For the 6th year, the World Learning Summit took place in Kristiansand during June 7-9, and, as you would expect, Nordic EdTech was on the agenda. Special thanks to Jannie Jeppesen (Swedish Edtech Industry), Hege Tollerud (Oslo Edtech Cluster) and Niko Lindholm (xEDU of Helsinki) represented the major Nordic edtech ecosystem players, and shared a plenary panel with me (that I moderated) on the Nordic edtech ecosystem. Jannie and Hege also co-hosted a few of the edtech track session of the conference.
The host of the conference, University of Agder (UiA), helped pick the overarching theme of the conference–Smarter Universities–and since 50-75% of Nordic edtech companies focus on K12, we realized that this was an unfortunate mismatch that probably helped keep many Nordic edtech companies away. We also realized that the length of the conference–3 days–was another contributing factor to holding the number of Nordic edtech companies down. Despite this, the edtech track sessions were interesting and had the usual active participation of those who joined the sessions.
If you missed the conference and the program, you can find it here, and if you want to see my plenary presentation (“Nordic EdTech: Vision, Evolution, Opportunities and Challenges”) you can see it here.Nordic EdTech_Conference Presentation