• The course tells about the history, culture, and society of Ukraine from the Middle Ages up to the present times.
• The project was created by the Ukrainian Institute together with the educational studio EdEra and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
• Lectures are presented by the representatives of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
• The total duration of training is about 5 hours, and the language of lectures is English.

The course is divided into two weeks: in the first, there are 6 video lessons about Ukraine before the 19th century, and in the second — 5 lessons, dedicated to further Ukrainian history. The course is already available, you can take it for free and at any time.

Coursera is an international educational platform that offers online courses from the best universities in the world. The most popular courses on the platform are in the following fields: engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and others.

Details of the deal

The round was led by Owl Ventures, with participation from previous investors, in particular, Diligent Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Educapital, Evli Growth Partners, as well as co-founder of Grupa Pracuj Przemysław Gacek. The new VC investment companies Swisscom Ventures and Orbit Capital also joined.

The funds raised will be used to expand the company’s operations in the US and Europe, further develop the AI-based tutor searching technology, and increase the global community of foreign language learners.

The platform plans to capture the growing online language learning market, which will reach $47 billion by 2025.

In March 2021, Preply raised $35 million in Series B funding.

About Preply

Preply is a Ukrainian company that develops a global language learning marketplace. The company was founded by Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn, and Serhii Lukyanov. Using a machine learning algorithm, recommended teachers create personalized lesson plans based on a student’s budget, schedule, and current knowledge. As stated by the founders, Preply unites the world’s biggest foreign language learners community.

• Today Preply is global edTech-platform that brings together more than 32,000 tutors who teach 50 languages to hundreds of thousands of students from 180 countries. Over 250 people work in two offices based in Kyiv and Barcelona.
• Last year, Preply tripled its B2B operations. Among its clients are such companies as Bytedance (TikTok), Mercedes, and McKinsey.
• In the past two years, the number of Preply users has quadrupled. The general amount of students who study with the marketplace is bigger than Ivy League.
• Preply has offices in three countries — Ukraine, the US, and Spain, and its founders are from Kyiv.
• Despite the war in Ukraine, Preply managed to grow its team to 400 employees of 58 nationalities in 30 countries.
• Over the past few months, the company’s international staff has launched a number of significant initiatives to support Ukraine. Among them are the Message for Ukraine campaign, which translates more than 8,000 messages of support from around the world into Ukrainian, as well as a free language assistance program for thousands of Ukrainians crossing borders and starting to learn a new language.

• According to the startup, the United Kingdom is the leader in Europe by volume of investment, as well as the first country in the region where the number of IT companies with a capitalization of over $1 billion has reached a hundred. Accordingly, the local presence of Headway in the capital is an additional opportunity for raising funds and developing its business.
• Headway has an office in Warsaw and Lviv, which appeared due to the team’s evacuation. The Kyiv office has partially resumed its work. There is also an office in Nicosia and now in London. There are only 150 people in the Headway team.
• There are currently about 20 job openings at Headway. The company plans to add 40 more by the end of July. All the positions are fully remote, with the option to visit the office. You can check out all the job openings here.

• Headway is an IT company that creates EdTech products that help users develop their skills through concise formats of educational content: courses, videos, games, infographics, etc. The startup’s main product is the Headway app.
• The Headway app is an educational app that allows users to read a book in 15 minutes. It contains summaries and main ideas of 1000+ non-fiction books about business, motivation, and psychology. They are divided into categories and available in text and audio formats.
• Over 12 million users worldwide have downloaded this app. Apple regularly tops it on its stores in 140+ countries. Last year, Headway was No. 1 worldwide by number of downloads in its category.
• Since the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine, the company has not stopped hiring and has launched several social projects to support Ukraine. The team created a free collection of summaries about Russia’s crimes against Ukraine for the app audience from 140 countries with an appeal to support Ukraine’s Armed Forces and the humanitarian needs of Ukrainians. The company also developed a series of safety infographics based on official sources to help Ukrainians keep themselves and their loved ones safe during the war.

