Social learning is crucial for educational technology, says Noon Academy founder

The coronavirus blockade changed attitudes towards educational technology (EdTech), accelerating its adoption within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as students tried to continue their online education.
Founded in 2013, Saudi-based Noon Academy has established its name together of the top prominent start-ups within the region’s educational technology landscape. Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, the start-up has gone from strength to strength, with its continued expansion beyond MENA after its recent pre-Series B investment of $13 million.

We met with Mohammed Aldhalaan, CEO and co-founder of Noon Academy, to find out about his perspective on the present state of educational technology and his predictions for the world in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

How has the crisis affected education technology within the region?

“Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, people didn’t rely entirely on digital learning, including buying it, so that they ultimately moved far away from them. However, the crisis has forced both parents and educators to start out accepting digital learning as a necessary solution to continue meeting the training needs of the youngsters.
Nonetheless, as a corporation, we’ve realised that the most critical problem with online education was that the experience itself wasn’t attractive to students, who find it boring and fewer lively compared to the offline classroom experience. That’s why we decided to redouble social learning and increase levels of participation among our student and tutor communities”.

“When the pandemic reached our region, we realised we were on the proper track. The crisis further amplified the necessity for teacher-student interaction, lively discussions and peer collaboration. We’ve seen that students are rejecting completely individual tutorials in favour of individual classes. I feel many new educational technology companies have neglected the human component of their digital learning solutions for a long time, and now it is time to start out taking it seriously”.

How much growth have you ever recorded in recent months?

“I believe that the foremost important milestone achieved in recent months was the new high-level hires at Noon Academy. We successfully attract the best talent from different technological backgrounds.
In terms of end-users, we’ve seen a seven-time increase in our active users thanks to the Covid-19 crisis. The number of registered users went up from 3 to 6 million. We are gaining high levels of participation in our platform.
We have noticed that students spend nearly 45 minutes each day on our platform, while social students spend about 78 minutes each day, five times the worldwide benchmark that’s 14 minutes. To satisfy this demand, we are channelling our energy towards creating more relevant and accessible social products. That’s why we established our office in London, trying to draw in people from companies like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram also as online gaming companies to spice up our social learning products”.

How are you competing within the markets you’re expanding to?

“We are trying to border ourselves as a social learning company, not as an online teaching company. For instance, there are more than 290 million students in India, of whom around 130 million are marketable. The overwhelming majority of them are studying in their regional languages, while only 14/16 million students in English. This last segment finds itself in a targeted market whereby well-established online teaching companies have their eyes on. We couldn’t get good results as an online teaching company within the competitive tutoring landscape. As a result, we are going to become hyperlocal in order to attract new clients to our platform by focusing on automated digital classes with interactive social learning”.  

“We aim to make more accessible for the teachers to teach by utilising our virtual tools so that they can teach their ways by enabling them to create their own classes, upload the teaching material and start teaching straight away without even our permission. This is often how we approach the Indian market and believe that by keeping our business strategy, we will be able to get and win the global markets”.

What have you in mind for next year?

“We are looking to expand to the EU and US markets during 2021 and shut another round of investment by mid-2021, and we’ll also launch social products like virtual schools”.

How do you see the development of educational technology in your market?

“Options are still limited for EdTech in our region. We saw that educators have been utilising apps like Zoom and Google Classrooms, which, I think,  aren’t designed for educational or instructional purposes.
I believe that EdTech will evolve and develop in the coming years and more companies will land on the market; the question is how the situation is going to change after COVID-19 and what role will play the EdTech in the classrooms”.

Pic source: Menabytes