N8 Summary 2021

by | Feb 1, 2022 | Uncategorized

How better to conclude our 2021 summary series than by sharing the Nordic EdTech Forum’s accomplishments. Big thanks goes to our 2021 board – Märt Aro, Peter Fagerström, Jonathan Viner, Sari Hurme-Mehtälä, Ginvile Ramanauskaite, Maria Rahamägi, our project manager Petra Kucharova, and all of your members and supporters! Thanks to all of you, we managed to grow our community to 200 members last autumn and achieved the following:

Last summer, we helped to launch the European EdTech Alliance. The European EdTech Alliance was co-founded by N8 to bring the voice of the education innovators to the highest policy making level in Europe as decisions legislation made in Europe are important for many Edtech startups. Decisions made on EU level can support or work against innovation of education. As a positive example we can bring that we have established a dialogue with the European Commission and in cooperation a joint memorandum for developing the European EdTech ecosystem is being drafted. As an intervention example from our side, EC has proposed to regulate AI and in the first draft we saw that education seemed to be fully considered as a “high risk” sector for using AI, which is of course absurd and would be a big hindrance for using AI for improving learning experience. So we made our proposals for the document and hope the text will be amended.

Märt Aro represented the N8 at:

  • Forum Alpbach, meeting with Austrian ministries and EdTech Austria
  • Dubai Expo and Dubai One TV meetings with European Commissioner of DG EAC Mariya Gabriel
  • Meeting with Lithuanian Ministry of Education and EdTech Lithuania
  • Meeting with Estonian Ministry of Education and contributing to the development of EdTech

Estonia N8 also participated in the further development of the EduStack concept. Together with colleagues from the United Nations we drafted the vision for education innovation ecosystem development and have been working to fulfil this vision. This has brought us behind the table of many national and international organisations.

We had a lovely meeting with the Helsinki Education HUB. As background information we are happy to add that the Helsinki HUB is the first HUB that has been built implementing the concept that N8 board members Peter Fagerström and Märt Aro drafted in 2018 as per agreement with the Estonian Minister of Education and Research. Our aim is to support creation of more similar HUBs for improving the EdTech ecosystem. See the vision here.

N8 has become a partner in two Erasmus+ projects in 2021. Our first project focuses on the mental health wellbeing of entrepreneurs (Entre-MWB) and the second one on English language teachers and their abilities to work with digital technologies (Englife).

N8 lunch in Helsinki – N8 organised a meetup lunch at the Helsinki Education Hub restaurant that took place before the XcitED 2021. We had members participating from most of our member countries. We also organised a well-being presentation for the XcitED pre-program together with Velbi, a company preventing burnout. Together we conveyed the importance of mental health wellbeing of entrepreneurs and shared the progress of the Entre-MWB Erasmus+ project. And finally, we assisted with organising and hosting the Global EdTech Startups Awards – Nordic & Baltic semifinal 2021.