Educate Online is a platform allowing international students to study at UK, US, and Canadian schools. All the study is done online, remotely, full-time or part-time, without having to move to another country and bear the related costs.

It’s now raised $4 million in Seed funding from Xploration Capital, TMT Investments, Flyer One Ventures, Softline, and Angelsdeck. Alexander Zheltov, co-founder and CEO of Educate Online, said:

“Educate Online was founded in 2018 and since then has placed more than 4,000+ children between the ages of 4-19 in top schools. After COVID-19 hit, we made a hard pivot to online education as we were seeing a surge of interest towards online education – in 2020 we grew 5.5 times and we expect to continue growing 3-5x year-over-year”.

The startup says it’s garnered 2,500 students from 18 countries, covering K-12 study, ESOL, career exploration, university preparation, and internship & mentorship programs In the past 12 months.

The platform also offers options for students to participate in on-campus summer or semester programs. It now plans to scale in LATAM, Asia, and the Middle East.

The programme will be suitable for students from grades one to 13 and almost 15,000 teachers in public schools across Jamaica will be also involved.

The programme was launched by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information on May 7, through a partnership with a software firm called Amber Innovations Group Limited.

The pilot programme was operated in about 20 schools where almost 2,000 students from grade four and grade nine were involved. For this complete rollout, Digicel, which is a telecommunications company, started a partnership with the Amber Group in order to co-sponsor the programme. During the virtual event, Holness said:

“Through the Coding in Schools Programme, (students) will acquire basic numeracy, language, and problem-solving skills, which are the prerequisites for coding. Too many of our students are leaving school without these basic functional skills.”

In his opinion there is a real hunger for coders as Jamaica seeks to become a digital society and quickly adapt to using technology in order to bring services to the population through virtual platforms.

“It takes coders to design the business processes, to deliver the services, to write the language…the algorithms, to instruct the machines to carry out the processes and that takes a special skill…that is not widely available here. But we are developing that skill, and the more of that skill that we develop, it’s the quicker we will be able to move to a digital society. Jamaica already has the building blocks to become the Silicon Valley of the region, such as proximity to the largest markets in the world. We have a creative, imaginative and young population and we now need to turn this into an asset. We need…the coders – they are the builders of the digital society,” he stressed.

In the Prime Minister’s opinion coding will give many opportunities to the children when it comes to information technology. Moreover, he thinks that they will learn how to problem-solve and how to think rationally. He also noted:

“These abilities, when developed at an early stage, will enable students to be more productive in the workforce and in their future careers.”

Holness revealed that he is pleased because the Amber Group will provide professional coders for children who will  educate them technically proficient. The Prime Minister also noted:

“The programme aims to educate more than 15,000 teachers at the primary and secondary levels. I encourage our teachers to embrace this. It is part of our transitioning into the fourth industrial revolution. Your jobs will be transformed in this way, and I urge you to take advantage of this opportunity in expanding your skill base.”

The Prime Minister rolled out the Coding Academy in January 2021, with a five-year goal of training 20,000 Jamaicans in software development to become software producers.

Housed at the Stony Hill HEART Academy in St Andrew, the establishment of the coding academy was facilitated through a partnership among Amber Group, the HEART Trust/NSTA, the Housing Opportunity Production and Employment (HOPE) Programme and the Art of Living Foundation.

Education market researchers HolonIQ reported that edtech companies received $16.1 billion in venture capital in 2020. A recent survey from Brighteye Ventures, Europe’s biggest edtech VC firm, said that European edtech funding is set to surge from $711 million in 2020 to $1.8 billion in 2021.

As part of Tech.eu’s Crossing Borders series on international expansion, we spoke to three European edtech startups about their scale-up stories, how they weathered the pandemic year, and how it has shaped expansion plans looking ahead.

How to game the education landscape

Poland-based learning platform Brainly, for one, has seen its monthly user base surge to 350 million today, from 150 million in 2019. Brainly, which enables students and their parents to get help on study assignments, is available to people from 35 global markets, including the U.S., India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia.

Felix Ohswald, cofounder and CEO of GoStudent, said the pandemic was a mixed bag at the start. He said:

“On the teacher side, from one day to another we had 4 times more applications simply because a lot of young people were looking for remote jobs … and providing online teaching is a pretty attractive opportunity.”

However, on the parent side, the team saw a decrease in search volume for tutoring services because there was less pressure in school and fewer regular exams, which in the end made it more expensive for the company to acquire new customers.

Post-pandemic edtech crunch

Vienna, Austria-headquartered GoStudent became Europe’s first edtech unicorn in June 2021, after raising a €205 million ($242.5 million) round that valued the company at €1.4 billion ($1.65 billion). The company is present in more than 15 countries and about to add Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Canada in the coming months, as part of its stated ambition to become the world’s No. 1 online school.

Building edtech into the curriculum

As a campus-based business, Ironhack expanded based on factors like the cost of renting teaching space, cost of living in the city, ease of hiring teachers and program managers, and the number of competitors. The competition and astronomical cost of space and living ruled out London, Baqués says.

The Ironhack playbook for assessing potential new markets includes analysis of demand for the types of job positions their graduates are being trained for, including projections on how many web developers, UX designers, and data analysts different cities will likely need in the coming years.

In a post on the Newsroom website, Apple is showcasing a number of schools, educators, and students in Australia who have used Swift to learn how to code. Swift is Apple’s open-source programming language that is now incorporated by developers in tons of apps on the App Store.

One of the stories Apple highlighted was TAFE Queensland, the state’s largest training provider. According to the article, the company will soon offer iOS app development with Swift training to students starting in October. The course was co-created between TAFE Queensland, Apple engineers, and educators.

Apple says that there are now 160,00 app economy jobs in Australia and that new jobs continue to increase at a rate of ten percent every year.

“Since the launch of the App Store in 2008, the iOS app ecosystem has been an engine of growth and among the fastest-growing sectors of the world’s economy. There are now close to 160,000 app economy jobs across Australia, a figure that’s been increasing by 10 percent every year since 2017. Today, there are nearly 2 million apps on the App Store, which has facilitated over $600 billion (US) in commerce in 2020 alone, while the sale of digital goods and services through the App Store has earned developers over $200 billion (US) to date.”