Reaktor Education

AI is like electricity, it will touch all of our lives in ways we cannot yet imagine. We think this means AI is too important to be left in the hands of a few elite programmers and companies. A foundational understanding of this new technology, targeted at those normally left out of tech discussions, was therefore, a societal imperative. 

In order to help people to not feel threatened by this new technology, but rather empowered to make informed decisions about its use on their own terms, we partnered with the University of Helsinki to create an online course called Elements of AI. 

We have so far trained over 1% of the population of Finland. The program has spread to participants in over 110 countries and 170,000+ students globally - with 10,000+ new students joining each month. We have created a movement, and we want to share it with the world. 

In what is often dubbed the "Finnish Miracle," Finland transformed itself after WW2 into one of the most prosperous and technologically advanced nations in the world. Finns achieved this without oil or outsized financialization, investing instead in R&D, and education. 

Now, in a global economy that is transforming faster than ever before, we wanted to see if the same could be done with AI; if Finland could compete with global tech giants like China and the US, not by outspending, but by focusing our efforts on the majority of people often left out of technology discussions. 

We wanted to lead the way on demonstrating how applied AI, used on and by and for all of us, could be transformed for the better by virtue of having an informed society to influence and regulate its use. The goal of our course was to equip all citizens, from CEOs and politicians to Uber drivers and retirees, with the knowledge needed to make informed decisions on AI and harness it for the benefit of our nation.  

With over 1% of Finland and 170K+ participants from over 110 countries, we have seen that there is a global need for our movement. 

Our course subscribers are more diverse in terms of background, age, gender and education level than most online courses, especially ones in the AI/CS domain. Alongside being ranked as the world's #1 online course in Computer Science on Class Central, ahead of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, it has delivered on our goal of attracting groups like women, non-university educated groups, and lifelong learners in and out of the workforce.

The fact that we have participants from over 110 countries already demonstrates the content has proven accessible, approachable, and relevant to a global audience. The pedagogical threshold requires only a high school level education and no coding, unlike other online AI courses aimed at university students and professionals. The illustrated design makes the course approachable and nonthreatening, which is why over 38% of participants are women, and over 25% are over the age of 45 years old. The flat content and mobile-optimized user interface means that you don't need to own a computer to take the course, you can even do it on your bus ride to work.

We have surveys and an online chat community that allows course takers to interact, reinforce learning, and comment about the course materials. 

Our original course, Elements of AI, is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) uniquely designed to disseminate the complicated topic of AI to a non-technical audience, focusing in every aspect of design and implementation on those normally left out of tech discussions (women, older people, non-university educated people, and other marginalized groups). 

Prior to, during, and following the course launch, Reaktor Education created a marketing phenomenon using everything from influencers to a graduation ceremony hosted by the President of Finland (all organic and voluntary, never paid) that has reached around the world. 

The course was custom-built by Reaktor Education with educational content from the University of Helsinki. Reaktor Education manages all customer service requirements including student requests and localizations. 

The UI/UX is mobile-optimised from the outset, with flat images, text, and interactive exercises designed to allow anyone, anywhere in the world to take the course on their mobile phone with lower bandwidth requirements than typical video MOOCs. 

The course is free to every end user in the world. Any person can go to elementsofai.com and sign up to the course for free. Finnish residents can receive free credits from the University of Helsinki, and all participants receive a an official electronic pdf certificate, sharable on Linkedin, for successful completion of the course. The course participants can interact in our online chat forum to reinforce learning and from discussions around AI.

In order to reach our aim to teach 1% of the world's population, it is crucial that we work with local partners and companies. To do this, we partner country by country with a local funding partner, a university partner, and a public sector partner to release a localised, translated version of the course. For this package, we have created a comprehensive marketing kit, a manual for recreating the phenomenon locally, and personal training sessions for course facilitators (usually the universities). We sell this bundle package along with the translated version of the course in individual bespoke landing pages, with unique URLs that can also be located from our main site menu by selecting your country of residence. These landing pages and all local marketing and course materials have the logo(s) of our local partners, enabling them to be seen as AI pioneers in their countries. 

