GoLearn is proud to announce that we have partnered with Blekinge Integration and Education (BIU) centre in Sweden; BIU is a tutoring programme that has developed a nationwide model for online educational tutoring.
Henrik Lövgren, Director of BIU heard about GoLearn and subsequently reached out to our team to arrange a meeting with our Founder, Alex Mirza, to see if we could help them digitally transform their upcoming summer school.
The summer school is run by BIU alongside Knut Hahn Upper Secondary School and the Ronneby municipality and offers English language and literacy tutoring for residents, migrants and refugees.
The fantastic work that BIU is planning for its tutoring students, the laudable work they are doing with refugees in the Ronneby municipality and how the integration of the GoLearn platform will help them reach their goals is the subject of this joint study.
Although Sweden features in the top ten list of PISA rankings, a recent report found a high proportion of boys in vulnerable communities are not being able to graduate to gymnasium and as such the study will have a much wider implication in being able to address language barriers by using data to understand how deep learning can be a continuous teaching and learning process.
About BIU Sweden
Over the last six years, Henrik and the BIU team have developed a nationwide model for educational online tutoring, providing support to students from seven years of age all the way through to adult students seeking higher education. Their mission is to raise the standard of English language/literacy teaching in Sweden; setting all students up for a brighter future.
Digital and remote learning methods are paramount to BIU as they connect students from all around Sweden with professional tutors who have the necessary language skills and the proper subject knowledge to provide a high-quality education to all tutees.
“Through digitalisation, we now have the opportunity to support all students and create both accessibility and equality throughout Sweden. Through its holistic perspective, BIU co-produces and delivers several services that directly create value for students and help them achieve their goals. We believe that this digital societal development has great potential and it will become increasingly important to try new ways to meet societal challenges.” – Stefan Bedin, BIU
Their Challenges
Sweden has long had a generous refugee policy, including a vast network of welfare benefits for asylum seekers. The Swedish Education Act states that all students in need of native language (Mother Tongue) tutoring have the right to receive it. As a result of this focus and priority, many students are beginning their learning journey at a basic level and consequently, the past few years have seen a rise in students failing primary English.
The municipality of Ronneby and BIU is no exception. BIU has been working to support local migrants and refugees to ensure that all in Ronneby feel welcome, safe and have access to a high-quality education — the ability to effectively communicate, make choices that benefit themselves, their families and the Swedish society at large.
To achieve this goal, real-time access to learning data is key and BIU is now looking to GoLearn’s teaching and learning solution to help them digitally transform their English teaching and to ensure a higher percentage of students pass their English classes.
The quality of learning data is important to ensuring evidenced pedagogies such as Metacognition and Self Regulation can effectively take place in the classroom. Therefore, learning data underpinned by pedagogical, learning, curriculum and assessment outcomes is necessary for a successful skills-based learning environment. The ability to use technology to collate this data continuously will accelerate outcomes for deeper learning.
“With assessment being the vital component of a quality education; the engine that drives student learning, a student undertaking any form of study will be subject to assessment in one form or another and all teachers will be engaged in assessment-related work including initial, formative and summative data. The process of collating formative assessment data can take up a considerable proportion of teacher workload, while for students, it can be a significant determinant of what, when and how they learn.” – Alex Mirza, GoLearn Founder/Chairman
How GoLearn Is Helping
GoLearn is an AI-based English Language & Literacy Continuous Assessment platform focused on improving skills-based learning and addressing curriculum and assessment outcomes.
Our pedagogically underpinned solution collates data on each learner to identify their unique strengths, and weaknesses so that teachers can address their skill gaps with better intervention to accelerate learning as well as provide deeper understanding.
“Continuous assessments are conducted when students are engaged in learning and are based on reflective teaching cycles, where data is collected continuously on each student’s (or group of students’) learning journey continuously. This continuity allows teachers to make on the spot decisions to improve their practice and looks a lot like formative assessments. Summative assessments are conducted at key points in the educational journey, and students are given a grade (that aims to) reflect the achievements they have made.” – Read our whitepaper on ‘Why Continuous Assessment Is Redefining Global Education’
GoLearn’s experienced curriculum team has created a full, bespoke learning experience for BIU with Continuous Assessment, which includes an initial assessment, two English lessons per day and a final assessment to review progress across the 4-week summer program. Each lesson is fully planned, resourced and tailored to the needs of the students to allow them to develop the key language and literary skills needed.
The English teachers and the tutors involved in the summer program attended a comprehensive platform training with our team to ensure they got the most from the platform. The platform has been developed by teachers with teachers in mind so whilst the training was in depth, we managed to cover a lot of ground in a short time. We also upskilled two technical staff members and provided extra training so they could manage the admin requirements at short notice and act as a 1st level support for the teachers if needed.
Anna Isaksson, Principal of Knut Hahn Upper Secondary School, said she has “high expectations” of how GoLearn can help BIU and Knut Hahn raise their English teaching and learning standards.
After the summer school, BIU will evaluate their experience, looking to fully integrate the GoLearn platform as an offering for Swedish state schools and tuition hubs. The GoLearn team looks forward to sharing our experiences in a case study in due course.
Looking beyond, we are also exploring how we can expand our relationship with Henrik and his team to support them in servicing other parts of the public sector and governmental agencies, civil sector, housing companies and health departments in Sweden and across Europe.
“All children should have the right to maximise their life chances and we’re excited to work with forward-thinking leaders at BIU, Ronneby and Knut Hahn Upper Secondary School to support them in ensuring successful outcomes for their students by providing access to quality learning data and intervention resources.” – Alex Mirza, GoLearn Founder/Chairman
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