InstAcademy: connecting informal learning spaces

Cohere Learning Ltd plans to launch its new cloud-based platform InstAcademy, connecting the learning that happens at home, in the community and at school. InstAcademy enables any student and parent of young children to find the learning opportunity in any place and moment and connects this to the formal learning in a classroom through 'just-in-time' tutoring.

The InstAcademy platform connects learning in classrooms to the learning that happens everywhere, everyday, such as in museums, galleries, parks and play centres, on football pitches and in Girl Guiding groups. InstAcademy enables teachers to understand their students' interests in relation to their local places and communities and bring this into the classroom for meaningful, regional and personally, immediately relevant learning. It enables parents to understand how they can support their childrens' school learning while visiting a museum or playing in a park. It enables pupils to share what is meaningful to them and for this to be included in classroom learning, making school lessons more relevant and engaging.

The learning data generated will enable informal educators and institutions to understand how participants engage with their activities, events, objects and spaces in relation to their formal learning experiences. Post encounter data will evidence how a user/visitor experience in one place is seen as related to other spaces or the same space at a different time. This can in turn inform targeted learning design for regional, organisational and individual learning objectives as well as informing lesson planning in schools and formal education settings.

This project will develop a bank of the explanatory 'connective content' that our platform enables, which can be used to support learning and parental engagement in their learning of curricular concepts, with a particular focus on STEAM subjects. This will evidence the value of this content to parents, tutors, child minders and other informal educators and build on existing evidence of the value to teachers. The project will also enable us to effectively design AI image recognition and geolocation into the platform development roadmap, through better understanding of how users engage with the connective content.

Cohere and the InstAcademy prototype was set up by Dr Amanda Banks Gatenby and Dr Sara Jackson who are STEAM Lecturers in Education, both passionate about making learning meaningful for all students by engaging communities beyond the classroom.