Innovation in digital education was celebrated this week at the second annual Wharton-QS Stars Reimagine Education awards, presented this week at a gala dinner held in downtown Philadelphia.
Osmosis won the overall award at Reimagine Education. Photo: The PIE NewsThe top prize was scooped by e-learning project, Osmosis, from Johns Hopkins University, which provides resources for students studying medicine around the world.
“It’s a real honour to be in this environment in the first place”
The programme analyses content taught in class and provides the learner with personalised resources using memory science techniques.
Caleb Furnas, director, user growth and experience at Osmosis, told The PIE News that he didn’t register the win at first. “It’s incredible. It’s a real honour to be in this environment in the first place.”
Osmosis was awarded a $25,000 prize, which Furnas said would enable the company to build more content and expand in size.
“We have to make this into a business that sustains itself whilst doing as many cool things in the world that serve a lot of people,” he said.
“So we’re trying to figure out how to do the former and then we’ll get to the latter, and maybe winning this competition will let us do the latter quicker.”
In addition to the main prize, an Overall EdTech Award was given to feedback platform, Kaizena, which also received $25,000.
There were 560 applications submitted to the awards this year from 45 countries.
The shortlisted projects were judged by 35 education stakeholders around the world, based on four criteria: approach, engagement, impact and scalability.
“Anything to win has to be strong in all those areas,” Nunzio Quacquarelli, managing director of QS, told The PIE News.
“I think the actual winners are probably the ones that have a little bit more maturity and can demonstrate engagement and impact.”
Awards were presented in 10 categories, including hybrid learning, teaching delivery and educational app.
Regional awards were also given to the best projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Canada & USA, Middle East and Oceania.
Full list of Wharton-QS Stars Reimagine Education Awards winners:
Overall Winner – Osmosis: Knowledge Diffusion (Johns Hopkins University, United States)
Overall EdTech Award – Kaizena (Kaizena, Canada)
E-learning Award – Osmosis: Knowledge Diffusion (Johns Hopkins University, United States)
Hybrid Learning Award – learning.futures: a strategy for learning transformation at University scale (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
Presence Learning Award – Seeing the light: the SpecUP educational spectrophotometer (University of Pretoria, South Africa)
Teaching Delivery Award – A method for enabling innovation learning (Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, Chile)
Learning Assessment Award – Cognii Virtual Learning Assistant (Cognii, Inc., United States)
Nurturing Employablity Award – Spoken Tutorial (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India)
Educational App Award – Multi-Platform English Learning with the Natural Method (American & British Academy – ABA English, Spain)
Digital Content Award – Science Bits (International Science Teaching Foundation, United Kingdom)
ICT Tools for Learning and Teaching Award – Kaizena (Kaizena, Canada)
ICT Support and Services Award – Watson@Deakin (Deakin University, Australia)
K12 Award – Smart Robot Coding School (SK Telecom, South Korea)
