Edtech startups competition live pitches

okay welcome to this session we've got nine head tech companies who are going to pitch to you now these are the companies have been shortlisted for our accelerator program that we run every year in Jeschke if you look on your app the the digi fest app you'll find a voting option there so you can vote and leave comments on each of the companies okay and so we've got nine companies they're going to talk for around about three minutes each there won't be an opportunity for questions during the pitching but I'm hoping will be finished probably quite enough time there might be some time at the end if you want to call them and ask them or chat to them during the rest of the day okay um and I haven't even introduced myself I'm Paul Bailey I've been run the EdTech program from JISC so I shall invite the first one up Daniel good afternoon everybody college and university applicants these days leader connected digital life and their savvy consumers so when they choose where to go to do their studies they don't go to your college or university websites and neither do they go back to their emails and search back through what they've previously ignored instead what they crave is authenticity and they don't get that from people who are on the university or college payroll what they look for is to get that from their peers I don't remember too much about the universities that came to my school in 1999 but what I do remember is that one of those universities brought with them two student ambassadors they told us about the university lifestyle and that stuck with me for almost 20 years later today's students downstream from a tidal wave of communications and they're often unprepared to manage it universities and colleges on the other hand stick to fairly traditional forms of communication often by email and this makes it very difficult to connect with their student body in pre arrival or post enrollment especially when they're asking for a timely response from their students my name is Daniel Hinkley and the co-founder and director of campus connect and we produce mobile apps for universities and colleges to simplify the communications process we make it easier for universities and colleges to communicate with their students and for their students to communicate with one another we have brought two products to the market the first is called campus connect and that product is used in pre enrollment we're working with eight major universities across the UK and Ireland using campus connect pre enrollment students are able to connect up with other fellow applicants who have also applied for their course people who are already studying at the university of choice and a direct communication channel with university staff members the universities get to direct and quality comms channel they can send out calendar reminders or directed content along with a push notification to their student body the second product we bring in to market in a month or so from now it's called go exchange and that is used in the outbound student mobility and exchange sector using go exchange people who are planning to have an overseas experience as part of their studies are able to connect up with other students who are also going to the same horse destination be that by city or country even people who are not from there at the same university as them will still have important information to share in that community from the university perspective the unis are able to manage their whole student mobility cohorts they can collect important pre-departure information from their mobility students and they can use automated reminders to collect in that all-important paperwork there's also well-being aspect to this service if a student cohort is abroad they have instant access to communicate back and forth with the University in the event of an overseas crisis or emergency we've been working on these products for the last probably seven years we've established a team with 25 years plus experience in Fe and here qi in the UK and in ireland we have proven entrepreneurial vision skills and unique industry experience we have created a network in the UK and Ireland over the last few years that's very significant and we know that around five million students now are spending time overseas as part of the their studies and we feel that we're very well-placed to grow this business and help as many students as possible to achieve life defining experiences as part of their studies my ask of you today if you have a chance to take out your app look up the study bundles trading as campus connect and give us a voice of progress in the JISC competition thank you Thank You Danielle and thanks for reminding to give us back the clickers okay okay I skocy Scala C excellent Phil another good afternoon my name's I'm Warren Jones and this is Phil Gooch and we're the founders of Scala see a new service that uses machine learning to read to validate complex information thanks Emma several years ago I returned to university after a separate after a 20-year gap in fact as you can imagine at that point my study skills were very rusty but my problem wasn't finding what to read there's plenty of Discovery Tours out there that will do that my problem was understanding and absorbing the information in front of me I saw a need for something that would help me master the core concepts and give me the main learning points to help get me up to speed on a new subject so we know that students are often struggling to read all of their course materials to give themselves the best chance of success and there's been lots of research into why this is they frequently feel overwhelmed with the volume of reading and don't always know where to start or what's most important they may like the background knowledge required to understand the material in front of them especially if they're new to a subject and then they may also struggle when it comes to effectively structuring information to plan for essays or revision and the way students are learning is really changing they're increasingly multitasking and they use mobile devices to consume information and when they do read the course material they often only skim read it once but we know that when you skim read you don't really of information you're not fully focused so you end up having to reread it so with Scala see we're using machine learning to solve the skin reading problem and also implement the strategies used