aeioTU Network

The current global situation has affected learning for more than 159 million children, highlighting the importance of articulating schools, teachers, and parents to guarantee high-quality education regardless of the environment in which children are being attended. As a response to this situation, aeioTU has created an online network to bring together parents, teachers, and educational organizations wanting to improve their daily practice with children. Today the network has more than 7.000 members and it offers them access to more than 1.300 contents on Early Childhood Development (in the form of videos, podcasts, and documents), forums and networking events, and an e-learning module with both free and paid courses they can access when desired.

As a cost-efficient solution, this network can be scaled globally, guaranteeing adults accompanying children have different resources to enhance children's development by improving the quality of their practices.

Globally, over 200 million children under 5 are not reaching their developmental potential due to poverty and lack of Early Childhood Development (ECD) services. Failure to receive adequate Early Childhood Education (ECE) results in children not developing the skills and abilities needed to change the course of their lives, create a better future for themselves and their families, or positively impact their communities. According to UNESCO, the percentage of access to ECD services depends on countries income level; and in Colombia, 56% of poor children are deprived of developing their full potential. Colombia has implemented significant changes to improve its ECD ecosystem. Yet, compared to all Latin America -76% of children´s enrollment- Colombia has a long way to go.

Through the aeioTU Network, aeioTU is providing the adults who accompany children with the tools they need to strengthen their relationships and interactions with children, and to promote meaningful experiences for their learning, guaranteeing their full potential development.

To share with others its Educational Model, which has proven effective in transforming children´s lives, aeioTU created this free online network, currently offering its curriculum in the form of tips, videos, podcasts, documents and experiences for teachers and parents to accompany children. We are aiming to boost this online community, articulating parents, teachers, and educational organizations to strengthen their daily practices (link: https://red.aeiotu.org/).

The network has been created on a WordPress platform that has been integrated with different solutions: BudyBoss, to promote online community and social interaction, LearnDash, a Learning Management System to enable online learning; and Woocommerce, a solution that allows the network to offer different products and services for Early Childhood, as well as the opportunity to acquire a paid membership that will allow them to have more benefits. Amongst the benefits for paid memberships (to be launched in August 2021), the network will offer a job hunt feature, discounts in stores specialized in Early Childhood, networking events, grants, and others. As a result of this integration of platforms and solutions, the aeioTU network is an easy to navigate - responsive website that anyone with internet access can use. 

By being a free digital platform, open-source of information, the aeioTU Network allows families, caregivers, and teachers to access all the content of the aeioTU Educational Model. This model has proven to be effective in the closure of the development gap that exists between children from high and low-income families because it promotes a culture that understands the child as a protagonist using his personal interests as a basis to explore and investigate. This strengthens children’s abilities such as creativity, problem solving, self-regulation, self-expression, observation and perception, resourcefulness, environmental awareness, and entrepreneurship; all valuable skills for the XXI Century.

This curriculum was nominated for the WISE award, which recognizes innovative projects that can have a great impact on global education and has scientific evidence that has shown that after 8 months in an aeioTU center, the developmental gap between children from low- and high-income families can be closed until up to 50%. Likewise, the Educational Experience shows positive effects on parents and the community:

• Parents play more with their children.
• Lower maternal depression
• Parents vote more and trust their neighbors more.
• Increased use of positive discipline strategies

Our evidence-based curriculum has also been effective in transforming teacher’s beliefs and practices by promoting a culture that emphasizes positive and coherent relationships. The role of educators is innovative because they accompany the child rather than transferring their own knowledge onto him. To assure coherence, teachers must engage in a permanent training program that is followed by tools of the curriculum. The aeioTU Network is fundamental to enhance the training program. Thus, teachers trained by aeioTU have proven strong commitment, good relationships, and clarity on how to attain developmental objectives.

The aeioTU network serves teachers, parents, and educational organizations, regardless of its socio-economic environment. Teachers can access a variety of tools to strengthen their educational practice, offer their services (not only in education but also in other fields such as nutrition, psychology, and others) to parents and educational organizations, further develop their knowledge with the courses and certificates from the e-learning module; and have discounts in different products needed on their daily practice. Families and caregivers have access to different strategies to accompany children´s development while using the different resources/materials they have available at home, can connect with teachers and other educators (such as nutritionists, phycologists, etc.), and pay them for their services when required, share their learnings and best practices with others, strengthen their knowledge through courses and certificates, and have discount in products and services for their children. Educational organizations (which will be included in the platform as of August 2021) will have the opportunity to interact with other organizations, recruit teachers, qualify their staff members at very low prices and apply to / offer grants.

In order to involve the target community in the construction of the platform, we have carried out online and offline market research processes, such as the study of the most used keywords in the jargon of our target audience, and some surveys, interviews, and focus. group. This allowed us to identify their main needs and adapt the platform and its contents to each audience and context.

