One-line solution summary
Bringing the best digital educational content to learners worldwide
Pitch your solution
Through a combination of state-of-the-art AI and human curators, we offer world's largest collection of curated educational online content to learners of all ages, matched to specific curricula, reading age and need, and in an affordable way. We provide our API to EdTech providers like LMS providers, Publishers, and other EdTech companies, for whom we can accelerate their time to market.
With our solution our partners can expect a reduction in the upfront capital investment on content development, significant reduction in time to market and an improved content management lifecycle overtime.
Wizenoze has already made over 60 million resources learnable by assigning reading levels, age relevancy, and curriculum-specific subjects and topics, while perfecting the quality of the largest educational content repository in the world.
By combining professionally crafted material created by publishers with publicly available internet content, Wizenoze can provide its customers with access to an immense library of current and contextualized educational content ready for use in their applications.
Our customers rely on Wizenoze to classify, filter, index and curate content to make it suitable for their students.
What does Wizenoze provide?
- A complete online curated collection of trusted web content and proprietary (e.g. Britannica) digital content for learners. Videos, images and documents
- Matched to curricula and desired learning outcomes
- Matched to keywords, age and reading level
- AI-driven readability classification to automatically identify the reading level of any text.
- Fully integrated into the school learning platform
- State-of-the art design and engaging UI
- Available via API, SDK or LTI (beta-version).
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Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Strengthen delivery of STEM and 21st century skills for learners to effectively build work readiness
Where our solution team is headquartered or located:
Amsterdam, NetherlandsIs your solution working in Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and/or Malaysia?
What specific problem are you solving in Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and/or Malaysia?
Access to high-quality information is not an automatic given for students in South-East Asia compared to students in other parts of the world, because content from publishers is expensive to buy for many schools in this region. Therefore, the internet offers a great solution to get access to open educational content. However, it’s very hard for students to find relevant and reliable information on the open internet, for which we provide a solution.
With respect to the Southeast Asian specifically, the internet economy in this region is expanding rapidly. A report covering Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines, said the region added 40 million new internet users in the past year, taking the total to 400 million. That implies 70% of the region’s population is now online. Which means through our solution we can enable learners and teachers. With the help of our solution, teachers and students get access to relevant and reliable open-sourced content that will help increase equitable access to quality learning opportunities.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution is there to complement the work of educators, especially with students reliant on remote learning more and more. Teachers can give their students access to high-quality, curriculum-matched and reliable information from the internet, that can be independently used by their students to support their schoolwork. Teachers don’t have to worry about their students getting lost on the internet and spending too much time on searching for good information instead of learning about a specific topic itself. Furthermore, in our offering, the public content from the internet will be extended with proprietary content as well to also give access to content from sources like Britannica in an affordable way for these students.
Our solution is placed to align with the primary focus of increasing access for both learners and educators at an affordable cost. It also aims to tackle other pressing issues such as quality and inclusion. The optimized content is suggested by our proprietary AI technology and then vetted by local teachers to ensure it meets the learning needs keeping in mind level, topic coverage and cultural aspects.
The inputs from local teachers and an extensive user research carried out by our team enables us to ensure the fitment of the solution for the specific region.
How does the problem you are addressing, the solution you have designed, and the population you are serving align with the Challenge?
Our solution offers content both in the form of text and videos from top rated internet sources and websites from across the globe. It is well curated to align with the need of all stakeholders and both enable, as well as enrich their teaching and learning process. They have the flexibility to build on their own delivery styles and pedagogy. The solution allows the target group to improve literacy, numeracy and social and emotional learning while supporting their individual learning styles and pedagogies.
Our offering has a ready collection of curated content for STEM and 21st century skills catering to different age groups and also tagged across reading levels to allow adaptive learning based on an individual’s personal learning needs and abilities.
The aggregated and curated resources provided by the Wizenoze solution are designed to support existing EdTech solution providers and Learning Management Solution providers to create a more comprehensive solution, allowing users to browse through without wasting time on the internet looking for relevant, readable and reliable content.
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Growth: An initiative, venture, or organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in one or, ideally, several contexts or communities, which is poised for further growthWho is the Team Lead for your solution?
Diane Janknegt, Founder; ‘Forbes 100 Women Founders in Europe to Follow 2019’; Fastest Dutch Scale-up by TechLeap Rise Program –April2020
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successfulWhat makes your solution innovative?
Our AI algorithms and search technology algorithms are innovative compared to the old approach in which teachers or students had to search themselves for content that is relevant to the curriculum. Also, in the old approach, lists of links to webpages were outdated all the time. Our algorithms automatically keep the relevant search results to the curriculum up to date, the algorithms automatically analyse the reading level of any webpage and students and teachers don’t need to search for relevant information themselves anymore.
Have you tested your solution’s approach? If so, how?
We are testing our solution all the time, in pilots, but also with existing customer integrations. With pilots, we measure a baseline by asking teachers to fill out a pre-pilot survey about their current experience with educational resources. Then we ask the teachers to work with our solution in their classroom. We record and analyse usage data and after the pilot we ask the teachers and students to fill out an evaluation survey. With existing customer integrations, we record usage data and we ask teachers and students to fill out evaluation surveys to constantly be able to improve our solutions and technology.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
We combine the expertise of teachers and domain experts with the consistency and scalability of AI and technology. Our technology collects content from the web, automatically classifies its readability and discloses it via search or curriculum matching.
