Egodact was founded in September 2018 by three students from Agora Roermond. Agora is a new type of education that supports student-centered learning and gives students a proactive role in their own development. How? By allowing students to choose their own projects, thereby letting them work on things they’re passionate about. There’s no endless stream of assignments from teachers. In fact, we don’t even have teachers in the traditional sense, since we don’t need them. We only have coaches.
And realize this: by letting students decide for themselves what they’re doing, Agora relies on intrinsic motivation, meaning that students actually care about what they learn. Naturally, this results in amazing projects that are enormously valuable for the student.
So, what’s Egodact’s role?
As Egodact, we develop the practical implementation of the vision of Agora. The things that we’ve described in the previous section, are actually done through our software.
We also go beyond Agora. The software that we’ve developed to support the Agora style of education, matches a variety of other education styles as well. After all, student-centred learning exists outside of Agora and the Netherlands, as do other concepts incorporated in our software such as formative assessment and project-based learning.
To give a brief introduction to our software
As we stated above, students at Agora work on their own projects. We call these challenges.
In Agora ChallengeMonitor, we allow students to keep a portfolio of their challenges through a Kanban board. By using the same model for every challenge—which can be modified entirely by the school—students always walk through the same process so that they can always work on a challenge without any intervention by the school.
In Agora ProgressMonitor, we give students an overview of rubrics—provided by the school—in which they can autonomously and proactively record their progress.
The mentor—the “coach” in Agora terminology—only confirms or refutes this progress. They do this with a separate indicator, meaning that the student remains the owner of their progress.
For students, by students
We have been working on this software since the end of 2016, when we were 13 and 14 years old. Since then, we have developed a deep interest in education. With Egodact we want to help shaping the education of the future in collaboration with Agora.
