EdTechX Awards Spotlight: Seneca
Earlier this year, Seneca won the 2020 EdTechX Impact Award along with Busuu. Following the awards, we spoke with Stephen Wilks, CEO of Seneca, to learn more about the inspiration behind the company, what they are looking to achieve next and challenges amidst COVID-19…
What was the inspiration behind starting Seneca?
Whilst at university, I became more and more interested in how we learn, and how we can learn more efficiently. The more I learned about Neuroscience and Psychology, the more I realised that what most people do is completely wrong. I was one of the people using the worst possible learning techniques and we wanted to fix this for everyone. If we could build a free system to allow people to learn more effectively, we thought that would be a good goal to aim for.
What would you like everyone to know about Seneca?
When we first built Seneca, the first thing we did was test it in a 1,120 student Randomised Control Trial to make sure that it was effective and helped people to learn more efficiently. Students who used Seneca scored 105% higher on the final test, compared to the students who learned using traditional methods.
What are you looking to achieve next?
We have 4 million people using Seneca in the UK and we would love to have this positive impact on more children in more countries. Our primary goal is to create a free personalised education for every child in the world — we’re currently focused on the USA, Brazil and Mexico.
Looking back to the day you started, what would you have done differently?
Nothing! I think even the things that we have done completely wrong (and there are a lot!) are an important learning experience.
What piece of advice would you give to other entrepreneurs?
Be outcome-oriented. If you want to achieve something have clear milestones and accountability mechanisms to ensure you get there. Then persuade as many people who are goal-driven and outcome-oriented to join your team.
How do you think the support and ecosystem in your country has helped you to launch and grow Seneca?
From the very start, there has been a great community of teachers interested in using cognitive neuroscience in the classroom. Getting early feedback from enthusiastic students & teachers was really helpful. Later down the line, support from great organisations such as NESTA to develop our Smart Homework feature has been amazing.
What’s been the biggest challenge you have seen with Seneca amidst the COVID-19 pandemic?
With schools being closed, we saw 1 million people sign up in a month and the functionality that people needed changed overnight, and probably temporarily. We built a whole new platform & interface to support parents & teachers during the school closures. We hope that adding these extra data insights has proved invaluable for helping to make distance learning as productive as possible.
How to envisage the EdTech landscape to change as we go into the ‘New Normal’?
Errrr… If you know what the New Normal is, we would love to know! It’s very tough to know which changes are temporary and which are permanent, but hopefully things are back to the old normal before long!
Finally, is there anything else you would like to add?
We have free courses for everything, a free teacher platform and a free parent platform to help support your child’s work from home. Check them out!
To keep up to date with the news at Seneca, you can follow them on Twitter or visit their website: https://senecalearning.com/en-GB/teachers