• Founded by Aleksandra Kozera, Agnieszka Łuczak, and Weronika Matejko-Skwarek, The Village is creating an all-in-one marketplace that supports parents and encourages crucial child development through parent-led micro-schools.
• The SaaS platform allows parents to organize childcare centers by providing tools for anyone to run a physical micro-school, so-called “villages” based in community hubs. Parents and teachers, working in these hubs, participate in the original courses and regularly improve their qualifications for better childcare and education.
• Movens Capital is one of the main investors in this round. It is a Warsaw-based venture capital firm investing in startups focused on AI, fintech, SaaS, and marketplaces. Its recent investments include leading the round for fyrtel.market, and investing in Doctor.One. 500 Startups, Tilia Impact Ventures, and Credo Ventures also participated in the investment.

“Childcare means more jobs and more women working. Rich experiences in early education are the foundation of democracy and equal opportunities in society. If parents want to go to work and have no one to leave their children with, this is an area that needs to be addressed,”

The Village teams talks about their approach to childcare and education.

• The fresh funding will help the startup create a connected community of quality childcare that supports parents worldwide.

• Among the investors are co-founders of Wise (Transferwise), Teleport, Pipedrive, and Bolt. The round was supported by Horizon Capital and existing investors TA Ventures and Flyer One Ventures, which invested in the startup in 2019.
• According to the startup’s representatives, the funds raised will go toward expansion in the American and Polish markets.
• Mate Academy is an online academy for IT professions that provides a four-month programming course in exchange for a percentage of salary after employment. The students of the academy learn Java, Front-end, Full Stack Web, and UI/UX Design. In exchange for free courses, students pay 17% of their salary after employment for two years.
• After the seed round in 2019, Mate Academy’s revenue grew 20-fold. Currently, the online academy has 1,300 employed students and 60 employees.

• Headway is an educational app that helps you read a book in 15 minutes. It contains summaries and key ideas from 1,000+ non-fiction business, motivational, and psychology books.
• Since early November, Headway has been among the top 10 educational apps on the platform in the UK, India, Australia, Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, Cambodia, Qatar, UAE, Indonesia, Ireland, and Singapore.
• Headway also remains the top downloaded app in its niche during 2021.
• The Education category is the third-largest category by the number of apps on the Apple Store after Games and Business. There are over 482,000 educational apps available on the store, and Apple displays no more than 200 apps in different countries on its top picks.

About Headway

Headway is an EdTech project that is part of the ecosystem of the international IT holding company Genesis. Its main product, an educational app, was created in March 2019 to help people across the world learn and develop on their own. In two years, it has been downloaded by over 7 million users from 140 countries.

Ukrainian universities in the rankings

Ten Ukrainian universities were included in the rankings, and they all ranked below the top 100:

1. Sumy State University — 501–600
2. Lviv Polytechnic National University — 601–800
3. Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics — 1001–1200
4. Oles Honchar Dnipro National University — 1201
5. Ivan Franko National University of Lviv — 1201
6. National Technical University Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute — 1201
7. National Technical University of Ukraine – Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute — 1201+
8. Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv — 1201+
9. V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University — 1201+
10. Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University — 1201+

At the same time, most Ukrainian universities are still losing positions in the rankings. For example, Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics was ranked 801-1000 in last year’s rankings, while in the new rankings, it is only 1001-1200. Lviv Polytechnic National University also dropped to a lower level – from 501-600 to 601-800.

World Leaders

First place in the rankings went to the University of Oxford (UK). The California Institute of Technology (US) and Harvard University (US) shared second place. The top five are closed by Stanford University (US) and Cambridge University (UK).

Besides the already announced leaders, the top 10 includes five more American universities — Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, as well as Yale University, and the University of Chicago.

