Innovation

CLANED provides a comprehensive digital learning solution with three crucial elements:

1. Learning design automation with analytical support which intuitively guides course creators to create highly engaging and effective online learning experiences

2. An intuitive and engaging UX that lets users interact and collaborate in context on all types of learning materials, such as highlighting, commenting, and note taking

3. Advanced learning analytics powered by AI for measuring progress and impact of learning on both an individual and organizational level, which is then linked directly to organizational KPIs

CLANED is a platform that can be used for any kind of learning at any scale. The platform is compatible with any device, software stack and content repository. Digital content can be used as learning material, such as webinars, videos, PDFs, etc. To further develop on this, CLANED is planning to raise €5 million from investors. The company offers fully digital sales and marketing, offering unlimited growth opportunities globally.

CLANED is a social learning platform that enables effective learning on any kind topic affordably, essentially democratizing education. Indirectly the impact of CLANED’s service can cover all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For example, it can be used as a platform to teach about responsible consumption and production.

CLANED has an intuitive online learning platform makes it easy for teachers to create courses and for learners to take them. All learning materials becomes interactive when they are added to the platform. For example, when a learner is going through a PDF, they can highlight any part of the text and post a public comment about it. This way the actual discussions can happen in context inside the materials instead of getting lost in a separate message board. The same goes for videos and other materials.

CLANED’s machine learning algorithms automatically collect data from every interaction that happens in the platform. So basically, it measures the current knowledge capital of learners and compares it to the strategic skills and competences needed in the future.

Inspiration

The company’s vision is to provide education to all those who find it difficult to access education whether it be due to lack of access or financial reasons. 75% of corporate training fails to create any measurable impact (Glaveski, 2019).

The inspiration for CLANED started from necessity. Digital learning has attempted to bring the classroom online. Unfortunately, traditional classroom training does not translate well to online learning, and corporations lack the skills to convert offline content to engaging and motivating digital media. CLANED provided a proven solution to these challenges, combining the best Finnish pedagogical know-how with modern technology and data analytics. CLANED has ranked higher than its peers, with a 4.5 rating vs. 4.0 and 4.2 of BlackboardLearn and Moodle, respectively (Capterra, n.d.). CLANED shows healthy customer metrics such as average retention of 98.8%, an LTV / CAC of ~20.5x.

Another key issue was that there was no easy-to-use platform for online education. “It usually involved a lot of installations”, says Vaalasmaa, CLANED’s Head of Learning Design. With platforms that required a lot of IT skills, setting up an online course was only accessible to those who either were IT professionals, or had capacity to buy their services.

When the founders noticed that no good existing platform existed, they decided it was better to build their own platform, that is how CLANED was born.

Overall impact

CLANED is a learning platform that is an easy to use and affordable learning solution which democratizes education. The impact of CLANED’s product could cover any of the SDGs. However, as an education platform, the impact mostly lies in the education sphere, i.e., the fourth SDG which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education.

By creating an intuitive and effective learning platform that combines insights on the psychology of learning, analytics, and engagement between students and teachers, CLANED is making learning accessible to all. Since their platform is inexpensive, effectively anyone with a good subject knowledge can create a course and spread information. This offers massive global expansion potential while keeping the expansion related costs moderate and margins high. CLANED has experienced a user growth of 118% in 2020, proving the increasing demand for an efficient and effective online learning platform.

The company has also increased the quality of education: analytics in the CLANED platform helps to pinpoint an issue that was causing students to drop a course. Their intelligent Digital Learning Environment and solution to directly measure learning impact on an individual and organizational level is a crucial feature of their innovation.

CLANED is designed to maximize the impact of online learning on both learners and institutional level. CLANED data identifies learners who need support, lack challenge, or contribute positively to the learning of others.

Business benefit

CLANED offers an online social learning platform that it is affordable to set up. Customers pay for the amount they want to use it and personalize the software rather than having a high initial cost for setting up a complex program. Having a low starting cost enables online learning opportunities for wide range of customers and business opportunities for experts whose skills and knowledge are not in IT. As such, the platform is used in developing countries like Kenya and India, at the same time, a multinational banking company Santander uses it to educate more than 2000 young entrepreneurs around the world. In 2020, the company had above €750k in revenues, of which approximately 66.3% was recurring, revenue has already crossed €1m in 2021.

The common feature of CLANED customers according to Vaalasmaa is that they want to do “things differently and especially utilize the social learning capabilities.”

As a result, CLANED’s revenue growth increased by 400% from 2019 to 2020 and is estimated to be over 150% from 2020 to 2021.

CLANED is a company that represent SDG 4, quality and better education for all, in its finest form. Currently only 4% of the market has been digitized so far and the educational technology market is estimated to reach $10 trillion by 2030 (Rivero, 2021). Better education can also be seen as a base for many other improvements in human and environmental well-being.

Social and environmental benefit

As an easy-to-use learning platform focused on social learning, CLANED’s main societal impact is in making education accessible for all. It thus directly contributes to the SDG 4, quality education, but indirectly also to, for example, goals 5, 9 and 10, that focus on reduced inequalities and decent work and economic growth. For example, education-focused businesses can use it to build their online courses, and students learning through CLANED are better equipped to come up with new innovations and business ideas. Education is also widely seen as one of the key approaches of reducing inequalities – gender and other – which is the focus of goals 5 and 10.

“Online learning makes education accessible for people, who would normally have difficulties in getting into it”, Vaalasmaa says.

SDG 4 stresses the importance of education to all, not just for those that are in formal education, but also, for example, for adult learners. As formal education does not reach everyone, it is important that small businesses, NGOs, and informal education institutions can use easy-to-access and easy-to-use learning platforms that provide good learning outcomes. Target 4.7 aims to ensure that “all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development”, which could be described as CLANED’s special strength. Making education more accessible, also the skills and knowledge needed to promote sustainable development can spread more widely. Overall, education, forming partnerships through social learning and innovating together, are bound to be in the centre of achieving any of the SDG Global Goals.

Interview

Teemu Vaalasmaa, Head of Learning Design