What are the benefits of using a digital platform for employee training ?

There is no longer any organization that doesn’t offer its employees flexibility and encourage collaboration. That’s why they need the right tools for the job.

Old-fashioned training took place over one or two days of face-to-face sessions. For learners, the experience could be intense, but the anchoring could be unsatisfactory. Messages were quickly forgotten. For the trainer, some of the training sessions repeated theory, and time was therefore poorly spent. Mobilizing all these people meant that organizations had to spend a lot of time and effort on project management, which was costly in terms of euros and CO2 emissions.

Glowbl makes it possible to organize innovative and engaging distance learning formats without mobilizing employees for days on end. Distance learning doesn’t have to compete with face-to-face training ! It is perfectly possible to complete a blended course, i.e. a course that uses several modalities and takes place over a long period of time.

For example, Legrand has set up a course for its distributors as follows: launch of training on Glowbl. This session is designed to gather information on the maturity of participants’ knowledge, to create a cohort and to prepare both the e-learning course and the face-to-face session. Group and individual tutoring sessions are then organized on the platform.

We also offer collaborative workshop templates, in particular Codev (or action learning) workshops. These are very powerful workshops for solving complex situations, usually involving emotional intelligence, between peers. These workshops are increasingly used in organizations. Doing them remotely means you don’t have to mobilize more time than is strictly necessary for the workshop… provided you have the right solution. In the age of hybrids and tight schedules, this is a real benefit.

What are Glowbl’s next projects ? How do you see the rise of AI ?

We do about one release a month. The next one is in July, and it’s more than a release, it’s a new experience. With a single click, it will be possible to switch from the workshop experience to the plenary experience. We’re reproducing the experience of a seminar space, where people alternate between working in sub-groups and in plenary sessions, seated around work tables.

As far as AI is concerned, it’s obviously a subject under study! We’ve already got lots of ideas, and we’re starting brainstorming workshops this summer. We will also be prioritizing a data management interface for our users. Login data is already available, and we’re looking forward to showcasing further elements in the coming months.

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What impact do Myfuture’s activities have on the inclusion of young people/students in difficulty ?

We focus our efforts in particular on young people who have fewer opportunities than others to access training and employment : those living in priority neighborhoods or rural areas, by offering them formats that are adapted to their location (mobility is a major obstacle to equal opportunity), by giving them privileged access to a large base of companies, and by offering them enhanced follow-up of their search for internships.

You are supported by the Banque des Territoires. What are the next steps in the project’s development ?

We’re rolling out our program in new regions: Bourgogne, Franche Comté, Occitanie, Auvergne Rhône Alpes, etc., to ensure complete national coverage. We are also diversifying the discovery formats we offer to students, teachers and professionals, in particular by proposing the organization of in-class meetings or company visits.

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To conclude on this subject, I’d say that the American market is very tempting, for many good reasons, but you need to go in prepared, with a substantial budget to launch operations locally.

American investment in the EdTech sector is on the rise ($8.3 million in 2021 versus $2.3 million in 2019 and 2020). Does this have an impact on competition in the French market ?

The COVID period highlighted the contribution made by EdTech and enabled establishments to continue or even expand their activities. This spotlight has attracted the curiosity of investment funds around the world to our sector.

On the other hand, as we all know, access to these sources and the amount of funding is far greater across the Atlantic. When a French EdTech raises 2 or 3 million euros, its American competitor raises 50 or 60. The promise they make to their new shareholders is often to go out and “conquer the world”, burning through the freshly-raised capital fast and furiously.

As a result, they are entering or strengthening their presence in certain markets, such as Europe of course, with very aggressive strategies, as they need to show rapid growth in sales / number of customers / number of users, depending on their business models.

