Abstract:

As far as we are concerned, the 1st of the great Internet revolutions was access to content: the possibility of finding anything we may wish to online. We may take this for granted now but barely 15 or 20 years ago, there was no way to find a website about which we had no direct references. Either somebody had told us about a website or it simply did not exist.

This change came about thanks to a number of protagonists, with Google being one of the key players. Google gave us the opportunity to find anything that we are interested in, all in a single place, through a list of results that is ranked by relevance and adapted to our needs. Since the emergence of Google, we no longer need to know references to find content. Instead, one single reference (Google) is enough to access any content we may desire.

The 2nd great revolution was the dissemination of content or how the content reaches us. This revolution came hand in hand with the rise of the social networks. We do not search for any content in particular on such sites but we are constantly informed about songs, restaurants, articles and so on that we have never requested. In addition, everything that we receive is of interest to us because it reaches us through people with whom we have certain things in common.

That is what the Internet is nowadays: a way or many ways of accessing contents and an equally diverse tool for disseminating contents. At least this is true at a general level. But what about in the world of education?

Let’s look at access to content. Does Google work for the learning world? When we ask teachers how they search for contents, it becomes clear that Google is not an efficient tool in this case. Google was not designed with education in mind because it does not take account of the contents’ level of difficulty, it does not distinguish between educational and non-educational contents, there is no relationship between the various education systems, etc.

In terms of content dissemination, we find exactly the same situation with social networks: they were not designed with education in mind.

Based on these facts, the objective of Tiching is to make all digital learning contents that exist online accessible and disseminate them in a personalized way. This involves a second objective: putting the entire learning community in touch in a space designed specifically for teachers, students and families, to strengthen the community and enable everybody to improve education by contributing their own contents, experiences and opinions.

So, how did we achieve this objective? First of all, Tiching has a resource search engine that already has over 90,000 contents categorized according to educational criteria. In addition, the platform puts over 400,000 education centres and over 300 catalogues of content within reach of the whole learning community. As a result, Tiching has managed to centralize searching for everything related to education in a single place, thereby facilitating the work of over 100,000 teachers that have already joined Tiching.

Lastly, Tiching also enables intuitive browsing structured around three key bases: Class, School, World. Each of these three bases reflects one of the three great settings in which education can take place. In this way, teachers, students and families have their own space for managing classes, another space for keeping up to date with everything that is going on at their education centre and a third space for sharing interests.