• Skillsetter was founded by Vlad Yakupov in 2019. The main product and unique selling point of this startup is an educational platform with online simulation courses aimed at IT professionals. The innovative training approach includes participants in solving real-life cases and involves practical tasks which occur within technical companies, rather than relying on traditional video lectures.
• The platform now offers over 20 courses covering various areas: content marketing in the IT industry, traffic management, SMM management, product management, UX design, etc.
• Also, skillsetter offers career consulting and assists graduates with job placement at partner companies, including Boosta, Projector, Genesis, Murka, and Kyivstar. So far, the startup already has 70 of them.
• Skillsetter plans to invest the raised capital in the business scaling — product line development and team strengthening. The goal is to build a company with a 90% success rate of graduates by the end of 2022. Now, according to the startup, that figure is 70%.

If the company reaches certain figures, its valuation and the size of the investment will increase. Thus, GIOS may receive more than originally announced during the round.

What is GIOS

GIOS is a service for blended learning of maths and critical thinking. The GIOS business model works by selling animated, interactive maths and critical thinking courses that explain complex topics to children in simple language and a playful format. There are two target audiences: B2B — mathematics teachers and B2C – parents. The startup is also developing a platform for STEM tutors.

According to Forbes, the platform currently has over 100,000 registered users, with about 7,500 paying ones. Nataliya Limonova has invested about $350,000 of her own money and investments from business angels in GIOS. She also secured a $50,000 grant from the Ukrainian Startup Fund. In 2020, GIOS generated $84,000 in revenue. By March 2022, Limonova plans to grow it sevenfold by scaling the service up in Ukraine and launching it in the US.

The company plans to spend the fresh funding from UVO to fine-tune the platform, expand the team, and enter foreign markets.

Comments from the investor

As Forbes.ua reports, UVO Ventures was established in late 2020 by Ukrainian product IT company Uvoteam. It invests in early-stage startups, and its average ticket size is $100,000-200,000. Managing partners: ex-Uvoteam’s employee Alex Kozenko and former Executive Director of CEX.IO Vitalii Kedik, who is responsible for the strategy of crypto exchange Currency.com. The shareholders are Eugene Yanovsky, Nikita Osaulenko, and Olga Andrusenko. The UVO Ventures portfolio also includes the GoIT IT school and Liki24.

“GIOS is in the early stages of development right now and is testing several business models. We have been pleasantly impressed by the depth of the team’s domain expertise and the fervor with which the founders talk about school education. We believe that the company and the products they are working on will change the perception of school education not only in the former CIS countries, where the guys are already showing strong growth but in other markets as well. This deal will help the company scale up to the US market and adapt the products to local needs,” Vitaly Kedik, managing partner of UVO Ventures, commented to AIN.UA.

UVO Ventures focuses primarily on edtech projects. According to Kedik, thanks to the lockdown, the already dynamic industry has received a strong boost — this can be seen both in the project figures and in rounds in the industry over the past year.

About 99math

The startup 99math is an interactive platform for kids to play math games and compete with each other. The company will spend its fresh funding to create a mobile app for children to play at home and premium plans for monetization.

Teachers use the platform for free. Monetization will be done through premium subscriptions and in-app purchases for parents.

Children engage with the platform during math lessons. The teachers generate math tasks on a given topic and run the game, and the kids play on their phones. It takes less than one minute to set up, and the whole class gets involved in the game simultaneously. 

“Math is a very difficult subject for many children. They don’t always want to study long and hard and, instead, spend their free time on technology, gadgets, and online games. We combined a game, competition, and academic component and showed how fun and interesting math could be. Moreover, with interactive rewards and gamification, a positive feedback loop is created. When a kid sees that they can solve a math problem, they become more confident in their knowledge. This is important because when teachers check assignments in schools, they mostly highlight children’s mistakes. We believe that self-confidence helps children to learn better – that’s why we focus on changing the process of learning in this direction,” shares Tõnis Kusmin, CEO of 99math.

99math has leaderboards, fan communities, and progress tracking. In January 2021, the platform had 300,000 monthly active users who solved more than 170 million math problems.

