Moving mountains: Challenges in Regional Education
To make an impact, sometimes you need to move mountains — or navigate flood waters. And navigating flood waters in Iloilo has been a mission unto itself over the past month. It’s been a very wet lead-up to our first regional Philippines cohort.
Extreme rains during the month of July saw many of the venues for our scholarship exams washed out, and widespread disruption to the fiber-optic network disconnected internet access intermittently across the region, which meant potential students were unable to undertake exams until later in July. And despite this, we had nearly 300 potential students turn out for the exams. The passion and energy of these future blockchain developers filled the rooms and we’re thrilled to welcome the top performing 10% of exam takers into the Iloilo cohort!
Several of the original venues for the August course were damaged by flooding but thanks to the stellar efforts of our onground team and regional partner Startupio we found a new place for our emerging blockchain developers to learn; thank you to the University of Iloilo for hosting us for the next four weeks.
The challenges of building regional education programs are myriad and complex — each region throws up unique obstacles to overcome (like flooding, regional festivals and public holidays, unscheduled visits from foreign dignitaries, civil unrest and intermittent power outages, to name a few). Sometimes these challenges are expected but often, they are unexpected, and we adapt to meet them head on. Although they can be difficult, and frustrating at times, these unexpected challenges lead to new opportunities and demonstrate ways we can adapt our programs to best support learning and growth in a regional context.
Building strong regional partnerships is essential to the success of programs like ours — it’s impossible to foresee all the challenges in new regions without the insights of people from within the region and we strive to align ourselves with like-minded, passionate regional partners who can help us realise our vision for blockchain and tech education.
There is no ‘one-size fits all’ solution for global blockchain education and as we enter each new market, the challenges reaffirm to us the importance of programs like Kingsland’s — ones that are agile enough to adapt to region-specific demands.
Make no mistake — delivering education programs in underserved regions of the world is an extreme undertaking and the success of these programs will not be born on the back of financial investment but on the strength of commitment to a vision for the future of accessible tech education.
The roads are too bumpy (literally and metaphorically) and the barriers to access too great to be overcome by money alone. And as we continue our global outreach, we will continue to deliver on our educational mission to provide accessible blockchain and emerging tech education — ensuring a better, brighter and more balanced future.
John Souza, CEO and Founder
Kingsland University — School of Blockchain
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