C1DO1 by Training Competence

The pandemic has made it clear that learning "to do" is not achieved just by watching, but by doing. Higher education institutions had to stop holding in-person workshops, and transferring practical skills on platforms like ZOOM is not scalable or feasible. C1DO1 (See one, do one) is an experiential learning methodology, which allows institutions to transfer practical skills to their users remotely and asynchronously. C1DO1 focuses on enhancing feedback with technology, optimizing teacher’s time management and reaching more students in a personalized way. C1DO1 bypasses any issues brought about by the need of in-person interaction, allowing students to continue training and progressing through their educational journeys, and educational institutions to keep imparting practical courses, securing the education of their students, regardless of contextual barriers. But more importantly, this technology will revolutionize the way practical skills are transferred and acquired, as it removes geographical and temporal barriers.

The pandemic has made it clear that learning "to do" something is not achieved just by just watching, but by doing. Higher education institutions, especially technical-training institutions, have stopped holding their classic in-person workshops and therefore stopped transferring practical/technical skills. As mentioned in the description of this challenge, “as result of the Covid-19 pandemic over 165 million students were out of school and over 26 million jobs were lost in the Latin America and Caribbean region". Globally, this means that students’ educational journeys have been on standby (at least those requiring the acquisition of practical skills), while higher education institutions have not been able to graduate their students, bringing practical skills training to a halt. Teaching practical skills on platforms like ZOOM is not scalable or feasible, it generates teacher-student burnout and the skills are not transferred. Currently, there are no good alternatives to train practical skills remotely.

C1DO1 (See one, do one) is an experiential learning methodology (a paradigm shift in the curriculum) that facilitates institutions that have or are dedicated to creating practical skills content, to transfer practical skills to their users remotely and asynchronously. C1DO1 is focused on feedback literacy and how to enhance it with technology. C1DO1 empowers feedback from teachers, and as it is asynchronous, it improves teaching efficiency and time management, allowing them to reach more students in a personalized way. The product allows teacher-student interaction in a web and mobile community. It has profiles for students, instructors and administrators. Broadly, the solution works in the following way: a student uploads a video performing a procedure or practical activity to the cloud, and a teacher remotely and asynchronously provides feedback. Then, the student reviews this feedback and trains as many times as s/he wishes and the activity is recorded and uploaded again, receiving new feedback and thus completing a learning curve, until s/he achieves a minimum level of competence/proficiency for that procedure. While the process repeats, data is harvested for machine learning algorithms and A.I. to complement learning and improve the learning experience.

C1DO1 is a tool for any institution that is committed to teach or transfer practical skills. With our methodology and platform, such institutions will be capable of transferring skills without limitations, and students will be able to keep practicing their skills at their own pace, with no time or place constraints, while developing a real learning curve. With C1DO1 the feedback provided by a teacher to a student is stored digitally and therefore becomes measurable and analyzable. This will help understand what optimizes and improves skills learning, and could serve institutions as a catalyst for their digital transformation, allowing scalability to reach thousands of students. C1DO1 allows institutions to expand their networks of students and teachers around the world, and students will be able to build their educational trajectories at their convenience, collecting micro-certifications as they achieve new skills, without the need pausing their education due to contextual circumstances, like the ones brought forward by the Covid-19 pandemic. We are approaching higher education institutions to show them and to encourage them to use our methodology for their practical courses. To help them with our solution, we sell a Setup consulting project in which we investigate the institutions' needs and problems, and provide support for C1DO1’s optimal installation and deployment.

C1DO1 aligns perfectly with this challenge: we facilitate the transfer of hard and soft skills, with no constraints of place and time. C1DO1 bypasses the issues brought forward by the pandemic, as students are able to keep training and acquiring skills remotely and asynchronously, and receive even better feedback on the procedures they perform. We support learning with no time boundaries or organizational constraints, and allow a personalized and flexible curriculum. While the learning process takes place, data is harvested to develop A.I. to complement teaching, improve the learning experience, and make every course even more scalable, reaching more students.