From my personal experience at UbiCast, I’ve been observing this with some dread over the last few quarters. In a series of invitations to tender in the Netherlands, we lost out on the Price part of our evaluations, whereas we were fully in the running on the Technical part. Quite honestly, I get the feeling that they’re “buying” customers at a loss… In our field of video in higher education, the operating costs of the service are not negligible: we host large volumes of data, we transcode the videos, which requires a lot of machine time, and the broadcasting is done to large audiences, implying substantial bandwidth costs. So when a university with 30,000 students producing and broadcasting several tens of TB of video per year is offered a contract at €15,000 per year, I grab my calculator and don’t understand how it’s possible.

Most recently, it went a step further when I learned that a group of 12 schools in France had been offered a platform for each school, free of charge and unlimited for a year… At UbiCast, we can’t afford to do that. That’s why I wrote a rant on social networks, which I don’t usually do. But this time, frankly, I was exasperated. I received around forty comments, which proves that we’re not alone in this type of experience.

In a year’s time, this company will be offering them a nice quote, and since it’s already in use, the solution will have been integrated with the other tools, the teaching staff will have been trained, so why on earth change the solution, even if the price is deemed too high ?

It’s difficult for a foreign company to penetrate the French market without a local office and employees. So, armed with their new funding, these American EdTech companies are playing with their resources and setting up a representative office, usually in London. But is this a response to the needs of the French market?

For my part, I invite French higher education establishments to evaluate the various offers they receive impartially and over time.

Above all, I suggest that they be attentive and vigilant on the GDPR front by not taking everything they’re told at face value. The GDPR is one of the only barriers protecting us in Europe, so let’s use it !

When an American company operates its services in an American Cloud, including one located in Europe, from offices in London, well all the lawyers in the sector will explain to you that this is incompatible with the Schrems II ruling of the European Court of Justice.

We’re not lucky enough to have a Buy European Act, or a Small Business Act in Europe, so let’s at least try to favor companies of integrity that genuinely respect the legal framework and manage personal data ethically.

What role are governments playing in the rapid development of EdTech sectors in different countries ? What’s happening in France and Europe ? Is the EdTech sector supported by strong public initiatives ?

Recently, the U.S. Department of Education expanded the definition of a third-party service provider for schools, and promised penalties if the provider company isn’t American or American-owned (source). Personally, I call this protectionism.

On a completely different note, in China, the government banned the use of companies to provide tutoring services, thereby wiping out a $260 billion market overnight… The result was the downfall of some of the sector’s biggest companies. (source)

Here in France, we have set up an association, EdTech France, which brings together 450 companies in our sector, and which aims to make our voices heard more loudly and clearly by the highest authorities. The association is itself a member of the European EdTech Alliance, which federates the various national associations in Europe.

On the public authorities’ side, we welcome the explicit invitation to establishments responding to the DemoES call for expressions of interest to co-construct their response with EdTech. In practice, however, not all relationships between establishments and EdTechs have gone according to plan, in terms of the distribution of funding. But the political will to do so is commendable, and should be pursued. The big advantage, in my opinion, is the possibility of speeding up and directing EdTech R&D towards the needs expressed by schools in the field, via public funding. We French EdTechs are extremely enthusiastic about the idea of hiring locally in France, financing doctoral students and transferring research with institutions. There’s no doubt that the needs addressed by these future solutions also exist in Germany, Belgium, Italy and Spain, and that our EdTechs will be able to disseminate their new solutions, expand and promote French know-how beyond our borders !

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But given that the investment itself comes from predominantly male business angels and funds with teams lacking in diversity, is this situation surprising ? Not really.

Aside from a concern for equity, which alone should motivate change, the following observation supports it in my view: women represent the majority of teachers (up to 75% in schools⁴), and consequently a significant proportion of our users. What gender bias are we allowing to influence the products they use?

To sum up: has being a woman been an advantage for me ? No. Should it be ? No. Nor should it. My gender should be neither an advantage nor another obstacle in my journey. But for this to become a reality, we all still have work to do.

Flowchase is an application designed to improve pronunciation when learning English. How is your solution used by teachers and students ?