by educators to help students really engage with their learning materials here's how with our five steps to faster learning so first of all Scala C identifies background reading to provide an overview of the subjects and explains new terminology our AI automatically highlights the key concepts and most important points to provide students with an overview and give them sort of a faster deep dive into the material our AI also creates interactive sections and reference summaries which is great for exploring the text in a nonlinear way and our AI demystifies the bibliography what it does is it displays automatically the key findings of every sighted source and finally it organizes the material visually by extracting figures and tables which is great if you're reading the material on a mobile device we achieve this by generating a summary flashcard from any document that can be read on any device and these flash cards and can support note-taking and annotations and can also be shared with other students with scholar C we're making research more accessible students have told us how Scala C really helps them focus and gain understanding before they dive deeper into the text there's other tools out there that provide summaries but they don't provide the context the backgrounds or the automatic references with Scala C we provide all three by combining the latest research into education with artificial intelligence we're helping students move from skim reading so deep reading thank you very much Thank You Scala see I think you can actually go and access on the website and use a counter yes okay 30 hi Alex for health professionals knowing how to perform under pressure can literally be a matter of life and death my name's Alex young I'm a Truman orthopedic surgeon by training I also sold a company as a medical student and scaled an education company internationally around my NHS training I founded vertie as there's no way to recreate the stress and emotion of real clinical practice and even further afield no way to scale experiential learning or teaching now as the doctor myself I can tell you the first time my skills were truly tested under pressure was the first time I was presented with an unwell patient now for all of you as potential unwell patients coming into an NHS hospital how does that make you feel well it's a massive patient safety problem and one of the biggest unmet challenges of our generation there were upwards of 20 billion pounds every single year spent on litigation payouts due to medical error and hospitals in the UK spend up as of 2.7 billion on mandatory in-house training with no way to reduce costs or scale their education offering internationally further afield in developing countries access to high-quality standardised experiential learning is limited both by geography and by resources for example in the 47 countries of sub-saharan Africa 11 don't have access to any medical schools at eleven-thirty tackles these enormous problems by using virtual and augmented reality technology coupled with artificial intelligence specifically natural language processing in computer vision to transport learners into difficult to access experiencial learning environments and safely assesses them under pressure to improve their performance and in healthcare patient safety the system works on mobile devices alone or when paired with affordable VR headsets and all the data about how students perform under pressure and the decisions that they make is visualized on a dashboard for teachers and educators to see and transcribe now behind some of the sci-fi tach we've got a world-class team including a computer vision PhD a BAFTA nominated Unit two developer and our CTO who in a previous life hacked videos into the front end of the Pirate Bay now we were only founded just over 12 months ago but in that incredibly short space of time we built our platform raise money from Silicon Valley and became revenue generating with large enterprise customers in the UK the US and as of just last week also the Middle East some of our customers include Cal Poly in California have upwards of 70,000 students on the platform and we even have managed to sell into the UK's NHS quite quite prolifically as well now everything the platform does have been validated to evidence-based research which we've run five major teaching Awards we have business and health economics case showing savings upwards of five hundred thousand pounds per year on the costs of in-person training for teachers and institutions and we were recently as I've lost Tuesday named onto the Annie NHS's national innovation accelerator and were the first ab tech company ever to be on that we're very excited to be here at JISC and digi fest today we'd love for anyone involved in education and looking to scale that in-person teaching or training to contact us via our website very calm and as mentioned you can vote for us by logging into the session on the app and clicking on Bertie thank you very much thank you very much Alex and next up is confident good afternoon all of us here are well aware of the issues around well-being that are currently impacting our students and staff and our universities I am ila co-founder of pocket confident I've spent 20 years as a coach in education writing curricula and training teachers student empowerment and well-being our subjects I am passionate about my goal has always been to help students build the strength of self confidence self-awareness critical thinking and problem-solving these are the skills they need to be successful in our challenging world I strongly believe that developing these skills is where pocket confident has a very significant role to play students today face problems of constantly navigating and new and daunting landscapes loaded with their own and others expectations for them most don't have enough tools in their toolbox to cope pocket confidante is a self coaching tool a robot which engages students to ask them questions about their problems and issues it's private and confidential gdpr guidelines are in place and old data is always secured students report significant benefits in working with pocket confidante including being supported and stepping back reflecting clarifying their problem identifying the resources they already have and those they need identifying goals and developing an action plan pocket confidence supports students and staff in learning how to solve their own problems and develop a growth mindset how do