With 290 million kids out of school, coronavirus is putting online learning to the test | Children - Quartz

Jenny Anderson, senior reporter for Quartz in London reports, In late January, Priya Lakhani, founder of Century Tech, an AI-driven learning platform for schools, got a question from her team: Should they offer free access to Century—which typically costs thousands of pounds—to schools in China that had started to close as a result of the spreading coronavirus?

Photo: LFH in Italy.

“Without hesitation I said yes, go for it,” Lakhani recounts. “This is why we do what we do, and if we can help we should.”

A little more than a month later, the British-based Century is giving training and access to its platform, which combines neuroscience and AI to individualize learning, to 50 schools in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and the UAE. Lakhani says anyone who wants it can use it (even in the UK).

Each school using Century delivers, on average, 565 lessons each week...

What are kids doing?

Schools and teachers can be notoriously slow at adopting new technologies, in part due to a lack of confidence, but also due to skepticism about their effectiveness. A lot of tech has come and gone, most with few results to show for it. Many edtech companies build solutions to problems that do not exist in a classroom. Teachers also know kids are social learners—they respond well to humans.
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Source: Quartz