Exactly. Flowchase is a spin-off from a Belgian university research project (at UCLouvain). Our learning experience has therefore been designed by applying research in linguistics and pedagogy, following a model known as the “flipped classroom”.

This is a tried-and-tested learning method for teaching with digital tools such as Flowchase, which deliver tenfold learning results thanks to the unlimited personalization and practice offered by artificial intelligence as a complement to training. This integrated digital approach makes perfect sense when teaching highly individual skills such as pronunciation and oral expression, where differentiated learning is necessary but difficult to implement effectively with human resources alone.

In practical terms, our mobile app comes with a manual of ready-to-use group activities, and our programs are designed to integrate seamlessly with teacher-led courses. Teachers can ask their students to familiarize themselves with the concepts of oral expression at home, before coming to class. This is done by completing quizzes, listening activities and practicing speaking in the app. When we record ourselves, the AI we’ve developed analyzes our voice, detects our mistakes and then gives personalized advice on how to improve. This first step is crucial, as it allows each learner to go at his or her own pace, and to train in his or her own comfort zone, away from the judgment of others that usually holds back the shyest.

Une fois en cours, les enseignant·es utilisent le manuel Flowchase pour mettre les compétences nouvellement acquises en pratique grâce aux activités correspondantes. Cette approche permet non seulement de gagner du temps de classe en ne devant pas expliquer la matière nouvelle et en passant directement à la pratique orale, mais elle permet également d’engager une utilisation systématique et régulière de l’outil par les étudiants·es, et de consolider les connaissances obtenues en multipliant les interactions productives avec la matière.

You currently work with a number of schools, both secondary and university. What are your plans for 2023 ?

For the moment, we’ve been working mainly with higher education in France, Belgium and Spain. This is where we have the greatest impact, training future graduates just before they enter the job market, where the language skills we provide will be an undisputed asset.

In 2023, at the request of our customers, we plan to expand our portfolio of learning paths to help our learners train with the most relevant content for their discipline. This includes, for example, the development of courses on soft skills (“How to give an excellent job interview”) or with specialized vocabulary (such as medical English, for example).

We’re also building on our momentum in higher education, and aiming to consolidate our presence in our partners’ countries as well as in other European countries such as the UK, where we’re setting up a program for the many international students preparing to study in English.

But you’re right: the secondary education sector has shown increasing interest in our solution from the outset, and we’re just starting to collaborate. We have just launched a pilot project involving 25 schools in France and Belgium, where the effectiveness of our tool in this context will be evaluated by Marie Dea, a pedagogy researcher from the University of Mons. If we’re going to revolutionize language training, we might as well start as early as possible!

¹ European EdTech Alliance. The European EdTech Map : Insights Report (January 2023)
² https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/senior-female-vcs-call-out-major-funding-disparity-in-europe
³ https://www.bcg.com/publications/2018/why-women-owned-startups-are-better-bet
⁴ https://www.holoniq.com/notes/the-2022-global-state-of-womens-leadership

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A malleable and adaptable interface, Memory enables you to accelerate your content creation strategy and enhance the value of all your content through a single, centralized and consolidated access via the most common integrations.

The aim is to innovate in terms of content distribution, community involvement and controlled access to the largest possible number of people.

For any educational establishment, this objective is enhanced by the ability to lose no trace of everything that has been conceived, written, produced and distributed, so as to be able to refer to it and use it as a knowledge base on which to build.

And to better understand Memory :

You tell a story to explain Memory, why the seahorse and the elephant ?

I often use the image of Memory tidying your room for you.

In fact, this analogy is correct, but the concept is more powerful. If you don’t clean your room, it works too, and that’s when it gets interesting and creates value for organizations, their members and their users. Memory gives you the ability to find what you’re looking for, very easily and very quickly, whether you’ve tidied your room or not. It’s not so much a question of tidying as of finding, of finding what might reveal what’s next. This is the path taken by the human brain, when it constructs the present and imagines the future based on what it already knows, what it has recorded from past life experiences.