we train these skills we use coaching research tells us that questioning is a powerful tool for learning and asking good questions is at the heart of great coaching practice an average conversation lasts about 20 minutes and a sharing tool inside the bot allows students to connect with a trusted friend or confidante with our technology we can deliver a cost-effective and scalable to to all students and staff anywhere at anytime we are already working with universities in the UK the US and Europe and we would really like to be working with you to imagine having a tool that can support you at the very moment in time that you needed this is what we are creating and developing at Pocket confident it is exciting to be here today to present to you and we're very grateful to JISC for this opportunity we look forward to working with you to co-create solutions for your students your staff and your University and I think all you have to do in order to make that happen for us is click on that app thank you very much for your time thank you very much Holly okay next up talero hi my name is Gabe so clean I'm CEO right there's some of the background problem in terms of how we're dealing and sort of back in terms of the student mental health crisis the problem that we have explored is that 94% of universities have experienced a sharp increase in the number of students trying to access mental health support also the shocking statistic is that student suicides have increased by 79 percent from 2007 to 2015 this is where talero was born as an answer to that is a 24/7 support platform providing support in the form of articles videos and podcasts to each each user what we actually do is it's a Facebook style app I have it on my phone here so come and talk to me afterwards I can give you a demonstration what we are a Facebook spell app designed to prevent mental ill-health in students and teachers alike so how we do this we meant that we acknowledge that mental health is more than just how you're feeling it's how well you're sleeping do you often feel nervous or on edge have you changed the things that you do you find things enjoyable they used to find enjoyable so what we do is you have a 7 very very simple question 7 question questionnaire and we then tailor all of the content on an individual's app based around their own mental health so for example I answer the questions and our algorithm detects that I'm having trouble sleeping all of the articles all of the videos and all of the podcasts on my personal app will be geared towards improving my sleep so the articles what we want to do behind them so news and articles all aggregated in one place on the app what we do is we essentially want to build education and raise awareness around mental health to ultimately reduce the stigma attached to it if you see mental health in the news at the moment it would be how X NHS Trust has failed this quarter or mental health is being slammed as the reason for an incident that's taken place all mental health in the news is negative there isn't one place that students and teachers alike can find positive curated mental health information except from the tellurian up with the videos on podcast we also provide practical solutions for those who are experiencing mental health issues so for example in the case of if I wasn't sleeping very well would have sleep therapists talking about how to clean up my sleep hygiene I'm in a video or a podcast or we'd have a nutritional therapist talking to me about how I can actually change my diet for example certain foods inhibit sleep so we do as a quick summary we do news articles and videos and podcasts all about based around education raising awareness to ultimately reduce the stigma whilst also providing practical solutions for those who are in need of mental health help for the education institution we then aggregates and anonymize all of the well-being data so from the southern question questionnaire all aggregated say the universities and colleges can actually understand the modes of health of their students and their teachers so they would see for example our trends over time so we're over 30 day window they'll they'll be able to see if their stress anxiety and depression level of their students have gone up or down and we then provide the resources with their in-house channel to then overcome those issues identify them and then provide practical resources for her to help their students and staff members one thing that we have the ability to do with our technology is this well-being checkup and we have built a flag in the system to recall suicide prevention anonymity and confidentiality is the most important thing for us so it's important that each user feels that they can turn to our app to find mental health support but in the case where the or the teacher might be experiencing very poor men's health issues we have a flag in our system which we are looking to link with papyrus mental health at the moment to start the conversation have a friend have somebody to talk to a text conversation a phone conversation there's always going to be somewhere out there and we have the technology and we've built the technology to start that conversation so people don't feel like they're alone thank you very much thank you to lower our next up student CRT hi everyone I'm Andrew Marek I'm the founder of third floor systems I'm also a lecturer at the University of Manchester a job that I've had for 13 years and during that time of course see a lot of great things of course but I've also seen firsthand the problems that students can encounter with their mental health during their studies and in some cases the tragic extremes that they can lead to there are over two million students in the UK and as many as 80% of them the NUS found struggle with their mental health during their studies though a consequence is that those struggles ranged from not doing as well as they wanted to in their crosses they go through interrupting their studies dropping out of university and at the tragic extreme students contemplate suicide and every year in this country around 100 students take their own lives four years ago we had a student in the school that I work in who took their own life and that event in particular made me think hard about whether we could be better to protect our students using the data that we collect about them anyway so by data I'm thinking about engagement data attendances at classes and meetings coursework marks