Our startup is an official spinoff of the Catholic University (CU) of Chile (Ranking QS #1 Latin America), with whom we are partners, and we are also partnering with Chile's largest professional institute, DuocUC (110.000 students). We are activating our partners' channels to reach other higher educational institutions. We also have 10-years of experience validating our results on an academic level, and thus have many ties to international institutions. Of notice, we already have 3 clients with a potential $1M/year recurrent income, and we are growing and better understanding the product market fit with them. As soon as this stage finishes we will scale-up!

C1DO1 facilitates the transfer of practical skills remotely and asynchronously, breaking learning paradigms and allowing for an education without boundaries. It integrates the best elements from both the online and face-to-face learning formats, which allows scaling-up to an ever growing number of students with a limited number of faculty (e.g. validated with 1 course /1300+ students/4 teachers, for further info please see https://bit.ly/3yKbz2w). We developed a way for networks of teachers to provide personalized feedback, enabled by technology. In C1DO1, each student is supported 24/7 by a network of teachers, who remotely (no matter in which country) and asynchronously, assess a video of the student with interactive multimedia tools included in the platform. The student achieves his/her learning curve at e.g., a workshop at the institution, on the field or at his/her house, depending on the characteristics of the course. Throughout this technology-mediated process, data of the student-teacher interaction including the feedback itself, is retrieved and analyzed, to allow machine learning algorithms to complement the teacher’s input, making the learning process easier, smoother and more effective for both students and teachers.

The core technology that powers our solution is based on software. C1DO1 is focused on feedback literacy and how to enhance it with technology, creating a digital community around feedback. It consists of a mobile and web based platform, which allows for traditional, face-to-face courses, to be adapted and optimized so that they become digitally available anywhere and at any time, thus reaching more students. Our C1DO1 technology makes a traditional, in-person course, digitally available and embeds it with continuous and personalized training, remote expert feedback, and self-optimized courses and learning, leveraged by artificial intelligence.

C1DO1 is already being widely used at the Faculty of Medicine of the Catholic University of Chile, in disciplines such as physical therapy, nursing, odontology, medicine and surgery, audiology, and nutrition. In addition, successful feasibility studies were performed in a variety of non-health related disciplines at DuocUC professional institute, including carpentry, electric circuits, script programing, risk prevention and gastronomy. Companies like Johnson & Johnson are also using our technology to teach their clients how to use and handle their surgical equipment and products throughout Latin America. C1DO1 has also helped our clients to provide evidence and publish their results in academic journals regarding how is it that learning is taking place. Some of these high-impact examples include:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00464-019-07024-1

https://bjssjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bjs.11923

https://journals.lww.com/simulationinhealthcare/Abstract/9000/Implementation_of_Distance_Based_Simulation.99385.aspx

The main risks involved with the use of our technology are related to privacy concerns and data security. An essential aspect of the interaction between teachers and students in our platform  involves recording videos that are shared as responses. These include images and the faces of users, which could result in privacy issues if those videos are leaked or stolen. Similarly, sensitive data (names, addresses, institutions, email addresses, and so on) is also stored with the use of our platform. As a result, we will mitigate these risks by enacting strict terms and conditions, and also by seeking voluntary consent in case any video is used for e.g., marketing purposes. Our personnel are also being trained on HIPAA guidelines and regulations, as we are working on becoming HIPAA compliant. Additionally, all the data is securely stored in Amazon Web Services servers, which minimizes data breaches and security risks. Our terms and conditions are compatible with the California and European data policies. If a user decides to withdraw from the platform and get their data erased, they can request this at any time.

Currently, our technology is being used by 4.000 active users mostly through LAPP, a laparoscopic surgery course imparted through C1DO1, and other health-related courses from Catholic University in Chile. We expect to have at least 15.000 active users within a year, mainly due to our partnership with Chile’s leading professional institute, DuocUC, which can be easily scaled-up within their 100.000+ students. We hope to reach the 1 million-user mark in 5 years. We are talking not only about any user, but a trainee performing a learning curve in specific skills, this is amazing!

