Japanese education technology company Quipper unveiled platforms that aim to support learner-centered experiences amid the changing learning styles in the Philippines.
The local education sector was bombarded with demands to shift to virtual learning environments due to the constraints on health and mobility caused by the pandemic.
A leading education technology platform in countries like Japan and Indonesia, Quipper witnessed an increase in users in the Philippines at the onset of the pandemic as teachers and students transferred to the online setup in 2020.
The shift imposed the need for distinctive strategies in pedagogy, with educators experimenting with different learning platforms and tools available in the digital space.
“We are used to being assigned homework, being used to assign tests, being asked by our teachers to ask questions. We have to move already or transform our education styles from assigning to designing. We have to start designing equitable lessons,” said ed-tech educator Tricia Anne Castro.
“Traditional methods are still effective, but we have to adjust them and modify the traditional methods to fit the kind of students that we have—the digital natives,” said Castro.
Quipper features two of its ed-tech tools: Quipper Link and Quipper Create. The former is designed to allow educators to create classes and distribute lessons and assignments to students as efficiently as possible by providing them with easy-to-navigate dashboards, curriculums, worksheets and others. The lesson plans distributed through the Quipper Link are constructed accordingly to the Department of Education’s curriculum.
The latter is designed for teachers and content creators who plan to create their own courses and distribute them to their respective audiences within the web-based learning application.
“The lack of resources and how we respond to that is through creativity,” said Castro, who acknowledged the limitations in funds and equipment experienced by Filipino educators and underscored the importance of maximizing what is available for education.
Yusuke Takagi, chief executive officer of Quipper Philippines, noted that the company is continuously seeking to advance their platform as an all-in-one learning management system to aid in the needs of teachers in and out of the classroom.
“Quipper is really an all-in-one package for the Filipino teachers and learners because we only not provide the learning management system but we also provide the contents that are fully aligned with the DepEd’s curriculum,” Takagi explained.
Quipper was founded in 2010 by Japanese entrepreneur Masayuki Watanabe, primarily designed to cater to online education management services.
It first entered the Philippines in 2014, through its flagship product, Quipper School.