Nigeria startup Qataloog is focused on helping universities and colleges to access specialized academic books. The startup’s mission and objectives are sharing, enabling catalogue discovery, strategic acquisition, and the management of learning content collections across various schools in Africa.
About Qataloog
The startup which was created in 2019 by Martins Fidelis is aimed at providing schools in Africa with the latest research from top scholars across Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and America through catalogue analytics. In a statement speaking about the vision of the startup, the CEO, said:
“Qataloog disintegrates the learning content supply chain by offering the industry’s most transparent and cost-effective pricing directly to schools using cataloguing algorithms to autonomously understand semantics learning content and user search preferences to unlock the latest learning content for each user.
Higher Education Market and The Qataloog Difference
The higher education learning content market is highly fragmented, and there is no easy way for universities and colleges to find the best content for their academic programmes. It requires long phone calls, and several emails, and the purchase process sucks.
Rising cost due to markups by middlemen makes content prices unaffordable to students and libraries. On the other side, publishers are seeking seamless ways of distributing their learning content across schools directly, without customer acquisition costs.
Unlike our competitors, content on Qataloog is cost-effective. Users save over 60% of learning content costs. Libraries can seamlessly access and order specialized content from the best publishers around the world in a few clicks.
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It is very convenient to purchase content from anywhere, our distribution engine is efficient, reliable, and pocket-friendly”.
In the terms of funding, they haven’t lacked such as they have received funding from angel investments worth $150,000 to fund their project.
They are also in collaboration with 36 universities and colleges as their paying customers to which they have distributed over 10,00 books from over 2,800 publishers.
Technology in Education
Since the Covid-19 pandemic took the world by surprise most industries such as Aviation and Human labour which involves physical contact have been restricted and prohibited in almost all countries in the world.
This makes education more flexible and most countries such as America and the United Kingdom are providing the resources for online education which enables students to take classes online through platforms such as WhatsApp, Zoom, Google class, Etc.
America since the Covid-19 pandemic has spent over $3 billion providing online resources to public schools which they can use to provide online classes to the students, here are the ways by which technology has been helpful and ways it hasn’t been helpful to education:
Advantages Of Technology To The Education Sector
i) It provides excitement to students, especially the younger ones:
Most students in middle school haven’t had access to technological gadgets at their convenience but the Covid-19 pandemic will ensure the parents provide their wards with gadgets such as Laptops, Wi-Fi Routers, and Mobile Phones to enable them to continue with their education.
Students may find this new trend of classes fun and more flexible for them because they are proceeding with their classes online, and they may find tools that can enable them to do a lot of things like muting their mics and remove of the video coverage.
The teachers will also find this method stress-free as they don’t need to go for long distances before they teach students, now from the comfort of their homes they can anchor classes and also take assignments at their convenience.
ii) Grooms the children for the future:
We are advancing to an era of technology where it will be used in almost all sectors so introducing technology to them from an early age will enable them to familiarize themselves with the system which will be helpful for them in the future to get high-paying jobs in their field of expertise.
In the nearest future, human labour will not be required for most jobs as AI will be used for almost all fields of expertise and only those who are literate in AI technology will get high-paying jobs and will be sought after by big companies.
iii) It Encourages Spontaneous learning:
Having access to technology at an early age will help the students have access to additional information on a particular topic because they can search for more content on Social media than sticking to the limited information that the libraries provide them with.
Students, before the introduction of Online education, most of they only stick with what they are taught in schools and only a few of them bother to search further on that topic hence narrowing their scope of knowledge but with the introduction of online education, they could supplement their nates with other information from YouTube and even organizing a virtual tour easily for students.
Disadvantages of Technology To The Education Sector
i) It can provide them access to a lot of harmful content:
With younger ones advancing their scope of knowledge, they could come across bad content on the internet such as Pornography which will influence them negatively if proper security measures such as website blockers, and internet filters aren’t put in place.
It can also distract them as they would be attracted to a ton of other content on the internet which could cause them to deviate from their main agenda.
ii) It also blocks socialization among teens:
Given that, almost all children have access to technology and most especially social media, studies have shown that teens and young children now spend most of their time on social blogging platforms hence cutting themselves from the outside world which leads to diseases such as Obesity and the rest.
iii) It can also discourage creativity:
Since most children are now stuck and addicted to social blogging apps it has helped to kill some of the talents in the children such as drawing, painting, Etc. They don’t fancy themselves engaging themselves in anything physical, they prefer staying on their phones all day than displaying their talents.