The fable of the seahorse and the elephant helps us to illustrate the two major parts of the Memory concept, using their symbolism and history. On the one hand, the ability to automatically and intelligently index the depths of content and memory (for the hippocampus) and, on the other, to memorize all the paths to access it safely (for the elephant).

I take great pleasure in telling this story when I talk about Memory. It’s important when you’re speaking to be able to enjoy yourself. As a CEO with a creative background, I find this an original approach to talking about platforms, tech and data. Talking about a hippocampus and metadata in the same sentence, I can assure you that it makes an impression on the listener!

The elephants we met at Educ@Tech in November 2022

What are Memory’s plans for the coming years ?

Since the end of 2022, Sciences Po and I have been winners of the Paris Region Trophies for Digital Innovation in Higher Education. This has enabled us to accelerate large-scale, even very large-scale deployments, as well as to intensify the whole R&D part (machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence). 2023 and 2024 are important milestones for Sciences Po, and we’re very proud to be taking up these challenges with them.

Higher education establishments are well aware not only of the value of the content they produce, but also of the enormous value of being able to share it, distribute it and make it accessible to their community, or to as many people as possible for some. These are not only issues of ethics, conviction and access to education and knowledge, but also of communication and territorial impact.

In addition to these technical and ergonomic challenges, we take great care to do so in the most eco-responsible way possible. Environmental impact is at the heart of our decision-making criteria, and our serverless technologies enable us to achieve very low CO2 emissions and virtually infinite scalability. This is a major advantage for our development in France and abroad.

Content platforms have experienced unprecedented growth in recent years, largely thanks to the growing popularity of online content consumption. It is therefore imperative for us to create a unique user experience, and that the time we all spend searching for content on the internet or elsewhere, and the way we consume it, feed into our current accessibility and experience challenges for the future.

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When we hear My-Serious-Game we think of gamification of teaching, but you do many other things. Can you give us a few examples?

Specifically, we exploit the motivational levers of gamification, to reinforce commitment and memorization. We don’t try to make a serious training course fun, but like advertising, a smartphone game or a film, we seek the learner’s best attention, and use emotions and interactivity to increase its impact.

Serious-gaming is a simulator-like simulation that is highly effective today for supporting change and transformation, or for soft-skills training.

Most of our products are digital-learning contents that exploit the levers of gamification, as well as applications that coach/support change or reinforce learning through a routine (e.g. 3 minutes every day). Then there are serious games and new technologies such as virtual and augmented reality. We’re also seeing some great experiments in metavers, even if its development is still patchy, and we’re waiting for its meta… morphosis !

What are your projects for 2023 ?

Our priority is to contribute to the development of our sector: the strong acceleration of E-Learning after the crisis of 2008, and of Digital-Learning after that of 2020, has seen many players and many projects. Which ones are really effective? What are the real pedagogical impacts of these different solutions? Our world has been built empirically, and we need to build up a state of the art on the subject. This is the ambition of My-Serious-Game, which has started in 2019 with AFNOR by creating the first “digital training engineering” certification.

This will also involve consolidations and mergers, which we are looking into with other companies, in order to reach higher levels of maturity.

Secondly, we have hundreds of achievements in vocational training and numerous experiments, such as with the CNRS on learning mathematics; we are convinced that we can also make a contribution to initial and higher education, and have some exciting projects in the pipeline…

We also have strong convictions about gamification in terms of the form of future developments, and in terms of substance, we believe in the possibilities of adaptive-learning (the possibility of adapting content and its format to each learner, like a teacher in front of a class or a pupil), and collaborative learning (learning with, for or against someone).

Whatever the case, we hope to be able to bring pleasure to learning, to help collaborators or students in their development, and with all the great team that makes up My-Serious-Game. Here’s a sneak preview of one of our most meaningful projects, “Horizons”, created for E2C (École de la 2ème chance). Through a 15-hour adventure, each young person who has dropped out of school will be able to rediscover the desire to learn and discover a job that could suit them… You can download the white paper on our website : my-serious-game.com

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