The platform is currently working in Spanish, but aeioTU has started to translate all its contents to English in the hope of reaching an even wider international community. The platform aims to be a Social Network of Learning (SNL), in which all its members can share their experiences and maintain dialogue with others around Early Childhood educational practices. It also would serve as a window to scale the aeioTU educational model. By the end of 2021, aeioTU expects to reach more than 10,000 teachers and parents, impacting the lives of 200,000 children in Colombia and Latin America.

The aeioTU Network aligns with the Challenge because freely shares the aeioTU pedagogical model along with strategies so that educators can improve their educational practices from virtuality, and tools that empower parents to accompany their children at home, through pedagogical experiences of play and exploration. In this way, we are contributing for children to continue to develop their full potential despite school closure, and ensuring that adults who accompany children, both while they remain in quarantine and when they return to their environments school children, strengthen their role, promoting positive relationships and interactions for the well-being of children.

The aeioTU network was first piloted with Aprendiendo, a free platform launched by aeioTU in May 2020. This platform helped aeioTU understand the needs and characteristics of the platform member, as well as to test its courses for the e-learning module. A total of 5.000 members were enrolled during the second semester of 2020, and more than 1.600 of those members tried out the first online course developed by aeioTU.

With the information gathered by this first pilot of the platform and the e-learning courses, aeioTU understood the changes that needed to be made and developed this second platform, which was launched on March 15th, 2021, currently has more than 7.000 members, offers 7 virtual courses and is in the process of developing 12 more, to complete the aeioTU Educational Experience certificate, the first of many certificates to come for parents and teachers. 

There are currently no digital platforms in Latin America focused on Early Childhood that allow user interactions and with a variety of contents for families and educators. In this way, the Social Network of Learning is an innovative solution to impact the development of children under five, which has been proven to have a positive effect on the transformation of communities. 

Currently, the aeioTU Network of Learning has 7.223 users now. Through them, aeioTU has been able to impact the lives of 33.125 children under the age of five. In 2023 the platform will be serving 22.600 people, between educators, families, and caregivers.

The aeioTU Network is an initiative of the aeioTU Digital business line, which has a series of indicators and impact results defined as follows:

Key Results:

• Be recognized as the leading Early Childhood Network in the region
• Contribute to the financial sustainability of aeioTU
• Promote measurable improvements in the pedagogical beliefs and practices of teachers and educational organizations, and the parenting practices of families.

KPI´s:

• Number of users in aeioTU Network
• Number of children impacted
• Growth compared to other platforms
• aeioTU Network members satisfaction
• Online courses/certificate user satisfaction
• aeioTU Network bounce rate
• aeioTU Network organic search
• Online courses + certificates sold/projected
• aeioTU Network Paid memberships: sold/projected
• Income generated by products and services: sold/projected
• aeioTU Network engagement
• Online courses + certificates engagement
• Online courses + certificates Pre-post results 

Full-time team: Digital aeioTU Director, Digital Coordinator, Pedagogical Advisor 1, Pedagogical Advisor 2, Graphic Design and Media Professional and Graphic Design Interns

Part-time team: Executive Director, Pedagogical Director, Knowledge Management Coordinator, Comercial Director, and Comercial Coordinator

The project leadership team is made up of professionals with extensive knowledge of aeioTU and its pedagogical program (Educational Experience). In addition, they have more than 5 years of experience in marketing and in the generation of design pieces and audiovisual content. Along with this, they are professionals who are experts in working with early childhood (pedagogues) and in managing alliances and relationships with public, private, and governmental actors.

One of the pillars of the Educational Experience and of aeioTU as a social enterprise is social inclusion. Within our organizational policies, we have clear gender equity and diversity policies, which is reflected in the leadership of both the organization and the aeioTU Network initiative. Currently, the Network team is led by a woman and more than 50% of the team are women.

Regarding the organization in general, it is led by 70% by women, and we have collaborators belonging to the Afro-Colombian population. Along with this, within our educational centers, we pay attention to children with disabilities, from vulnerable and historically discriminated populations, such as indigenous people, peasants, Afro, etc.

We are applying to Solve because, due to the stage in which the development of our initiative is in, we need the accompaniment of experts in digital tools to take the Network globally, understand the possibilities of other benefits for users, and scale the business model through innovative strategies in technology for education.

We would like to analyze the proposed business model and understand how we can improve, make it more competitive and sustainable over time. Likewise, analyze and learn about other development strategies from the hand of experts

We have identified some types of companies with which we hope to initiate an alliance, in order to develop the business model and obtain strategic information on our target markets in order to generate new strategies that reach them. In addition, we seek to make alliances with companies whose focus is innovation, which allows us to generate new ideas for interactive solutions to incorporate them on the Internet.

For example, we seek alliances with machine learning and artificial intelligence companies, multilateral organizations such as UNICEF, that work with early childhood at a global level and whose emphasis is on social transformation through education. Also, companies with experience in the growth of social enterprises and in digital training.

We consider that we can be considered for The GM Prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion because the aeioTU Network is an innovative platform, with free content that allows families and educators to access quality content from anywhere. This enables access to educational strategies also for migrant communities and provides content for families to develop meaningful learning experiences with local materials and in any space.

No, I do not wish to be considered for this prize