“We are pleased to participate in this round and support 99math along with a group of prominent investors. We see great potential in 99math and believe in its importance in transforming educational processes. The technology in the hands of a skilled team has turned into a product with one hundred percent organic growth and excellent dynamics. We will apply our expertise in the field of subscription monetization and edtech startup support to help 99math successfully scale in the US,” comments Vitaly Laptenok, General Partner at Genesis Investments.

According to Facebook’s press service, Get Digital‘s lessons and resources are based on materials provided by Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.

About the Get Digital program

Get Digital platform in Ukraine was launched as part of Digital Literacy Week, a nationwide initiative aimed at promoting computer skills.

Get Digital focuses on four main topics:

• Basic digital skills and media literacy
• Coding, STE(A)M, and artificial intelligence
• Advanced digital skills and employability
• Digital cultural heritage

The information is divided into five main blocks: Digital Foundations, Digital Wellness, Digital Engagement, Digital Empowerment, and Digital Opportunities.

“As our lives are increasingly moving online because of the pandemic, it is important to provide young Internet users with the knowledge and skills that will encourage them to use digital information in a useful way, benefit from it while minimizing the risks they may face online,” says Kateryna Kruk, Facebook Public Policy Manager for Central and Eastern Europe.

The teacher lessons were developed by the Youth and Media team at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, which has made them available worldwide through a Creative Commons license, The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and Teaching Tolerance.

Other content partners include the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Net Family News, the Micro: bit Educational Foundation, and Beyond Differences.

The aim of the course is to introduce Ukraine and show that it has always played an extensive role in global history.

About the course

The course Ukraine: History, Culture, and Identities is available free of charge. To start the course, you need to register on the Udemy platform.

The course consists of video lectures and supporting materials, such as a syllabus, a glossary, and a list of recommended primary sources for reading.

The course Ukraine: History, Culture, and Identities comprises five modules dedicated to particular historical periods:

• Kyivan Rus’ in the Middle Ages
• Ukrainian Lands in the Early Modern Times
• Ukraine in the Long XIXth Century
• Ukraine in the XXth Century
• Independent Ukraine

The lecturers of the course are acclaimed Ukrainian researchers, professors of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy – Vadym Aristov, Tetiana Grygorieva, Kateryna Dysa, Nataliia Shlikhta, and Maksym Yakovliev.

About the developers

The developers of the course believe that Ukraine should not only be associated with the war and the Chornobyl disaster. It is the largest country in Europe, the birthplace of Kazymyr Malevich, Alla Horska, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, and many other talented artists and public figures known all around the world.

The Ukrainian Institute is a public institution affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. Its mission is to strengthen Ukraine’s international standing through the means of cultural diplomacy.

EdEra is a Ukrainian educational project that has been creating full-fledged online courses and supporting materials for six years.

The National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (NaUKMA) is a classic university that creates preserves and spreads knowledge in the natural, social, humanitarian, and technical sciences. Kyiv-Mohyla Academy represents a community that forms nationally-conscious, honest, caring, creative personalities who can think independently and act responsibly following the universal principles of Good and Justice for the development of an open and democratic society.

“Last year the incredibly helpful and responsive Genesis Investments team believed in our ability to educate and entertain young children worldwide with our high-quality content delivered through a mobile device. Exactly 12 months later we are excited about our Series A investment and expect to exceed new investors’ expectations. We’re building one of the largest companies globally in preschool education and the round will speed up our development very substantially” — comments Andrey Kondratyuk, IntellectoKids Co-Founder.

About IntellectoKids

The platform offers parents of preschool children gamified educational content and structured lessons available on mobile devices. According to SensorTower, IntellectoKids’ apps are steadily ranked in the Top-10 Grossing Apps in Kids 5 & Under category in the U.S. and Canada and in the Top-5 in Brazil, Mexico, UK, France, Germany, and other major European countries.

