CollatEd is a data-driven education technology NGO, the first that uses open innovation as a means of pedagogy to propel Education Sustainable Development in the Global Action Programme network. By shaping youth into global citizens through solving our signature Challenges™ in exchange for solutions to corporate and institutional sustainability problems, CollatEd helps educators find practical applications of academic knowledge, all while strengthening students’ academic prowess and working in global teams to facilitate the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Civil society, policymakers, students, and industry professionals from a variety of fields related to global problems are invited to create challenges based on their area of social impact for students. CollatEd writes its own software in a DIY format that automatically regroups and recommends ideas in its database in the areas of interest to accelerate the delivery of open and flexible education systems that enable equitable, relevant, lifelong learning opportunities in contribution to the SDG’s. The product in the development process includes: A sub-platform featuring our work on education policy and policy-oriented contributor submissions, with the goal of forming the world’s largest student-led education policy network. By responding to policy and simulating the impact, either through ideas crossed over from Challenges, students form a productive dialogue that becomes valuable feedback for centralized decision-making bodies. Once students complete their Innovator Profile and select a Challenge, they join a team automatically selected based on matching of profiles. The chat space is connected to a desktop idea-design toolbox to inspire their projects. The desktop supports an experimental mode of music-remixing-inspired innovation. It takes multidimensional features of existing ideas initialized to examples of innovation. Machine learning incorporates past projects contributors uploaded over time, so that users can opt to start the innovation from remix results or from blank. After submission and evaluation, students can decide what to do with their accomplishment, in collaboration with the contributor if listed as such, via a page with interactive guides for entrepreneurship or portfolio or social activism. If used in a classroom, teachers can designate the action that want to take. Meanwhile, CollatEd prepares these results into reports that inform the UNESCO Global Action Programme’s work.

The UN Partnership network is central to CollatEd. The UN Sustainable Development Goal #4 demands quality education, which CollatEd tackles by changing how specific communities benefit from the Education Sustainable Development (ESD). Furthermore, CollatEd itself seeks to expand formally and functionally the UNESCO Youth Forum.CollatEd identifies broadly SDG, ESD, and GCED coalitions and stakeholders as the contributor for Challenges. But applied to the student population, Challenges™ is the first method of its kind to drive innovation and promote global citizenship among youth, provided a stable content flow. Where education is well-established, creating such a system of open innovation presents a clear parallel to the college-career framework that most schools in the Anglosphere has adopted. Shifting the mindset of school boards creates an important new education standard of collaborating with learners around the world. It also draws a paradigmatic focus to Educational Sustainable Development in particular communities, allowing students to impact their surroundings while pursuing their growth. CollatEd’s advancement of the Right to Innovate, in turn, has a systemic impact on developing societies and economies. The Challenges™ is designed for the final purpose of research benefitting the UNESCO and World Bank education accessibility initiatives. More than the universal access of digital materials, we seek an immediate idea-to-impact transference so that education is more widely accepted and impactful in communities. Also, due to the large population and understaffed nature of public schools, the teacher-to-student ratio is very low. The California Board of Education has recognized this problem and has endorsed CollatEd to begin in its schools. As an easy-to-install application, CollatEd divides the burden of block investments into manageable pieces for each student to download onto their own devices. This allows for schools to divert funding to areas important for the students’ wellbeing during attendance. In addition, CollatEd works in conjunction with existing systems, by opening direct links from Learning Management Systems to satisfy textbook learning objectives. These LMS incorporations funnel directly into broader change in American education standards: for student research in the social sciences and humanities, we selected the US Census Bureau’s Statistics in Schools (SIS) reference standards in the five priority areas highly impactful to civilizations and sustainability: Geography, History, Language, Statistics, and Sociology. For STEM applications, we selected five priority areas in general Mathematics, Engineering, Matter and Energy in Organisms and Ecosystems, Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems, and Human Sustainability, based on the Next Generation Science Standards.

This initiative is governed in two ways. Firstly, our seven member international Youth Executive Team carry out all the functions of CollatEd. We are in the process of forming a Global Advisory Board of adult members who are not only world-renowned global leaders, but also have experience in the classroom. Secondly, our endorsing agencies assist in the application of our model. Each agencies role can be summarized as follows: UNESCO: this organization serves a crucial role in that its representatives submit Challenges™ for our student innovators to research. However, these Challenges™ are more focused on social science topics to ensure we are undertaking an interdisciplinary approach to addressing a particular SDG. The World Bank: this entity provides data insights on our data-driven education model to further our education accessibility initiatives in developing countries. Currently, we are building out an AI-driven software for curriculum distribution in K-12 schools and universities! The African Union: we are in the process of finalizing a continental partnership that is purely for impact, that is, we distribute our software to this party and they distribute within the countries that the Union operates in. In the coming weeks, this partnership will become more concrete. European Commission/The United Nations Development Programme: these organizations serve a similar function to the African Union in that our software is distributed to any countries that interact with the EC's UNDP's global network. Collectively, our partners serve a vital role but we also ensure that the work CollatEd does is mutually beneficial. Indeed, after a student innovator submits their research projects, we prepare these results into reports that inform the UNESCO Global Action Programme’s work. Foreign Education Ministries, policy-makers, and government officials of higher-level education in countries connected with our partners help facilitate communication to the institutions who can support our iWorld Policy Lab. This is where our goal of becoming the largest student-led educational policy program comes into play. We believe that by establishing this multi-sectoral, active feedback loop between our partners, we seek to streamline ideas between solutions for sustainable policy-making and decentralizing law-making bodies by making their ideas accessible to inform policy. We are not merely a think-tank because all research that is submitted by our student innovators can take a variety of roles in their application to solving global issues!

PEEL District School Board, UNESCO, World Bank, European Commission, United Nations Development Programme, Ministero dell'Istruzione dell'Università e Ricerca, Electus Global Education Company, Duke University Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, Harvard Graduate School Doctoral Program (pending), Harvard College Student Groups (various pending), Ivy League Student Organizations (pending)