Business of Education in Brazil

A Virtual Rollercoaster: Training through Simulation at SENAI

I can hardly believe that our two week study tour has flown by and I am now back in sunny, yet still freezing, Cambridge Massachusetts. As my classmates have posted, the trip proved to be an incredibly well-planned, jam-packed, crash-course in the Brazilian educational system, culture, and economy.

One of my favorites visits during the trip was to the SENAI Center for Technology, Automation and Simulation in Rio de Janeiro.

A private, non-profit organization, SENAI began in 1942 by developing courses to prepare students to work in all segments of industry across Brazil. SENAI now focuses on skills-based education, preparing students through technical programs that use simulation and augmented reality to build skills needed for a particular job or industry. 

SENAI looks to find and test the best technologies, then effectively integrate those technologies into the classroom. I was impressed by the way the employees spoke about the education process as one necessitating "mutual communication and integration" between the teachers, students, and technology. Everyone seemed to truly understand the importance of "learning how the students learn, and adapting" in order to create the most effective courses, technologies, and learning environments.

We had the unique opportunity to experience some of SENAI's simulation technology first-hand. While we discussed the use of their process simulator for training deep sea oil rig staff at length, once we went into the augmented reality room they let us try out the roller coaster and the solar system simulations. These may be less practical, but they were a lot of fun! What an exciting visit. Thanks for teaching us so much AND giving us a virtual roller coaster ride SENAI!

Dilemmas of Education

According to dictionary.com (which shows up on google’s first page), education is defined as “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life”. Simple (or complicated) as it is, delivering education is not a simple task.

Should education be provided by public or private sector? How do you feel when you hear somebody is making money out of basic services like healthcare and education, which should be provided equally to people? But you also hear stories of UK’s Oxford and Cambridge University screaming out for short of funding for their quality and expensive education system, and raising tuition fees will always be followed by students demonstration. And just go a little bit further to Asia, people would save up or even sell their houses to pay for their kids to go to private international schools.

Should education be profit-driven or quality-driven? Can we actually do both? If a university earns profit, are they guilty for not investing it back to raise the quality of their education? But at least in developing countries, whenever we see a private university with a healthy bottom line on its income statement, that university will coincidentally be the top choice of parents and students. Why can’t the loss-making schools provide better quality?

Should scholarships be means-based or merit-based? Merit-based scholarships encourage students to perform academically and provide support for talented students to further their education. But hold on, many high performers at school do not really need scholarships to fund their studies, even though the honor of receiving scholarships still means a lot to them.

Should education be provided to develop each individual’s unique talents or prepare them to fit in the whole social economic environment? Are good students those who can do well what we teach them to do, and just exactly that, or are they the innovators bringing in new things that the current system has not known about? What should we teach them?

And for that same reason, should education be scaled or be personalized? This question is key to developing a business of education. If we don’t scale, the cost of education is going to be excessively high, any innovative teaching methods can only reach a small group of students. If we don’t personalize education, do we ignore the unique talents of each student and as such, fail to develop them?

Technology and Education

With only two weeks to go before our trip, our Brazil Study Tour class has divided into groups to research a variety of topics related to education in Brazil. My group is looking at the intersection of technology and education. One piece of our research is to find companies and organizations that are using innovative educational technologies. We are also examining how effective, or ineffective, the introduction of computers and other technological tools has been in Brazilian classrooms.

This week we are creating profiles of all the organizations and companies we will visit during our trip to Brazil. I want to highlight one of the companies with a particularly interesting business model: Ezlearn (www.ezlearn.com.br/EN).

Ezlearn is an education technology company based in Rio de Janeiro. The company was founded in April of 2008 with the vision of democratizing access to high quality educational content through the use of low cost distance learning via the Internet. Ezlearn's first product, Meuinglês, is an online product that helps Brazilians learn to speak English. Meuinglês currently has over 25,000 users and more than 400 hours of English content updated daily.

Ezlearn focuses on content, community, and customization in order to build a robust online learning experience offered directly to individual customers as well as to businesses interested in training their employees to speak English. 

I look forward to learning more when we visit Ezlearn during our trip. I am especially interested in understanding how the company incorporates social media and social networking into its online learning model—this is a big part of Ezlearn’s “community” focus. Using social networking is an innovative yet cost effective way allow customers the interaction necessary for developing their English language skills. How effective has this social networking component of Meuinglês been thus far? We will find out during our visit in March!