The world of education is looking for its space on the Internet

The world of education has numerous specificities which hitherto no technology

company has managed to transfer to the Internet. Many of the big platforms have

unsuccessfully attempted to answer the needs of teachers and students.

Clicking on the screen in a primary year to English class at the La Llacuna School in Poblenou.

Every era in history is marked by the discovery of some great invention: fire changed our eating habits completely; the wheel facilitated the transport of objects and people; the printing press helped to spread knowledge. Today, the Internet has totally changed our perception of reality and the way we interact with our environment. Many more changes still lie ahead of us, but for the moment we can talk about major revolutions such as the immediacy of communications, easy access to information and the disappearance of geographical distances, to name but some.

All the areas of our lives have found their space on the Internet – we have Facebook for entertainment and private life, Twitter to stay up to date with current affairs, Spotify for music, YouTube for the audiovisual world, LinkedIn for the professional sphere, Foursquare for eating out, etc. In short, major reference points for all sectors. All except one, which in addition is fundamental and decisive – education. There is still no reference point for education on the Internet and we wonder why.

The world of education has numerous specificities which hitherto no technology company has managed to transfer to the Internet. Many of the big platforms, such as Facebook, Google or Skype, have unsuccessfully attempted to adapt to the world of education, to respond to the needs of teachers and students, but always based on their initial product, which was never created with education in mind.

Only by taking your goal and your target into account from the very outset can you organise and design a platform for a sector as essential and unique as education. Regarding access to content, for example, we can see how tools that are highly effective for other sectors, such as Google, do not work for education. Google does not take certain highly basic parameters into account, such as the level of difficulty of content, it cannot distinguish between those that are educational and those that are not; it does not propose correspondence between the different educational systems, etc.

Taking all these specificities into account, about four years ago we founded a purely educational platform called Tiching. Knowing that it would be no easy task, we began by launching an alpha version, which was piloted by more than one thousand teachers. Thanks to their experience we improved its functionality, and a few months later we went live with the beta version, which is available in Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Peru.

Tiching has evolved to become a veritable meeting place for community education. It now has a resource search engine with more than 90,000 content listed. In addition, the platform makes more than 400,000 schools and more than 300 content catalogues available to the educational community. In this way it centralises the search for all things related to education in one place, thus facilitating the work of more than 100,000 teachers who have joined the project.

Tiching also offers user-friendly browsing based on three major axes – Class, School and World, the three areas in which education takes place. In this way, teachers, students and families have a space of their own for managing classes, another to remain abreast of everything that is going on in their school and a third space for sharing interests.

We do not know what the education of the future will be like, but we believe that by making the world of education more open we are offering everyone the chance to improve it.