Doha, Qatar, September 25, 2019: The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), an initiative of Qatar Foundation (QF), has revealed the eight edtech initiatives selected to join its 2019-20 WISE Accelerator program. Botter, an Ethiopian startup, is one of the initiatives chosen for the new cohort.
Powered by artificial intelligence, Botter facilitates language learning. It allows educators to connect a chatbot to their Facebook page and create gamified lessons and exercises for students.
Through the platform, language teachers can craft lessons in local languages and reach users in Africa and across the world. The first bot created on Botter platform reached 250,000 users.
The program will officially kick off during the WISE 2019 Summit, which is taking place from November 20-21 in Doha. During the Summit, representatives of the selected initiatives will take part in workshops, attend master classes, and participate in pitching sessions.
The other initiatives include: Kamkalima, a K-12 school platform that supports the teaching and learning of Arabic language; Teacherly, which aims to create teams of teachers with collaborative lesson planning and peer-to-peer coaching; Medics.Academy, which aims to address the needs of global health systems through scalable education; Wiloki, an adaptive platform that leverages artificial intelligence to support parents in teaching their children; OXED, which launched Wumbox, an online and offline adaptive educational platform for children; AskMyClass: an affordable social-emotional learning assistant for teachers; and Livox, an alternative communication software for non-verbal people to communicate and learn.
Stavros Yiannouka, CEO of WISE, said: “We have faith in this year’s founders’ potential to transform education on a large scale and at a global level. This year’s cohort is tackling tough challenges in education that range from helping teachers reduce planning time through peer-to-peer support to tackling the global labor shortage in the medical sector by providing scalable and quality content for training workers in the medical field.”
The WISE Accelerator supports the development of innovative education technology initiatives with high potential to make a positive impact. The selected initiatives receive support from mentors and WISE partners to scale up their startups, improve their international visibility, and identify potential partners, donors, and investors through networking opportunities organized by WISE.
Kamkalima
Kamkalima is a K-12 school platform that supports the teaching and learning of Arabic language skills. Kamkalima offers content, tools, and deep data analytics to help teachers in lesson preparation and delivery, student progress reporting and follow up and importantly assessment of learning. Over 20,000 students and 450 teachers in nine countries benefit from Kamkalima.
Teacherly
Teacherly is turning teachers into teams with collaborative lesson planning & peer to peer coaching with a focus on flexible teaching and interactive curriculum. Over 60,000 teachers from around the world use teacherly to plan their lessons and learn from other teachers.
Botter
Botter is an Ethiopia based startup that allows schools, teachers or publishers to easily create AI chatbots which act as personal language tutors that teach content they create on the platform. The first bot created on Botter platform reached 250,000 users. Botter is partnering with the French institute to help learners learn French.
Medics.Academy
Medics.Academy was founded to address the needs of global health systems through scalable, high quality, consistent education.
Health professionals, struggle to access the training they require throughout their careers. Face-to-face training is often restricted by service pressures and IT solutions have been limited.
Medics.Academy offers a solution by creating high quality online video-based teaching for healthcare professionals. The startups has demonstrated the effectiveness of its approach through a 25% monthly growth in the user base.
Wiloki
Wiloki is an online adaptive platform that leverage artificial intelligence and interactive content to support parents in teaching their children mathematics, French, history and the Sciences.
Over 300,000 users have benefited from over 1,500 video courses, course summaries and the 10,000 exercises available on Wiloki.
OXED
OXED launched Wumbox, an online and offline adaptive educational platform for kids between 4 and 12 years of age. The platform contains thousands of fun interactive story driven resources.
The platform measures in real team each users’ interactions and adapts according to each students need ensuring adaptive, personalized learning. Over 45,000 users across Latin America benefit from Wumbox.
AskMyClass
AskMyClass is an affordable social-emotional learning assistant that makes it easy for all teachers to learn, infuse, and measure vital life skills into every lesson.
With minimal prep, teachers and students learn from web-based mini-lessons, and then practice many times a day by asking the classroom Alexa device for AskMyClass activities. In six months, 1,979 classroom teachers have used AskMyClass.
Livox
Livox is an alternative communication software that enables non-verbal people with disabilities to communicate and to learn. Livox uses machine learning and natural language Processing to enable people with disability to communicate up to 20 times faster. Over 25,000 children from around the world have benefited from Livox.
Instructively, the World Innovation Summit for Education was established by Qatar Foundation in 2009 under the leadership of its Chairperson, Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser.
WISE is an international, multi-sectoral platform for creative, evidence-based thinking, debate, and purposeful action in education. Through the biennial summit, collaborative research and a range of on-going programs, WISE is a global reference in new approaches to education.
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