Education Alliance Finland is a business name of Kokoa Agency, a privately owned company that specializes in quality verification of educational solutions and services. Under the name Education Alliance Finland, the company has established a pedagogical quality certification for educational technology products and issued over 130 quality certifications to learning solutions globally. The company was founded in 2015 by Saila Juuti, Olli Vallo, Marika Kukkasniemi, and Hanna Rinne. Three of the founders, Juuti, Kukkasniemi, and Rinne, had worked previously at Rovio Entertainment a Finnish company that is known for their Angry Birds brand. Two of the founders, Kukkasniemi and Vallo, had also worked as primary school teachers before starting in the technology sector. When working as teachers they had experienced that it was difficult to find curriculum-aligned learning applications that would meet the needs of their students. The founders concluded that providing an industry quality standard could help learning solution developers in the pedagogical design of solutions and on the other hand the standard would allow issuing quality marks for solutions that meet the pedagogical quality criteria. The company started out as a design agency targeting their services to educational technology companies. Once the founders learned that many of their clients wanted to improve the learning efficacy of their solutions, they decided to proceed to develop a method and process for evaluating the pedagogical quality of solutions. The company is a selected member of Education Finland, a governmental education export programme managed by Finnish National Agency for Education.
Methodology
Education Alliance Finland's certifications for educational solutions are based on product reviews made by teachers. In the product evaluation process, teachers define the product's learning goals and assess the product's pedagogical approach and usability. Learning solution developers can apply for the evaluation by submitting their application to Education Alliance Finland evaluators. After evaluators have assessed the solution the developer receives an evaluation report. If the product passes the threshold it will be granted the pedagogical quality certification. In 2018 approximately half of the evaluated solutions had earned the certification. Product evaluation criteria are based on educational psychology. The company shares publicly a white-paper that describes the theoretical background of the evaluation method. The reasoning for each issued product certification are available on the company's website in their Catalog of Certified Products.
International Operations
In 2020 the company started a partnership with a Singaporean EdTech accelerator EduSpaze. The accelerator had nine education startup companies in their first cohort which EduSpaze aimed to help through providing a customized accelerator program including mentoring in the areas of market fit, client discovery, product development, scalability, revenue generation and strategies to attract follow-on capital investment. As part of the partnership, Education Alliance Finland conducted pedagogical quality evaluations of products from the startups in the accelerator program. The goal of the evaluations was to support companies' product development. In 2019 Swiss foundation Stiftung Mercator started a collaborative pilot project with Education Alliance Finland to establish a product evaluation service in Switzerland In the project, Swiss teachers were recruited to work as product evaluators in a similar manner than Education Alliance Finland had worked for years in Finland with Finnish teachers. Classtime is one of the educational technology products receiving a certification during the project. The project is ongoing in 2020. In 2016 Kokoa Agency won Education Innovation Award at BETT Asia for its system of evaluating and validating the quality of edtech solutions. Among Education Alliance Finland certified solutions are products from Chinese technology companies Makeblock and Walnut Education.
