Category Archives: Sanoma Learning

Thank You, Goodbye and Merry Christmas!

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Christmas

Dear Friends and Colleagues at Sanoma Learning,

Passion for Learning

It has been an exciting sprint to the very end with the announcement of the acquisition of Clickedu in Spain this week, bringing not only a great new company into the family but also a bit of extra sunshine šŸ˜Š. In the meantime this will be my last message to you all as CEO, with my 10 years at Sanoma coming to an end. Iā€™ve loved leading our company and been inspired by the ā€œpassion for learningā€ that can be felt in the teams everywhere who have worked tirelessly to make a positive impact on teaching and learning. Thank you all for your dedication and excellent work!

Major transformation

Our company has gone through a major transformation during recent years:

  • Our reach has increased from some 10m to 15m learners and from 5 to 10 core countries
  • Our sales have increased from some ā‚¬290m to close to ā‚¬500m in 2020
  • Employment at Sanoma Learning has grown to almost 2100 FTEs
  • We have grown our market share and made great leaps forward on the digital transformation
  • We have delivered strong profitability and profit growth, amongst the highest in the industry
  • We have achieved good success in building one European company out of the 5 original units, through the High Five program
  • We have made a number of important acquisitions, this year adding Iddink Group, itslearning, Essener and Clickedu to the family.

This has been quite a journey and I believe we are well prepared and well positioned for the next phase of growth at Sanoma Learning. I see a bright future ahead for our company!

Thank you to the teams!

What I remember and appreciate most looking back at the last 10 years is the people: the friends and good colleagues I have made along the way. I feel a strong sense of dedication in our teams everywhere. People are eager to learn new things and looking to the future.Ā  Striving to do the right thing for education and for the company. Although it has sometimes been challenging, it has also been truly inspiring to work in an organisation with such commitment and potential.

I would once again like to thank each and every one of you for your dedication in doing a great job and moving Learning forward.Ā  It has been a privilege to be able to lead this successful company and I would like to wish you all the best for the future. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter or reach out to me at johnrichmartin@gmail.com if you want to stay in touch.

Merry Christmas!

Finally I would of course like to wish everyone a well-deserved break and a very Merry Christmas with your loved ones! I hope you will have a wonderful time and get plenty of rest ready for an exciting new year ahead šŸ˜Š. Cheers!

Looking forward >>

John Martin

CEO Sanoma Learning

Give the gift of education: www.camfed.org

 

Looking for new opportunities in education (technology)

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Europe’s biggest edtech company

After 10 years at Sanoma, mostly leading Sanoma Learning, Iā€™ve informed the company of my intention to move on as of spring next year, giving plenty of time to arrange a smooth handover to a successor.Ā  Check out the press release of 13 November about it here.

Great place to work

Itā€™s been an honour to lead Learning during this period, and Iā€™m really proud about what the teams have achieved.Ā  I love the dedication to learning that can be felt across the company and very much respect the commitment of our people to do a great job for pupils and teachers.

Growth and successful transformation

Our teams have achieved a lot of success in local markets and made great leaps forward on the digital transformation.Ā  We have worked together intensively across the company on the High Five program in building one Sanoma Learning.Ā  And weā€™ve completed a number of acquisitions including Sanoma Utbildning in Sweden, Tammi Learning in Finland, De Boeck in Belgium and and Iddink in The Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.Ā  We are now about twice the size we were five years ago.

Amongst the best performers in the industry

Today we stand as a very successful company.Ā  We are positively impacting about 11m learners and 1m teachers in some of the Worldā€™s best education systems through a professional organization of some 1700 talented people. We are a frontrunner on the digital transformation, arguably Europeā€™s biggest edtech company today in terms of revenues and employment.

Weā€™re growing and amongst the best performing companies in the industry financially: 2018 brought us the strongest result in our history so far, and we are well on track to extend that success further in 2019. Ā It has really been a privilege to be part of this great company!

My priority right now is to continue leading Learning effectively and then to handover to a successor before leaving Sanoma.

Investing in education/technology

After that, Iā€™m intending to make some investments in the education (technology) sector and to see where thatĀ  brings me.Ā  For early stage investments I will be investing in and working together with eduimpact.fi.Ā  For later stage investments I will work together with other investors.Ā  Feel free to reach out to me at johnrichmartin@gmail.com if you think I could in some way help your company to prosper.

Thank you!

Thank you to my colleagues at Sanoma Learning for their excellent work and cooperation through the years. Wishing them and Sanoma Learning all the best for a bright future ahead!

Looking forward >>

John Martin

Teachers Want to Go Digital Where it Brings Most Benefits

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In the fifth annual Sanoma Learning Impact Framework (SLIF), we decided to focus on the main tasks the teacher performs in her profession. In total 7075 teachers responded to the survey, which was again carried out in all of the markets in which we operate: Belgium, Finland, The Netherlands, Poland and Sweden.

Core activities

The main tasks for teacher are: lesson planning, teaching the whole class, exercising, testing, assessment and giving guidance personally or in small groups. Of course there are other tasks too, such as administrative work and professional development, but these are the most frequently repeated activities.

Figure 1 depicts the amount of time teachers estimate they spend on each activity. Teaching the whole study group takes most of the teachersā€™ time, but still only less than a third.

activities

Figure 1. Percentage of time spent on different tasks

As part of the digital transformation, we are as an educational publisher very interested in whether teachers prefer print or digital materials to support them in their work. Our experience so far is that they value both, and in last yearā€™s SLIF we came to the conclusion that blended learning is the way to go.

