we will create APIs to create 3rd party plugins and apps, but the core functionalities developed by us will work for most anybody.
I’m a strong believer in enabling technologies. Technology by itself is worthless, but giving access to the right tools at the right moment can help empower and enable anyone to step up and improve their quality of life. We at Esplori believe online learning done right can be one such enabling technology, and we are ready to start making an impact.