reports from tutors that sort of thing and I had a look at this and I decided that I thought we could do better especially in the time it takes to clay and analyse that data so that students are part of pastoral staff know who is they might need to follow and so I build this software system called student CRT the aim is to identify at-risk students as quickly as possible so that responsible staff can follow up with them before things escalate it does that by showing responsible staff a leaderboard view based on triangulating the students engagement data so they can see who it thinks is most at-risk responsible staff can then drill down on a student by student basis to see a storyline of everything the system knows about that student so they can decide how and whether to follow up they can also record the outcomes of those follow up on each student storyline and everybody with responsibility for that student can see what what's going on it's important to actively go out and try and identify people Oh struggling with their mental health because did you know about 75% of people that take their own lives are unknown to the health care profession just think about that it's quite shocking since we adopted this system in our school the effect on students part has been quite profound there are two schools now at University of Manchester that run this system and in those schools referrals to upstream services are down against an overall upward trend in the Institute as a whole so it's being adopted by other schools in our university of course I'm here today because I want to see more student lives protected with the system and but I need help to distribute it to other universities and I'm hoping to get that help from JISC and from emerge education we probably all know amazing young person who is struggling with or has struggled with their mental health a vote for third floor systems today and for a student CRT our early warning system is about to help that person thanks very much thank you very much Andrey okay I now connect to teach trusting for short people hi I'm Priyanka I'm the founder of connect to teach before I tell you a little bit more about what we do I just want to sort of paint a picture what's happening in the education system currently there's a huge disconnect between industry and academia some of the top companies like IBM Google Starbucks Cisco no longer require a degree for some of the top jobs this problem is not just something that's relevant to young graduates but also to an aging demographic that needs to upscale re skilled for jobs of the future seven out of ten jobs are coming up for rescaling if I relate that back to my own experience when I was leading teams in industry one of the hardest things for me to do was to find a right person to come and coach my team on the skills that they needed to progress to the next level or be able to take on more opportunities etc when I was doing my MBA at Cambridge in a supply chain class we were still focused on the old ways of looking at the supply chain system whereas that very morning shuttle was being sold to eBay in terms of hyperlocal delivery this presents universities with an opportunity to develop content that can cater to this new student which had which may be of a different age which may be of a different nationality of a different race of a different gender it presents opportunity to teach new skills like cloud computing digital marketing Java it also presents um an opportunity to teach new formats which are shorter courses executive courses teaching online teaching through apprenticeship programs the UK government is running a lot of initiatives to help support this through things like the subject-based Deaf knowledge exchange framework and apprenticeship program at connect to teach we have a network of 650 experts with industry experience teaching experience and the commitment to make time to teach in higher education we've also partnered with companies such as Financial Times in Metro Bank to nominate the senior leadership to teach at no cost at in the a UK higher education system the way we connect global institutions to experts is to help deliver great learning outcomes but also help the institution meet the business outcomes like how do you manage growing cohort sizes how do you increase your enrollment how do you drop in you introduce your drop-offs and how do you actually create a pathway to employability more easily our matching system is actually based on research that was conducted at UCL Institute of Education this is just to give you a quick illustration of how how we work so Pearson Business School actually reached out to us to look for adjunct lecturer to teach a modular operations they would have normally connected the connected students to a freelance tutor who knew something about operations and was teaching it through connected teach they actually got the principal director of Accenture teaching a module and supply chain and operations were 17 years of industry experience three years of teaching experience and a PhD she not only brought an immense amount of knowledge into the classroom but also pathway into employability and research collaborations for the institution for the future industry academia interactions are what some people have been talking about in forums for very very long and it had to be a very easy and simple way to get the two to interact and collaborate and work together and generate value on both sides and I think that's what we've done we've made it easy for institutions to work with academia not only to improve the learning outcomes and provide new opportunities for students to learn but also create a way to increase student enrollment engagement and employability we are also featured on the open EDX marketplace in the US and work with universities in u.s. Singapore India and the UK and I think we have it we great if you guys can vote for us so that we can actually collaborate with just to do a lot more thank you thank to you Bianca and I don't you've got your slides Gemma but I don't you need them so Gemma from my future fantasy being the only ones with slides and I work in how could we beat you in the rugby there my name is Gemma I'm the founder of my future app and I can't show you unfortunately I got on my phone if you wanna chat later that's fine and in 2016 I left my career in teaching as a PE teacher and I retired from international rugby to create an app or to bring to life an act that my students