Zoonk

We've been learning in the same way since the Industrial Revolution: like factories where everyone learns the same things at the same time and pace. Students don't understand how the school system is going to help them in real-life. They're just memorizing information to pass exams.

Zoonk is a free, open-source social network to encourage lifelong learning. Anyone can learn or teach anything, bringing practical examples of how things work in the real world. For example, you can learn about Math using football examples or understand how a microwave works to learn about Physics.

By making it easier for anyone to learn any skills, we'll have a more qualified workforce, increasing wages, and reducing poverty. This is especially important in Latin America where access to quality education is difficult and expensive.

In 10 years, 50% of our jobs will be changed by automation, and 9 out of 10 jobs will require digital skills. That is going to affect 1.2 billion worldwide. Latin America, however, has the biggest skills gap in the world: 4 in 10 firms have difficulties finding workers with the right skills. In the world, 617 million children and adolescents are unable to read a sentence or perform basic calculations.

This is happening because our school system isn't preparing our population for the 21st century: 82% of the students don't understand how to apply school-based knowledge in everyday life. 80% of the students think the content learned in school won't be important in life after high school.

Those are a couple of the reasons 83% of the students find high school boring. They're just memorizing information to pass exams without understanding how that knowledge is going to be useful to them in an ever-changing society.

We're encouraging people to acquire lifelong learning skills. We've tried a few prototypes in Brazil, Canada, and Germany before reaching the current stage. We got feedback from students, teachers, and businesses about what's necessary for them to acquire 21st-century skills.

We're currently working in Brazil and seeking partners to improve the content available on Zoonk to create new learning experiences. That's why we made it free and open-source: to encourage anyone to share their knowledge with other people.

There's still a long path ahead of us to reach our goals as there are over one billion people worldwide who will need to upskill or be retrained. Being free and open-source is one way to speed up this process and make sure no one is left behind anymore because we believe knowledge should be free, open, and accessible.

Zoonk is a free, open-source website where anyone can learn or teach new skills and subjects.

It's a collaborative tool: you can share your knowledge by creating lessons (and practical examples) about topics you know. Then, other people can learn from your shared experience. It's a community for both learners and teachers.

By making it open, we ensure we can have a diverse group of people creating content to match different backgrounds. Think about learning complex topics such as Physics using practical examples of your everyday life. That's hard to accomplish when you have closed systems because people have different needs and expectations - that's why the traditional school system is also failing.

Zoonk also helps you to organize information from different sources. You can find the best Computer Science courses, the most popular references for Artificial Intelligence, or the most relevant Engineering books out there. You can also ask questions and get help from the community to understand something you don't understand.

In the future, we also want to integrate new features such as a virtual reality editor and personalized, adaptive learning experiences using artificial intelligence.

By integrating it with VR, we expect to offer more fun, immersive learning experiences. You could learn about Mars by walking on the planet or learn anatomy by going inside the human body.

By adding artificial intelligence, we expect to offer personalized, adaptive learning experiences. We can understand one's strengths and weaknesses and focus on what you need to learn instead of using the same approach to everyone as it happens with the current school system. This approach will help teachers to offer a more tailored learning experience to their students, focusing on individual needs. It will also help schools to better manage their resources instead of using the current one-size-fits-all approach.

Accomplishing those goals require lots of resources, though. That's why we haven't seen substantial changes in the school system. Most things changed in the past 100 years, except how schools work. Making Zoonk free, open-source, and collaborative, we hope to speed up this process and help to prepare people for the 21st-century.

Most learning experiences focus on what the traditional school system already provides: memorizing information to pass exams. Our focus lies in preparing people for the future.

Zoonk encourages people to share practical examples of how things work so that learners can understand how theoretical knowledge is applicable in their everyday life. In the next few months, we're also implementing more interactive features such as quizzes and more personalized content possibilities.

But our main vision isn't implemented yet: when we have more resources, we're going to provide everyone with an adaptive learning experience. For example, do you like Star Trek? Then, we give you some astronomy-related content. Is your knowledge restricted to astronomy? We'll give you real-life problems you might face while traveling on space such as a sick member crew where you need to learn about other topics such as biology and chemistry.

Using gamification and storytelling techniques, we have endless possibilities in the future. Let's say you're playing a story, and our algorithm notices you only choose white men for your missions. Then, we start encouraging you to diversify your team; otherwise, you'll face problems that only a diverse group could notice.

There's a long way to reach that point, but that's why we don't get there: because it's a long-term vision, it requires lots of resources, and current solutions just aim for short-term gains. At the end of the day, education can change the world, but we need to change education first.

Helping people to get started

Latin America has the biggest skills gap in the world. In our research, 8 out of 10 people who lack digital skills don't know how to get started learning. We have too many fragmented resources. Zoonk helps to organize the best learning resources in one place, making it easier for people to get started.

