IDEA Digital Education hopes to become a global competitor shaking up educational systems through the creation and development of scalable disruptive digital education solutions independent of infrastructure.

The group believes the current ‘brick and mortar’ educational approach is no longer adequate, scalable enough or able to solve Africa’s growing education challenges.

Speaking to Engineering News, founder and CEO Corrin Varady explains that the company has created a digital interactive solution, across all grades, that is aligned to the national syllabus requirements and allows teachers to present and facilitate while also allowing students to undertake self-direct learning.

The company was established in 2015 to create and deliver science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, subjects in a digital format to primary and secondary students across Africa and the Middle East.

It now aims to prove its model of interactive, data-driven, digital software with content and games for students, parents and teachers.

“Technology is a fantastic tool that I do not think we always get right. [However], we are constantly learning and we have an opportunity, as infrastructure becomes a thing of the past, for education,” he explains.

“We can solve global educational problems with a South African solution. We have delivered a South African product and an East African product. Now we can deliver a very global product with our team,” he says, highlighting the potential of a global educational brand and concept that has been rooted, piloted and proven in Africa.

Pupils’ need for access to resources such as classrooms, textbooks and libraries, and teachers’ need for content mastery and continued training have remained persistent challenges in South Africa’s attempt to provide equal educational opportunities for children.

“Given that we are headed into a future where infrastructure and connectivity are improving daily, we can comprehensively look at the role digital tools can fulfil for both teachers and students.”

While mass support for teachers becoming content masters is not viable, enabling them to change their role in a classroom and develop into learning facilitators is a start.

“Hardware and the Internet are not solutions on their own, but they provide a gateway to how schoolchildren can more democratically get access to interactive, feedback-driven and learning- level-appropriate content in a model where they can be self-directed learners,” Varady continues.

It is really about changing the model and proving a scalable, effective educational model.

In the schools where IDEA has deployed its solutions, there has been extraordinary uptake, with “immense” results.

In the primary school space, student outcomes’ improved by 25% and, in the secondary school, improvement rates of 35%were recorded for students using the product regularly.

The solution is currently deployed across South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania.

In South Africa, the group boasts 257 000 students using the product for an hour daily and 5 500 teachers are active on the platform.

IDEA has a local subscriber base of 1.4-million and has ambitions of translating this into 1.5-million active users by next year.

Globally, the group is aiming for 20-million users in five years.

Varady further reports a 1 000% increase in uptake in Western Cape public schools over the past term with the Western Cape Education Department’s (WCED’s) support.

This followed a successful test pilot by the WCED over the past two years at selected schools.

An offline version, also providing feedback-orientated, data-driven, dynamic media content, has been developed as Internet access is not yet universal, particularly in rural regions.

However, he says it is less about devices and more about the content delivered on these devices.

“We have to try to solve the content knowledge and [build a] foundation in technology [before] learning to innovate with technology.”