so desperately needed part of my pastoral role was to provide Korea's provision and haven't been in education pretty much my whole adult life I hadn't kind of experienced the Korea's world so I realised just how frustrated firsthand the Korea's processes for young people we've got a generation of digitally native young people that want to do everything through their phones and we're still asking them to create Seavey's fill in application forms of filling online profiles endless amount of work to just try and find a part-time job or college course or apprenticeship I'm so seeing their frustrations firsthand and you know being quite frustrated with it myself I said right okay let's stop moaning about it how can we fix the problem I'm working with two and a half thousand young people in the South Wales Valleys we created them my future app I took to my future after the Welsh government and to create Wales I said here you go this is a solution this will help mobilize a generation towards employability and prosperity Welsh government said to me Oh a brexit Oh funding and we think it's a great idea but please go away he's scaring us so an opportunity for redundancy came up and I took it I left teaching I got a tech team together and so I know nothing about tech I got a team together I got as many young people as I can get in front of those who are going off to university and knew what they were doing right down to those who are in generational poverty who have no support at all maybe living in care try to create an app the solves a problem for everybody every young person so in a nutshell if you think tinder my future is tinder for Korea's for young people my vision is to get or every young person is seven million million of them right now that need to transition career-wise seven million young people using our app on sofas watching a football or in a in a bath lying in bed you know where they are they're on their phones to go swipe swipe swipe I've just applied for two apprenticeships and a job no paperwork no pens and we're gonna mobilize a generation towards employability thank you thank you Gemma and lastly but not least Rachel from uni for you the short person made all right now can you imagine getting yourself into 50,000 pounds of debt to study a course that you wish you've never studied be pretty stressful but every year over half a million seventeen and eighteen year olds in the UK are making decisions on university that they may or may not turn out to regret with that kind of debt attached to it it's a pretty expensive gamble I think you'll agree to make matters worse at works for me to make matters worse it's not that young people face a lack of information they actually face information overload they're facing a barrage of confusing and conflicting information from various sources they're looking at league tables of universities university rankings statistics gongs and accolades like raft F keV Russel groups things that to a 17 or 18 year old mean pretty much nothing really and as you can see there's also marketing very strong marketing from the lot of the universities these days and different messages from their schools from parents and so on so I'm Rachel Bergen and I'm co-founder of uni for you we're a startup based in Milton Keynes and we're addressing this problem by developing a personalized University matching system it uses a unique algorithm to match students to their ideal learning and social environments our founding team has over 30 years experience in the higher education sector and experience of software engineering last year we successfully secured some funding from the Department for Education to do some market and user research and to develop a prototype we actually co-created this prototype with groups of six formers in Milton Keynes and in Sheffield and they told us the kind of stuff that they really need we've built a prototype we've taken that to two users and tested that quite thoroughly with users and got really good constructive feedback on that so we're about to launch our product to the market this April this product will allow us to match students to their ideal universities based on things which actually matter to them as individuals so it could be that they play ice hockey or they're in a triathlon team it could be that they want to be within close distance of home it could be that they want to live on a campus it could be a variety of different things and it also takes into account their learning style their social interests their academic interests and their career aspirations and finds the right places for them this way they are more likely to choose the right University thrive at that University and then also into their future careers however our solution currently is quite manual and in many ways we have a small team of people but using our database and our matching algorithm compile personalized reports for the individual students so this is quite a manual process at the back end so we really keen on getting support from JISC and from others to help us to scale this product so that we can reach more students and we can help those students to make the right decisions we can offer it a lower price and we can offer it at scale and we can offer it to those students from more disadvantaged backgrounds through routes like their student pupil premium within schools and so on so with your support if you vote for us we can get the support from JISC to help us to reach more students so that those students are not taking an expensive gamble on their futures thank you very much yes lovely thank you very much Rachel okay so that was all the pictures the we will be announcing the companies that were going to take forward into our accelerator program this year just before the keynote at about 10:00 to 4:00 this evening it's afternoon okay so if you want to come along there and hear hear who's who's joining us who we work with the next year but can I just say a big thank you again to all of the companies have pitched we had we had a good entry this year we had about 20 or so entries companies that are looking really keen to get involved with this and with JISC so the ones we've got here today have already beaten a lot of others to get to the point way you've got to today to be shortlisted so thank you very much again

Channel: Jisc

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Id: 6ZCMEaGZK40

Length: 36min 44sec (2204 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2019