Innovation

Blinklearning, "a platform pursuing the improvement of education through digitalization", was founded in 2009 by Gonazalo Baranda (Founder & CEO), Joao Marques- Canas. This innovative business fulfills mainly the 4th UN Goal of quality education and the 15th UN Goal about the preservation of ecosystems, by providing a solution to paper books and instead digitizing them. This way paper is reduced and schools all around the world can have easy access to them from wherever they are.

Moreover, beyond Blinklearning providing only educational content, it is also an innovative tool for teachers to manage their courses programs and a new learning tool for students as well. Teachers can even track how the digital content is being used by the students. In other words, they can track the students’ progress through the platform, specifically in the “statistics” section of any course registered on blinklearning.

In fact, all courses registered on Blinklearning count with a resources section, a messages section, a calendar, a statistics section, and others. Also, the company offers a free “digital backpack” service where schools can choose all the books the students will need depending on their level so they can share a web link for their students to easily buy the digital content and license. Nonetheless, schools have to get the Blinklearning license in order to make their courses work through the platform.

However, the CEO highlights that none of this could be possible without the company’s focus on data analytics. Today, they track data from 3.5 million digital users which contributes to the Blinklearning data. As a result, they grow their experience and knowledge on users' needs and preferences that help them keep improving.

Inspiration

Gonzalo Baranda, the CEO and founder we interviewed, said that his main inspiration was looking at how technology has transformed many sectors worldwide and how it has made society grow. However, he noticed that one specific sector was lacking technological progress in education. Therefore he saw an opportunity to take advantage of technology to improve education worldwide, which he is very interested in growing. “There were many possibilities of taking advantage of all the technology to improve education,” Mr. Baranda, Founder of Blinklearning.

Apart from Gonzalo’s interest in spreading accessible education, he had a focus on teachers. He believed that giving a tool to teachers which are the ones who know the students, would be the key to improve teaching and learning methods. Actually, he and his partners thought about including tutorial videos or training webinars where teachers could access materials in order to know how to use the platform. Also this new initiative would make the educators and students to be more motivated, since the new way of digital learning would be more attractive and interactive.

Mr. Baranda also noticed the necessity of improving education mostly in countries from Latin America where there are places where quality of education lacks. Mr. Baranda shows his motivation behind this in the interview: “It is very gratifying to see how good these digital contents are accessible to people who did not have it before”. Therefore, Gonzalo also thought of developing a technology system that would make the platform work offline and online, and in different devices, in case schools don’t have the opportunity to buy tablets or others.

Overall impact

BlinkLearning has several innovative attributes, and for that BlinkLearning also makes a big impact to the world. For example, BlinkLearning wants teachers without great technological knowledge to take advantage of technological upgrades such as digital learning. By using BlinkLearning, teachers could easily spread knowledge through technology.

Now, BlinkLearning is working on data tools to be able to give teachers value-added data. If a student has a problem because he does the exercises much slower than the rest of his classmates and consistently poorly over time, BlinkLearning will help using the data at the public level so that better educational policy decisions can be made, such as detecting school failure early on. In other words, there is a fairly large field of innovation which is quite impactful to the teachers and students.

BlinkLearning develops solutions to improve education, so that students can learn more and better. Hence, what they develop are tools for teachers. This platform allows access to all digital and editorial content or the creation by teachers of their own digital content, to training teachers in digital skills or students in the correct use of technology or solutions of data to be able to track usage in digital projects. With over 3.5 million active users, it allows them to keep innovating and make a better education especially in the digital world.

Business benefit

BlinkLearning dedicates its focus to education that makes them know the school world quite well. The world of school is divided by the age of the students. For example, a university student requires different learning objectives than a student in a primary school. So, the level of interactivity of the books required in primary school is much higher because capturing students' attention is more complicated. With these various sections, BlinkLearning can gather users from all ranges of students.

Blinklearning was created thirteen years before the iPad was born thus they have access to a lot of information. They have access to information from schools in more than 60 countries, with the help of local offices in eight places and more than 100 editorials partnered to Blinklearning. As a result, Blinklearning counts nowadays as an international business with around 200 employees making the company’s objectives possible. Looking at what they have done so far and their compatibility with iPad, Android, Chromebook, Mac, Linux, Windows and Android and IOS Mobiles, BlinkLearning has a big chance to keep collaborating with more publishers and schools, and expand to other countries.

In addition, BlinkLearning has won the first major public project with schools to digitize all public schools in Extremadura, Spain. BlinkLearning is the first large white label platform with users in it, it has users in more than a hundred countries. This gives BlinkLearning opportunities to keep gaining experience for their business progress.

Social and environmental benefit

BlinkLearning focuses on improving education. It means that education is important because it helps students to get the best out of themselves. The objective is a bit about how technology can get the most out of their potential and give the tools as people are the ones that get the best out of themselves. The owner said: “I see it every time I go to a school and I see all the possibilities that technology offers, that is, from what I was telling you about simple things like how you can teach languages, using audio videos, gamification elements that serve to motivate students.”

Moreover, since the platform uses data analytics to create statistics for teachers and track students’ progress, it also helps to detect indicators of very common disorders such as ADHD and Impulsiveness. As a result, the company helps society to pay attention to these disorders that may affect the student’s learning or development in their studies. In addition it is important to remark that with the help of more than 130 editorials partnered to Blinklearning, an impact on paper reduction is done. Since all these editorials agree to digitize their books, they let Blinklearning fulfill its objective of spreading them worldwide.

By using BlinkLearning, students and teachers can take advantage of this service. It is very gratifying to see how good these digital contents are accessible to people who did not have before. With all of these impacts and innovative ideas, hopefully, people would notice more about this online learning platform.

Interview

Gonzalo Baranda, Founder and CEO