Knowledge in everyday life

82% of students don't know how school-based knowledge is useful in everyday life. They think learning is useless. With Zoonk, they can see practical examples of how things work in the real world - increasing their engagement and interest in lifelong learning. During our tests, 9 out of 10 people found more interesting to learn when presented with real-life examples.

Getting better jobs

We first help people get started by making it easier to learn things. Then, we keep them engaged by showing practical examples of how things work. Those things increase their interest for STEAM fields, which helps them to get better jobs.

Reducing poverty

30 million students drop out from high school every year. However, education increases earnings by 10% for each additional year spent in school. By making learning more interesting, we'll keep students learning for longer periods of time, reducing poverty globally.

Decreasing inequality

By making Zoonk free and open-source, we give everyone similar conditions for learning. When workers from poor and rich backgrounds receive the same education, disparity between the two in working poverty could decrease by 39%.

We've tried earlier prototypes with over 500 people. We're focusing on adding more content to the platform this year, aiming to reach 10,000 people in one year and 1 million people in five years.

There's a potential for reaching a much larger audience (up to hundreds of millions of people), but it depends on how much resources we'll have available to speed up this process.

Our goal is to increase the variety of content available in the next year. We're aiming to cover the basic skills required for 21st-century jobs, reaching out especially to communities left behind by technology.

For example, we're creating learning paths to help people get started with popular programming languages and computer science concepts. But we also want to create content for core science and engineering skills to help people understand how they're important in our everyday life.

Think about where you go when you want to learn something. There are so many places to reach out, which makes it harder to find useful resources. In five years, we hope Zoonk is the place you go to learn something in the same way Google is where you go for searching and YouTube for watching videos. By making it free, open-source, and collaborative, we hope to reach a community of hundreds of millions of people eventually.

There's a reason the school system didn't change in the past 100 years: it's hard to do so, and it requires long-term efforts in a society looking for short-term results.

Zoonk suffers from a chicken-egg problem: it needs content to attract people, but it also needs people to create content. Doing so without financial resources and using only ethical ways is hard.

We're making everything free, open, and transparent in the hope that more people will engage in the project and help us to reach our long-term goals.

I'm also using personal resources (time and money) to create more content for the platform, which eventually will end the lack-of-content problem.

We're also planning to reach out to possible partners to help us out, such as schools, teachers, universities, and businesses, which can support our project with either time or financial resources to hire people.

Zoonk is a website. So, technically, it's deployed everywhere. It's currently available in two languages: English and Portuguese (for Brazilian users).

We're also planning to release a Spanish version soon, which will help to further expand it to Latin America.

I'm the only one working full-time on the project at the moment. We have six other people who occasionally help on a volunteer-basis when we need specific tasks.

I come from a poor background in Brazil. I didn't have money to go to college or even buy a computer. Education changed my life, but I didn't realize it could when I was in school. I thought I was dumb. I thought science and engineering were things for "smart" people only. I remember how I was feeling, and I promised myself I won't give up while there's a single kid on this planet feeling the same way.

Today I have the technical resources to make Zoonk work after working for a few startups in the Netherlands and Germany. One of our partners in the project has over 20 years of experience in the finance sector, which will be a valuable asset for making it work financially. Other volunteers also have experience with design and marketing, so our skills are very diverse.

Zoonk is free and open-source but we're considering different revenue streams for the future. Some of our beneficiaries are:

• Students: can learn anything for free, gaining skills applicable in the real world;
• Content creators: can share their knowledge with other people, increase their reputation in their fields, and earn a share of our revenue in the future based on the relevance of their content;
• Teachers: can improve their learning experiences by better understanding their students' strengths and weaknesses;
• Schools: can improve their courses with our data analysis tools and better manage their resources;
• Governments: can save money by better managing their resources with our data analysis tools. For example, in developed countries, the government spends over $12,000/year per student without any relevant data about what's working or not. We could provide details about students performance by region (e.g. what skills are lacking in California? how students are performing in Florida?, etc.);
• Businesses: continuous training for everyday problems they face.

We're exploring different revenue streams. Some of the possibilities we're considering are:

• Crowdfunding options to reward editors creating content in the platform where we take a small slice of every donation (similar to Wikipedia but rewarding authors who create content);
• Premium subscriptions for private content, groups, and personalized content;
• Personalized ads;
• Data analysis subscriptions for schools and governments to help them improve learning experiences and save money with educational resources.

The prize offered by this challenge would allow us to improve our product. Plus, a possible partnership with Tecnológico de Monterrey and Universidad de los Andes could help us to expand create more content in Spanish.

Khan Academy, Wikimedia Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other organizations helping to improve education.