We are also working with the EU and UN organisations like UNESCO and UNICEF to achieve the same goals in developing countries. 

Our goal to create something that could teach AI to everyone, not just the traditionally tech-savvy, required us to leverage our expertise in technology and digital solutions in order to make our course as accessible, appealing, and user-friendly as possible. We knew our target audience meant that we were not competing with other MOOCs, but with Netflix and Facebook as options for people's free-time activity. That made our approach, and our results, quite unique in this domain. 

To do this, we started with the design. Not only are the graphics and content approachable, but the pedagogy includes interactive illustrated exercises imbedded in the course to foster learning and engagement. We also designed the course to be mobile-optimised from the start to encourage those with little free time, or who might not have access to a computer to be able to learn the entire curriculum on the go. 

We executed a professional-level digital online marketing and PR strategy leveraging national-level influencers, organic social media campaigns, and our corporate #AIChallenge, now with over 250+ Finnish companies pledged to educate their employees in AI. 

A sharing component for students was built into the course as well, making it a user-driven project: Participants are kept engaged with weekly emails encouraging them to complete the modules and share their progress online. Thousands signed up to our internal online chat communities and many have created self-organised study groups. In future, we would like to incorporate even more interactive exercises within the course. 

Our solution is a new application of an existing technology combined with a new approach to marketing it to a mass general audience. 

Elements of AI is a Massive Online Open Course designed, built, and coded from scratch. This means we did not fit the content to a template or into commercially available open sourced software kits like most of the MOOCs created today. We also do our own hosting and use APIs to integrate our various user experiences (all opt-in) including our online chat community on Spectrum, and our course-related email communications via Mail Chimp. 

This gave us the creative freedom to design something that would appeal directly to those normally left out of tech. These non-tech people often feel marginalized and intimidated by a constantly expanding and moving explosion of knowledge and technology that can foster a defeatist attitude when one tries to comprehend and keep up with the noise. 

Reaktor Education is a part of Reaktor Innovations, a Finnish digital design and strategy consultancy with 500+ employees in 5 countries, headquartered in Helsinki. We work in cross-disciplinary agile teams, which drove the success of this project. We worked with focus groups to understand how average citizens feel about AI before we started on the course design and build. This directly influenced our Behavioral Design approach and the customised Social Media phenomenon that followed the course launch. Both Behavioral Design and Social Media implementation are described in the previous question's answer. 

So far the course has had over 170,000 participants worldwide. We are in the process now of doing a one-year retrospective survey to quantify how it has affected all of those who have taken it. Anecdotally, we have received hundreds of comments, letters, and emails from our participants telling us how much they appreciated the course. Dozens have said that it showed them they could learn something new again, and has inspired them to learn python or think of ways to implement AI in their work and life as informed citizens. A grandmother wrote about how she and her family had three generations complete the course. An Uber driver from Nigeria told us how he tries to get everyone he drives to take the course, and how he feels better prepared for his job outlook with autonomous cars on the horizon. The CS department at the University of Helsinki have had an 80% increase in applications and 50% increase in women applicants since last year. We are actively collating these qualitative outcomes now, but we are happy to provide them individually if requested. 

We have also received interest and are in contracting phase with organisations such as UNESCO, UNICEF, EU, UNDP, NYU, countries such as Sweden, Canada, Germany, Peru, Denmark, Estonia, and others who wish to bring Elements of AI and our marketing phenomenon to local audiences in countries, regions, and major metropolitan areas around the world. 

So far the course has had over 170,000 participants worldwide. We are about to launch in Germany in September and are in negotiations with UNESCO to launch in five African countries, starting with Rwanda this year. We are in talks with many other countries as well and are preparing to go to 1 million users by next year, and hopefully 15-20 million in five years. 