With a goal to help prepare young kids for school, IntellectoKids’ apps deliver great educational materials combining learning content with a very engaging gaming experience.

IntellectoKids was founded by Mike Kotlov and Andrey Kondratyuk in 2017 already as a distributed team company. The founders manage a team of 40 employees who work remotely from a variety of countries including Cyprus, Ukraine, Germany, Austria, Russia, Thailand, and New Zealand.

The technical team has over 20 engineers. In one year the company grew 5x in monthly revenue and 3x in paying subscribers.

Andrey and Mike have three children each and built the product based on their own need as parents for high-quality educational content for preschoolers. In the past, Andrey has been involved in other successful educational projects, and Mike founded several startups before creating IntellectoKids.

In the nearest plans:

• The team intends to launch a Classroom feature with learning tracks in five core Kindergarten and Grade 1 courses, including Math, Phonics, Science, Arts, and Logic. For each educational topic, IntellectoKids’ Classroom will offer a personalized learning path starting with a pre-assessment and finishing with detailed progress tracking report & recommendations for parents based on a summative assessment.
  
• In addition to the current B2C model, the founders expect in 2021 to offer primary schools and kindergartens IntellectoKids’ platform as an online supplement to support their offline educational process.

IntellectoKids apps have more than 2 million installs and a loyal user base. The company’s target markets include North America and Central & Northern Europe from where the Company receives more than 85% of all its revenues.

To compile the ranking, Coursera has analyzed 65 million users from 60 countries who have been learning on the platform over the past 12 months. Data were collected from 11 different fields of study in business, technology, and data science. Countries were ranked by respondents’ skill level.

The general qualification level of Ukrainians in the field of technology was 95%, with the highest index of 100%.

In business and data science, Ukrainians are less skilled, taking 43 and 29 positions respectively.

The platform has also published the most trendy skills in different fields. In the field of technology:

• C
• Artificial Intelligence
• Javascript
• Web Development
• User Experience Design
• Cybersecurity
• Convolutional Neural Network
• Cloud Computing
• Internet of Things
• Application Programming Interface

Business:

• Microsoft Excel 
• Project Management
• Digital Marketing Blockchain
• Business Analytics
• Human Resources Management
• Copywriting
• HR
• Product Placement
• Supply Chain

Data Science:

• Python
• Data Storytelling
• SQL
• R
• Deep Learning TensorFlow
• Cloud APIs
• Multi-Task Learning
• Linear Algebra
• NLP

“About $5 million was invested in this project. All these years, the courses were free of charge, provided the graduates continue to work in Ukraine for three years. We tried to support the potential of gifted young people and stimulate the development of modern IT education in Ukraine,” commented Vasyl Khmelnitsky, the investor of the school, the founder of K.Fund and holding company UFuture.

What is UNIT Factory

UNIT Factory taught programmers on the system of a global network of Paris School 42. It does not have teachers, lesson schedules, syllabi, and traditional assessments. Teaching is based on the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) method, which allows students to collaborate and discover their creativity during teamwork on projects.

The Ukrainian institution worked in 24/7 mode. The course of study at UNIT Factory lasted from two to three years. During the time of the school’s existence, more than a thousand students have partially or fully completed a course at UNIT Factory.

Why the school is being closed and what will happen to the students

The reason for the school closure at K.Fund was cited as “the unfavorable current economic situation.”

UNIT Factory will be closed already this month. Students who have not had time to complete a full course of study will receive certificates on the level achieved and will be able to continue their education in other campuses of the global network of School 42.

One of the tasks refers to the Plague Inc. game, a pandemic simulator for mobile devices. The goal of the game is to cause human extinction all over the world by infecting people with a dangerous and untreated virus. In the game, students have to simulate global pandemic spreading. Then you have to outline the results and make assumptions.

Recommendations for such practical work can be found in the 10th-11th grade collected book of school curriculums, namely, Profession-oriented school as a path to a competitive personality. The collected book was compiled with the assistance of the National Academy of Educational Sciences and the Institute of Pedagogy.

