Märt Aro on CRMs unicorns Estonia and much more

 

Monsuni warmly welcomes Märt Aro, a genuine passionate about education & learning. Märt is convinced that we have all the means and knowledge available to significantly increase the quality of the learning experience and provide access to education to everybody globally.

Already at the undergraduate level, he decided he will dedicate his life to education development because if we wish to have a better society for everyone, we can have the biggest impact through education. Märt strives to inspire young people and act as an innovator for society. Over the years, Märt has given talks at 100+ conferences globally, with OECD and European Union events included.

In 2011, Märt co-founded the company DreamApply.com, one of the most widespread Student Admission Platforms. DreamApply.com is used by more than 300 universities from 30+ countries, and so far the platform has served over 1,000,000 international students’ applications to full degree studies, student exchange and scholarship programmes.

In 2016 he co-founded the Nordic EdTech Forum “N8” NordicEdTechForum.org which brings together founders of education innovation organisations and companies from across 8 Northern European countries.

Monsuni:

Märt, thanks for joining Monsuni, it’s a pleasure having you here today. To start with, tell us a little more about your vision.

Märt:               

Thank you for having me. Indeed, HEIs possess a significant amount of knowledge on how we learn. But that knowledge is often not implemented in teaching, so I believe in the first instance what is needed is a methodology improvement at all levels of lifelong learning. If we wish to achieve impact in supporting learners and teachers, we need to implement two principles. The innovation needs to be scalable and sustainable.

The internationalisation of higher education has enabled much better cultural learning. One could say that obtaining a full degree abroad amounts to getting an additional degree, as intercultural empathy and skills are today valued a great deal by all industries.

What before was available to few, included studying abroad – a thing just for elites up until a couple of decades ago- today is becoming reachable for all. Think about online degrees. Today, you can achieve a full UK online degree for as little as £ 7K, per annum, which is affordable. So the question is more about methodology, which involves e-learning platforms, internet speed, and adaptive learning materials.

Monsuni:

Point taken. But how does this cope with the resistance, mainly at an administrative staff level, vs. technological innovation? We do live in an era of continuous technological transformation, but either the personnel run offices or constantly adjourns their competencies: they simply do not have enough time for everything.

Märt:

As universities have a broad range of activities HEIs IT departments usually have much more to do than they could, especially in these pandemic times. The same goes for international offices, that in addition to all work that needed to be done before have to juggle home office and run virtual mobility and.

Hence, the task we are facing today is explaining to university departments that what we can support with organising admin operations conveniently in distance work setting, whilst automating more than 40% of the workload which greatly benefits running of their daily work. This enables us to have more time on the issues that need attention because of Covid.

Take a CRM system. Nobody claims you can set up a CRM in a couple of hours. It takes time, both for the personalisation, and then to learn how to benefit from it. But once you set up your CRM, you wonder how you coped without it before and wished you had adopted it earlier. Just to give Monsuni’s readers a figure, today 11 Italian Universities have adopted DreamApply, and more are joining each year.

Monsuni:

Our compliments! Shifting our focus to a broader viewpoint, how is it that Estonia appears, at least from an Italian perspective, as a place where doing business for ed-tech start-ups is so favourable and constructive? You alone co-founded 4 education companies.

Märt:

Today Estonia is home to 7 unicorns, so we are doing something right. How many unicorns are there in Italy? This is incredible, for a country whose population is lower than the city of Milan’s. In Estonia, there exist a start-up ecosystem that is able to support people that have ideas on how to make something better. The ecosystem development is highly encouraged by the government, a dedicated support organisation is in place, called Startup Estonia. Obviously, funding is important, but the possibility to receive continuous support is even more important: when you set up a start-up, the very first stages of prototyping and setting up an MVP are critical, but the ability to survive the following stages and grow into service that benefits millions of users is equally important.

Monsuni:

Fascinating, thanks indeed. Any final remarks you wish to add?

Märt:

Yes: we need to do more about the accessibility of higher education. In the Western world, we traditionally think of this as being about people with disabilities, but the practice of making sites accessible also benefits other groups such as those using mobile devices, or those with slow network connections. Think about low-income countries or states where, for a number of reasons, the internet speed is below “Western” standards. It is estimated that 300 million people globally do not have access to higher education. Here, we can internationalise our university system even more.

 

Photo credits: DreamApply