By that point, we will have other courses of similar critical societal importance launched, including examples like Climate Change and Ethics of AI. 

Again, we will have the mission of making courses with an impact arising from an informed citizenry, that are free to end users, designed to appeal to a general population, with a high school level education. 

Our top three goals for the next year are:

1) Close 5-10 countries and 50 API licenses
2) Increase course completion rate by 5%
3) Reach 1 million students

Within five years we hope to have reached 15-20 million users and have launched at least two further ground-breaking courses on critical issues of mass global societal impact, like Climate Change and Ethics of AI. Always free to the end users. 

Our internal risks are those normally associated with scaling and growth. We must ensure we have the proper infrastructure in place to manage going from 1-5 countries and a few hundred thousand users to 10-20 countries and millions of users. We are well-placed as a professional digital consulting firm to anticipate and manage this better than many companies, but growing pains may still arise.

The key stakeholders already involved span government, private, and public sector organisations. Managing those various priorities and ways of working is a challenge that is delicate and time-consuming. We are approaching this by creating manuals, best practice kits, templates, and generic trainings that we can give to our local partners to delegate the management of the course in new countries around the world.

For the end users, we have found that the original course is appealing to global audiences so far but on a massive scale, it may take tweaking to gain relevance in different cultures. We have set up KPIs to monitor these metrics.

There are always new learning curves in working with different cultures and types of organisations. But we have been successful so far due to choosing dedicated partners with some skin in the game and will continue this approach in the future.

The LMS API business model is much more scalable and automated, and additional required resources should be cost-covered directly through sales.

Reaktor Education is a new business unit, aiming to one day be a spin out of Reaktor Innovations, a Finnish digital design and strategy consultancy. 

We run our own team autonomously with budget set from the main organisation. Our aim for this year is break-even, with profitability in year 2.

Our team comprises of sales, customer service, copy editing, and product management. As new partnerships for Elements of AI arise, we commission design and related work accordingly and project manage the results to completion. The same applies for the commissioning of new courses by other third parties such as companies and universities. We pull Reaktor employees who are not currently on billable project and/or commission the work required with our preferred partners (many of which have helped in this first Elements of AI course). 

The team consists of five full-time members and three part-time contractors, who can be pulled to work full-time on new projects.

Reaktor is a world-class digital consulting firm with 500+ employees. Our headquarters is in Helsinki with offices in Dubai, New York, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. The Elements of AI team within Reaktor works with the University of Helsinki in an agile, multi-disciplinary team with experts in AI, digital education and pedagogy, graphic design, UI/UX design, sales, marketing, PR, legal, and government partnerships. The global footprint of Reaktor, our deep digital expertise, and our team's lean ways of working in fast product iterations, makes us uniquely positioned to achieve our mission of educating 1% of the world's population in the basics of AI. Our professional team, initial traction, and scalable product/solution is poised for growth; we just need the funds to make it happen in a sustainable way, while we can still capitalize on our PR momentum. At Reaktor, we operate in a unique manner. Here, we have a flat hierarchy without managers, which enables lateral decision making in self-organising teams. It was this original team that was tasked with designing a collaboration with the Universtiy of Helsinki. Our brief was to give anyone the tools to understand AI. Our objective was to educate on AI as large and diverse a group of people as possible: In less than a year at least 1% of the entire Finnish population. We wanted to make Finland the world's most AI-educated country but also to create a global resource that could educate the public anywhere in the world, regardless of background. 

The University of Helsinki: Professor Teemu Roos at the University of Helsinki created an intro to AI course, from which the original Elements of AI was created. The University CS department also helps with various technical implementation aspects of the original course. 

AI Innovation of Sweden, Linkoping University, and Vinnova: Our first pilot launch partners for a translated and localized version of Elements of AI to Sweden

While our team was originally established by Reaktor Innovations, a multinational digital consulting agency, in order to continue our business unit and build on our success, we need to be self-sustaining and for-profit.