We are on the verge of closing a follow-up project with DuocUC, the largest and most prestigious professional institute of Chile, with more than 108.000 students. Our short term goal is to secure this project in order to incorporate our methodology and technology during this upcoming year throughout all the hard and soft skills courses available at the institution, which will drastically increase the number of active users of our platform. Subsequently, we hope to close deals with at least five institutions of the same size or larger, within five years, reaching even more users globally and impacting the future of education around the world. Today, we approach the digital education market through our partners (Catholic University of Chile and DuocUC), scientific societies, congresses and webinars, the surgical supply industry, website, social networks, emails, academic publications, etc. Also, as we keep selling and securing deals, our network keeps on growing, reaching more and more people and countries interested in incorporating our technology; e.g. CHRISTUS HEALTH (U.S.A.) with over 80 clinics, who submitted a letter of intent to start implementing several pilots in 2022 with us.

Our main progress indicator is the annual revenue of the company, which has increased exponentially in the past years. We hope to continue on this trend, as this would mean that we have reached more people and that we are making an impact in the digital education field. For these purposes, we additionally measure our progress in terms of the number of active users, and hours of training these users achieve,  in the platform and number of courses created in C1DO1.These indicators will give us a better idea on the educational impact of our methodology, globally speaking. In order to measure specific aspects related to the quality of the educational process, we are already measuring the number of feedbacks provided from teachers to students, amount of time spent by teachers assessing video-responses, number of students that approve those courses, among other metrics, so that we can characterize the interaction between students and teachers, have an idea of the quality and effectiveness of the learning process, as well as measuring the successful transfer of practical abilities.

We have 13 people in our company: 7 are full-time, and 6 are part-time employees.

Our multidisciplinary team is made up of 13 professionals, coming from a variety of fields and providing their respective expertise. Each one of them has vast experience and skills to perform at their best at our different positions in the company. The experience of our team as a unit has the ability to navigate the following fields of knowledge: education & learning, scientific research, product development, project management, finances, operations, programming, technology & systems, data science, design, and social networking. In addition, we rely on a variety of consultants who provide support and guidance in the following areas: contracts, legal, intellectual property, accounting, strategy & growth.

Teamwork and fostering a welcoming work environment are essential at our company.  We constantly look out for each other and try to foster a sense of community, with team building strategies and fun activities. We strive to maintain  gender balance and we currently employ people from a diversity of countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela; foreigners make up 50% of the company. We additionally collaborate with organizations from the United States and Europe. We are aware that in today’s globalized world, anyone can be a potential user, customer or partner and we welcome organizations and collaborations from everywhere in the world. We keep a horizontal work-hierarchy, where everyone can have a say regarding the future plans of the company, and we value the potential in people by their merits and life goals.

As we read the description of the TPrize challenge, we realized we were a perfect fit for it. We are the solution that the challenge is looking for because our solution addresses most of the requirements mentioned: we solve an educational problem that the world is experiencing today, given the pandemic and all the issues surrounding it. We believe that TPrize can really help us overcome our current barriers, connecting us to new networks of experts and key players in the industry, enabling us to scale up and accelerate the expansion of our solution through all of the Americas. This step will allow us to reach an ever growing number of people who will recognize the methodology, and who would want to benefit from it, especially in today’s pandemic circumstances.

The area where we currently need the most support is in Business Model. We need to precisely understand our product market fit, and in this way understand our minimum scalable unit, so that we can later replicate it in several institutions. We still need to determine the exact business model with our three largest clients we already have, so that we can understand our charging schemes when we reach the scale-up stage. Secondly we also need support in Technology. Given the expected growth of our solution, we are going to need constant technological validation and support, and implement stress tests to achieve an adequate performance of the platform.

We would like to partner with Amazon and AWS, to try different tools related to machine learning and A.I. e.g. how to interpret audios, videos, feelings of our users. Also, they would help us better approach how to efficiently use streaming services and server requests.

We would also like to partner with the U.S.A.’s Department of Defense, as we believe that a C1DO1 pilot in the DoD could demonstrate the value our methodology may have for this enormous institution. We would like the opportunity to pitch our solution to as many higher education institutions as we can, including MIT in the Boston area or any others in the U.S., to see if they would benefit or be interested in our methodology to tackle any of their current needs. Finally, we would be very interested in blockchain technology companies and microcredential companies, for we know we hold the key for the future of certification in a decentralized fashion (when communities of teachers certify a skill, a blockchain can be sealed and a token minted as a reward).