CLANED Meets The Crowd

In ‘X Meets The Crowd’ I talk with entrepreneurs in the middle of their equity crowdfunding campaign. What’s the story behind their project? What are they looking for in an investor? Why do they think they stand out and what do they offer investors? Find out everything you want to know here, on our HelpTheCrowd Blog.

Finland has one of the best educational systems in the world. And yet, the Finnish keep renewing it radically. Digital is the way to go it seems. CLANED is the most recent example of this, it’s the ultimate combination of pedagogy and technology; exactly that has made the Finnish system flourish. Vesa Perälä, Founder of CLANED, on the ‘Facebook of Learning’.

HelpTheCrowd. Tell me, how exactly does CLANED work? For example, do students select a subject-matter they have to study and then get presented different ways of learning more about that topic?

Vesa Perälä. First of all, students own their CLANED account. It can be linked to any number of organisations during the lifelong learning journey of the individual.

CLANED provides all the tools a student needs on an every day basis: one can read, write, watch videos, highlight, make notes, chat, plan, collaborate with others, post questions etc. Everything in CLANED encourages collaboration as this has been proved to trigger learning.

In addition, CLANED learns to understand how the individual student studies by analysing all interactions between the student and the content, as well as other students and teachers. These unique insights are send back to the student as concrete recommendations of additional or alternative content, study buddies and mentors.

In brief, CLANED is a social-media-like personal learning environment powered by artificial intelligence. 

Students can study any subject in CLANED. They can be invited to see materials by for example their schools or create material (notes, upload interesting articles, group assignments etc.) themselves. They can also follow others and very soon sell and buy self-generated education materials on CLANED Market Place.

CLANED builds personalised learning paths (recommendations) to students and thus optimises their study motivation and improves learning results.

HTC. How do students find out about CLANED, how do you plan on ‘spreading the word’?

VP. Since December 2015, we have been selling CLANED to organisations (schools, municipalities, universities, corporations, non-profits). We will start the direct student/user acquisition campaigns once our native mobile apps and market place are ready in Q3/2016.

We will definitely use social media campaigns, co-operation with student unions and organisations and our partners (Microsoft, Telefonica, Lenovo, to name a few) to boost the growth. Organisations will of course be able to provide CLANED to their students/employees as well.  

HTC. Who provides the content for CLANED?

VP. Content can come from practically any digital source. Organisations often use their own content on CLANED but it can also come from any commercial content provider, be self-generated by students and teachers or CLANED can recommend it from any source on the Internet we can automatically index (such as Wikipedia, YouTube etc.). We are also developing partnerships with large content providers to serve our users best.  

HTC. What’s your favourite CLANED feature?

VP. I personally like our video commenting features a lot. One can watch for example a YouTube video on CLANED, pause it at any point, comment on that particular part of the video and thus create a collaborative learning session where peer students and teachers participate if they wish to do so. We have a dance school for instance, using CLANED because of this particular, very contextual, learning feature.  

HTC. You mentioned 5 previous exits, what were your biggest lessons?

VP. Go global as soon as possible. Focus on building an exceptional team, ensure you have the financial strength to grow (always be raising funds), and everything happens slower than expected (R&D especially), so make sure you fail fast and iterate/pivot even faster. 

HTC. What help our guidance did you get from your crowdfunding platform?

VP. I’m a pretty experienced ‘crowd-funder’ as I have raised over 5M€ using it over the last three years. Invesdor has been very helpful and created the campaign together with us. 

HTC. In what way could investors help you reach your goals?

VP. Most of all by investing in us. Education is a great and smart investment area as all individuals, organisations and nations need it. Any investor could also be our customer and can recommend us to someone they know. Crowdfunding and education is a perfect match!

HTC. Anything else you’d like to mention?

VP. Finland has one of the best education systems int he world but we are still renewing it radically. CLANED is the ultimate combination of pedagogy and technology, which has made the Finnish system flourish. We have excellent traction and customer feedback and will be the Facebook of Learning. 

Originally posted on HelpTheCrowd.com:
https://helpthecrowd.com/blog/claned-meets-the-crowd