The Wizenoze content collection offers learners high-quality information from trusted resources. From human-curated starting points, our technology crawls and monitors online resources, and makes sure the collection gets populated and stays fresh and up to date at all times. To manage the crawling and curation of sources, we have developed proprietary tools that allow curators to add sources, to monitor the crawling process, and to assure the quality of the collection.
Wizenoze’s machine learning based readability classifier allows learners to search across a 5 point scale from easy to more difficult content. Our readability classification is based on a large variety of lexical, syntactic and semantic features, automatically extracted from texts using advanced natural language processing algorithms. An ordinal regression model is trained and adapted to the content in the Wizenoze collection. Wizenoze’s ranking algorithms analyse the content of the millions of documents in the collection to find the best matches for the user’s query and return the most relevant documents first. In the ranking of the results, we combine topical features and topic independent features like page quality, readability, suitability, and regency. To further help learners find good resources in the context of their educational goals we have matched the content in the collection to the curriculum that they are taught.
Which target population(s) does your solution address?
What are the key characteristics of your target population?
Which categories best describe your main EdTech product or service?
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
- Number of users
- Number of integrations within EdTech and E learning platforms
- Number of clicked results
- Impact on learning outcomes as reported by teachers that are using our technology.
- NPS scores
What are your impact goals for the next year, the next three years, and the next five years? How will you achieve them?
3 million users - 2021 end
5 million learners - 2022 end
10 million learners - 2023 end
What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your impact goals?
Describe these barriers as they relate to your solution. How do you plan to overcome them?
Financing – The education sector is highly price sensitive, even though stakeholders are open to exploring innovative learning solutions – they are extremely stringent on budgets. Through Octava we can reach out to a larger target segment and also subsidize cost for users in rural areas and those who are less privileged
Cultural – Culture and education are two inseparable parameters, and they are interdependent. Any educational pattern gets its guidance from the cultural patterns of a society. The Southeast Asian market has its own
Market Entry – Unlike many existing EdTech solutions, the chosen path for our solution is B2B and not B2C. We focused on enabling our local partners/EdTech players which makes our rollout and user reach indirect. We cannot directly target the user therefore, finding the right partners and creating/executing an effective market entry plan is crucial.
Please provide a brief history of your organization. What was the motivation behind starting your organization and/or the development of your solution?
A large Academic Research Project between 2008-2012, funded by the European Commission, showed that for children the Internet is challenging to use for learning and research.
This concept inspired Diane Janknegt and Theo Huibers to start Wizenoze in 2013, to cut through the noise, identify relevant educational content, and deliver information appropriate to a learner’s reading ability.
Over the years, our customers asked more and more for content that is directly matched to the curriculums. Therefore, we started matching our content collections to curriculums worldwide. With our curriculum-matched solution teachers and students don’t have to search through our collections themselves but can directly access information that is relevant for the specific learning goal they are working on in their classroom.
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
How many people work on your solution team?
30 people
How long have you been working on your solution?
We’ve been working on our content collections, AI and search technology for over 7 years.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Our core technology and algorithms are developed by a team of experts in information retrieval (1 PhD), machine learning (1 PhD) and natural language processing. Our product development is done in-house with senior front-end and back-end developers. Our product team is a multi-disciplinary team that operates from a user-centred design approach, meaning that our user researchers do assumption testing research, our designers design prototypes, the user researchers test the prototypes with end-users, and the team re-iterates before bringing our products into production.
To ensure that our product meets the user needs across geographies we engage with local experts and teachers for an additional validation and localization of the offering. The additional perspective enables us to align with the educational, cultural and social learning needs of users from specific geographies.
Provide an example of your Team Lead’s ability to conceptualize and implement a new idea.
Wizenoze business objective is to provide the best educational resources to learners worldwide. While Wizenoze patent technology enables it to curate the internet to source the best educational resources for learners worldwide; it was conceptualised in the beginning of 2021 to lead Wizenoze to be the single source of best educational content worldwide for its partners. This meant adding proprietary content sources to the world’s best curated content collection on wizenoze platform. With this objective, the Wizenoze management entered a strategic partnership with Britannica; the world’s foremost educational content producer to bring Britannica content onto wizenoze platform. With this integration, Wizenoze platform is able to provide the unique combination of world’s best curated open-source resources coupled with Encyclopedia Britannica educational content mapped to global curriculums.
What organizations do you currently partner with, if any? How are you working with them?
We work with EdTech providers like LMS providers, Publishers, and other EdTech companies. We provide the ‘Intel inside’ for these organizations by enriching their platforms with high-quality educational content, matched to the curriculum of their end-users. We provide our technology in the form of an API or SDK solution, depending on the needs of the customer.
We have also entered into partnerships with proprietary content providers to enrich our solution offering. One such partnership is with Encyclopedia Britannica, Britannica’s educational multi-media resources for primary and secondary school (K12), are now easily and immediately accessible within the Wizenoze API offering. This includes more than 100,000 articles from Britannica School updated daily and spanning a range of media, including video, images and audio content.
Why are you applying to the Octava Social Innovation Challenge?
Our mission/vision story about improving digital literacy, access, equality through democratization of knowledge and supporting learners and teachers to leverage the internet as a powerful tool. The Challenge can support our mission of "Bringing the best digital educational content to learners worldwide" by providing financial assistance to as well as increasing our existing reach and coverage.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Please explain in more detail here.
NA
Solution Team
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DD
Devanjali Dutt Customer Success Manager , Wizenoze
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Solution Name
Wizenoze