The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people to transform how they live, work, and communicate in a matter of weeks. It has reordered social dynamics across all sectors—including education. With classes suspended for the forseeable future, students are now forced to put learning on hold.
“We need to make sure education does not stop,” said Raphael Francis Quisumbing, Chief Technology Officer of Edukasyon.ph, an education technology start-up in the Philippines. “During this time, young Filipinos can pursue e-learning opportunities and process their applications through Edukasyon.ph.”
Since launching in 2015, Edukasyon.ph became the largest youth platform in the Philippines—averaging over 10 million visitors per year. Through the website, students gain access to schools, scholarships, online education, and guidance and advice through content.
As social dynamics shift amid COVID-19, technology will play an even bigger role in defining the way students learn in the future. “Now more than ever, we need to continue engaging our students by exploring alternative learning channels,” said Quisumbing.
Prior to COVID-19, education was always associated with a physical school. While alternative modes of delivery have been cropping up in recent years, the global pandemic has highlighted the need for other channels to pursue learning, like distance learning and e-learning.
For its part, Edukasyon.ph has partnered with the world’s leading online education providers to relaunch its dedicated online education platform that connects students to a collection of curated online courses, with the aim of upskilling students in high-demand fields such as graphic design, coding, and digital marketing. Students can find top courses offered by world-renowned providers such as edX, Coursera, Codecademy, Futurelearn and Udemy on the platform.
There has likewise been a spike in online inquiries from Filipino students during the quarantine period. “We have actually seen a 25x increase in online student inquiries on Edukasyon.ph. These are mostly regarding school calendars, applications, admissions, enrolment, and the like. Our goal is to be there for students during this time of uncertainty, through direct support and by connecting them to our ecosystem of 700+ school partners and 50+ corporation and foundation partners.” Quisumbing added.
Powering education through the cloud
According to Quisumbing, Edukasyon.ph was able to grow in a very short period of time, because of their partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). “As a start-up, we needed a technology partner that would help us maximize our resources to scale efficiently and quickly,” he said.
Edukasyon.ph is part of AWS EdStart, a program that can help EdTech startups in the Philippines to move faster to build innovative solutions to solve education-related needs and bring creative solutions that can address the challenges in the education system. It is the educational technology startup accelerator of AWS, focused on innovative teaching and learning technologies that create positive student outcomes.
The EdStart program makes it easy for early-stage EdTech companies to find the resources and relationships they need to be successful. It is a community of like-minded people and companies who seek to solve complex education problems globally. There are two tiers in the comm, the innovator tier and the member tier. Edukasyon.ph belongs to the latter, meaning they are at the stage of advancing their business, driving further innovation, and growing their footprint.
“By building our company through the cloud, we are able to democratize student access to schools and other learning channels. It’s this information that will help them create and shape their own paths, as they discover the opportunities available to them,” said Quisumbing.
Additionally, Edukasyon.ph is offering free cloud-based services to educational institutions, powering admissions, marketing and pre-enrolment during this challenging time. This allows schools to stay connected with their students, allowing them to process online applications, upload profile information, as well as answer student questions in real-time.