To do this we have begun to sell a repackaging of the original course in the our country/region/city localisation business model elaborated further in previous questions.

For this main model (expanding to other countries with local partners), the content and certification will always remain open and free to every student who takes the course. The package we sell to recreate a local country-level marketing phenomenon ranges in annual cost depending on the size of the population and local GDP. This cost ranges from 200K-400K per country. 

In the future, we are commissioning new courses with universities, public sector organisations, and private companies. Our core social impact courses will always remain free to end users globally. Other courses may charge end users a small fee. 

Right now, selling Elements of AI (a free online course) to partner organisations to provide localised translations, content, and marketing phenomena, is a very slow and complicated process. That being said, it is working, as we have already launched in Sweden and will launch in Germany early autumn, hopefully moving forward to launch in 5 African countries with UNESCO, and other partnerships by the end of the year. 

We are already in contracting talks with other universities and companies to commission online courses, some of which, will charge end users outside of Finland a small fee, which we will receive a profit-sharing commission of. Reaktor Education is currently building its own education platform with a CMS for clients for this purpose. 

We aim to bring Finnish higher education to the world (currently only 2.5m euro per year exported vs. New Zealand's 3 billion) and to create more ground breaking social impact courses that will remain free to global end users, driving our user base for the platform. 

We will charge our clients a fee to host courses on our platform and a percentage of profits from sales of courses to end users and company Learning Management Systems. Our B2B will therefore move towards our commissioning clients, and our B2C will be a quick online purchase for end user students on selected for-charge future courses.   

Our moonshot end goal is to build towards a Reaktor EdTech online education platform to host our own MOOC ecosystem, using our first courses as initial superstar site content, and enabling third party course hosting with house style overlay. To make this possible, we would use Solve's network and prize money to turbo charge the visibility, user traction, and sales of the original course in foreign markets, particularly the US, specifically, to hire a new dedicated customer success manager and marketing manager, and to build a proactive (to-date it has only been organic, fully unpaid) international marketing and PR campaign.

Although this original Elements of AI course has exceeded all of our initial expectations in terms of users, press, awards, and most importantly, impact, we still have a long way to go to realise its full potential. The EdTech market is only just starting to feed the hunger of a rapidly growing, multi-billion dollar global market. With our course on the basics of AI, aimed at a broad demographic to include those normally left out of tech discussions, we are poised to capture a unique global user base. Solve would enable us to reach this growing community.

We would like to develop the Reaktor Education platform to answer to the needs of a modern educator. With machine learning technologies we can f.ex. predict student performance and offer a more customised learning environment where professors can focus on the students most needing their help. 

Our long term goal is to provide every user a tailored curriculum that leads to a micro-degree and later to a full fledged degree. We want to use modern machine learning technologies to better match the curriculum to every student.

Our solution was designed to appeal directly to women and other groups ignored by technologies aimed at men. 

We currently have over 40% female attendance on our flagship course Elements of AI (normally in computer science classes 15%) - we will want raise the amount of female students to 50% and encourage them to continue the education.

We would like to develop the Reaktor Education platform to answer to the needs of a modern educator. With machine learning technologies we can f.ex. predict student performance and offer a more customised learning environment where professors can focus on the students most needing their help. 

Our long term goal is to provide every user a tailored curriculum that leads to a micro-degree and later to a full fledged degree. We want to use modern machine learning technologies to better match the curriculum to every student.

We would like to develop the Reaktor Education platform to answer to the needs of a modern educator. With machine learning technologies we can f.ex. predict student performance and offer a more customised learning environment where professors can focus on the students most needing their help. 

Our long term goal is to provide every user a tailored curriculum that leads to a micro-degree and later to a full fledged degree. We want to use modern machine learning technologies to better match the curriculum to every student.