As-is/to-be: medium vs activity

This time we decided to be more specific and map the print vs. digital axis with the activities a teacher carries out. This provided us with revealing results, as depicted in Figure 2.

present_vs_ideal

Figure 2. Materials and tools offered by publishers: Current use vs. Willingness to use

First of all, teachers would like to use more digital materials in all tasks than at present. Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, the gap between current and desired state is the greatest in tasks where pupils/students have a relatively more active role, namely exercising, testing, and assessment.

Currently 65% of teachers are using printed tests/exams. 28% say they use half & half or primarily digital tests/exams. Contrasting this with the desired state is staggering and the percentages get flipped: only 28% would like to use primarily print and 68% half or primarily digital. A similar phenomenon can be seen in exercising and assessment.

Digital where it makes most impact

What to make of this? We think the answer is simple. Both exercising and testing generate a lot of new content and insights for the teacher to go through. This makes assessment time-consuming for the teacher. With both questions and answers in a digital form, time is saved, insights are increased and pupil/student engagement is enhanced. Teachers are selectively looking to use digital for maximum impact.

Santtu Toivonen, Lead Insight Manager, Sanoma Pro

John Martin, CEO, Sanoma Learning

Sanoma’s Start-up Challenge Five Years On

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Five years on from Sanomaā€™s Start-up Challenge on the Future of Learning at TNW2014, I checked out how the five finalists have fared.Ā  Iā€™m impressed!

Winner Labster raises growth funding

Winner of the Challenge Labster has been prospering and announced at the end of last month raising $21M in a series B round to develop more digital lab simulations and to grow in the US market. Ā Next stop the World.

DragonBox joins Kahoot!

Maths app developer DragonBox announced today that it has been acquired by Kahoot! for $18M.Ā  Their claim is that together they are going to make learning maths awesome!

ClassCharts wins BETT

Edukeyā€™s ClassCharts, a seating planner and behavioural management tool, has gone from strength to strength based on the close understanding of teaching and the classroom underpinned by a strong data and analytics capability. Edukey won Company of the Year at BETT2019.

Jumpido combines movement with software to boost maths learning and looks like quite a fun thing to do in primary schools.Ā  Although the website is still active and the company was a finalist at the Forbes e-volution Award in 2016, they have been rather quiet since.

The website for the final contender Eduvee, an intuitive learning and tutoring platform, now re-directs to the education page of custom software and consulting company Elinext, likely indicating that some form of major pivot has taken place for this company.

Impressive

Overall itā€™s really impressive to see how much success these companies are achieving.Ā  We were lucky to have selected such a strong cohort for our Start-up Challenge.

Inspiring

What I found inspiring in all of the contestants at the time was their deep understanding of their customers and their passion and drive to make a difference.Ā  Five years on you can see the positive impact of the energy they have put into their ventures.

Looking forward >>

Iā€™m curious on how far these companies will go in the next five years, and wish them every success in turning their ambitions into reality.

Teachers value blended learning

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In 2018, we carried out our SLIF survey (Sanoma Learning Impact Framework) for the fourth time. In total 7594 teachers answered the online survey, which was carried out in all our markets: Belgium, Finland, The Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden. The main purpose of SLIF is to investigate the impact of published materials on learning. This time we focused on blended learning materials.

We are happy to observe that digital materials are gaining ground in learning. The most important benefit of digital according to teachers is engagement. 68% of the survey respondents felt that digital materials are more engaging for their pupils/students than printed materials. This is easy to believe: for example Bingel with its visually appealing avatar characters which the pupils can adapt with pingping they earn from doing exercises has proved to be very engaging and motivating.

Ultimately we want to offer learning materials that lead to improved learning outcomes. When we asked which factors have the highest influence on learning outcomes, engagement was mentioned as the most important factor, followed by variation in learning activities, individual coaching, and timely feedback to pupils.

It is worth noting that the second most important factor, variation in learning activities, was also considered as something which is better achieved in the blended model. 64% of respondents thought that digital learning materials are better for providing variation than print materials. Again, this is easy to understand. Digital learning materials include video, audio, animations, interactive exercises, instant feedback, and other features obviously missing from printed materials.

Figure 1 summarizes nicely the teachersā€™ attitude towards digital learning materials. We can see that only 27% of teachers use only printed materials. Whilst it is significantly more than the amount of teachers using only digital materials (3%), we can see that the majority of teachers are somewhere in between, adopting the blended learning approach: 17% apply half digital / half print approach, and 44% primarily print with some digital components.

Figure 1

Figure 1. Teachers would like to use more digital learning materials

It’s interesting to compare the current state of teachersā€™ materials with their ideal situation. At the moment 17% of the teachers use half digital / half print materials. However, 38% would prefer to have this combination. The difference in print-only teaching is even more pronounced with 27% of teachers currently teaching with print only, but a mere 1% would like to do so also in the future.Ā  This is firm evidence that demand for digital should grow in the coming years.

“Demand for digital in the blended mix to grow”

Whilst teachers want more digital, as our survey clearly shows, it is worth emphasizing that virtually no-one of our respondents would like to teach with digital-only materials. Currently 3% are doing so, but it is not seen as the optimal state by anybody. What to make of this? Our answer: blended learning models work best.

Santtu Toivonen, Lead Insight Manager, Sanoma Pro

John Martin, CEO, Sanoma Learning