News Story

KMi Director Presented a Keynote at 60,000 Mobile World Congress

Kiran Parmar, Monday 07 March 2022 | Annotate

On Wednesday, 2nd March, Professor John Domingue gave a keynote in the EdTech stream of one of the most significant events globally. The Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona, attracted more than 60,000 attendees from almost 200 countries. Other speakers in the same stream included a partner in Europe’s leading EdTech Venture Capitalist company, a founder of an EdTech unicorn and the Head of Google Education in Europe

John’s Keynote covered the blockchain research and innovation that the KMi team have been involved in since 2015, funded by several EU (QualiChain, EU Observatory, DEL4All) and OfS (Institute of Coding) projects.

The key take-home messages from the event were: a) funding for EdTech startups is booming with $2.5B in 2021 alone; b) globally, there is a $2.7T EdTech funding gap caused by the gap in the amount of time learning is online (50%) vs the amount of spending in online (5%). If the incumbent educational institutions do not begin to adapt to the new reality, they will go the same way as the high street.