The collected book of recommendations can be found here, there is also an online version of the biology textbook.

It is not the first time when Ukrainian educational materials contain Internet references. Previously, it was found Keanu Reeves meme in a history textbook, and a map from TES: Skyrim – in a geography textbook.

How’s Plague Inc. doing?

Earlier, Plague Inc. experienced a new wave of popularity. Thanks to a coronavirus outbreak, the game entered the mobile store charts at top positions. According to the analytical service AppAnnie, the game remains in the top even today, Plague Inс. is the leader of the most downloaded paid apps of the Ukrainian App Store.

SensorTower estimates that in January 2020, the iOS version of Plague Inc. had 200,000 new downloads and generated $1 million in revenue. The Android version, which can be downloaded for free (with in-app purchases), has been downloaded more than 3 million times over the same period, providing a revenue of $400,000.

“All studies point to the fact that country’s economic growth is dependent on its citizens’ command of English. Among 32 non-English-speaking countries Ukraine is ranking 28th in English proficiency,” stated minister of education Liliya Hrynevych.

According to the minister, one of the main problems of the English language in universities is the level with which graduates are being admitted there. The purpose of the concept is to:

• Ensure that all students have level B1 upon admission by 2023. It will become mandatory to get accepted to an undergraduate degree program. 
• If, for example, during the external independent testing it turns out that a prospective student doesn’t know the language, it doesn’t deprive them of a right to enter a university. But such prospective students will be required to attend language courses before the beginning of academic year.
• Undergraduate students will be required to have a В1+ level regardless of their specialty, and B2 (Upper-Intermediate) level will be mandatory for MSc and PhD.
• Some of the major disciplines at universities will be taught in English.

There were two ways to get accepted.

First – rigging entrance exams. A student asked for exam deferral under a false pretense, then he/she would choose one of the sham schools in Texas and California to pass the exam. In that school, a teacher who received a bribe provided the student with the right answers or took the exam instead of the student. Parents had to pay somewhere between $15K to $75K for such a service.

Second – cooperation with college coaches. After getting quite a large bribe – we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here – coaches would take a child based on the latter’s ‘outstanding athletic achievements’, even if they were bogus.

The masterminds

The leader of this crime ring was William Singer. He is the director of Edge College & Career Network engaged in facilitating college admissions. He received the funds for his services via the charity Key Worldwide Foundation. He worked with several associates who handled financial transactions and liaison with parents.

Among his alleged accomplices is Igor Dvorskiy of Ukrainian descent. He was the teacher who was paid (usually a $10K bribe) to help students with the right answers. He worked at California’s West Hollywood school, which was one of the schools Singer referred future students to take exams to. The name Dvorskiy is in the DOJ’s documents indicating his place of work. According to Voice of America, they are allegedly talking about a person of Ukrainian descent whose mother also worked in the field of education. Mr. Dvorskiy himself did not reply to the questions of reporters.

The list also includes representatives of other schools that facilitated the fabrication of ‘athletic achievements.’ The complete list is available in the article of The New York Times.

Public exposure

The scandal received an unprecedented coverage in the U.S. as nothing of similar proportion has ever been exposed. In addition, Singer also gave out the names of those who paid for getting their children into a college, and the list contains quite a few celebrities. Moreover, some of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions, such as Yale University and Stanford University, have also been implicated in the scandal. According to The New York Times, many children did not even know that their parents paid for their admission because teachers, who received bribes, were submitting their exam papers with the right answers for them. In light of that, the authorities will not bring any charges against the children and colleges will decide whether to keep or expel them. In contrast, their parents are facing 12 to 37 months in jail. Singer is facing up to 20 years in jail.

Previously we wrote about how a Ukrainian EduBirdie found itself at the center of scandal in the UK: it advertised its essay ratings on YouTube. We also wrote about the workings of essay writing industry in Ukraine and why it is illicit.