Blippar Education: Building a global, interactive learning community

Having dedicated three years of his life conducting PhD research on augmented reality (AR), Stephen O’ Mahony, above, traded his life of academia for frontline action when he joined the Blippar Education team this month as Education Community Manager. He aims to bring the rigor demanded by academic research to his new role, where understanding peoples’ behaviours and experiences is key to the growth of Blippar’s exciting new educational product suite.

When you’re part of a company that is growing as fast as Blippar, welcoming new team members becomes part of your routine. A mere fortnight into my time here I myself have welcomed people to the fold; such is our number that you come to regard anyone who’s been here for over a year a venerable old hand.

I could scarcely have picked a better time to join Blippar. Following the recent announcement of the company’s successful $45 million funding round and the launch of a new visual browser, the excitement in the air is palpable. Having joined on the eve of the funding announcement, it is hard not to feel like the guy who has arrived into the house just as everyone else has finished moving the back-breaking furniture. That said, I have no intention of riding any coat-tails here; I have joined a growing part of the team that has huge ambition, and in this post I would like to share what we are trying to achieve.

By way of background, we at Blippar are launching a dedicated strategy to apply our technology and expertise to the education sector. We’re really excited about what’s happening in the world of edtech (educational technologies). Moreover, we believe that we have a big role to play in it. Our vision is to help educators to turn learning environments interactive, promoting a more engaging and immersive learning experience. We hope to achieve this by building a suite of three products tailored towards the needs of educators: Educator Blippbuilder, the Educator Dashboard and the global Educator Community.

We firmly believe that these tools will have a transformative impact on education. However, to fulfill this ambition we have to ensure that they are responsive to the unique needs of educators. That is why we have initiated a pilot programme to support the launch of our education strategy. We’re not going to presume to tell educators what features they need to have in a suite of educational tools; we need them to tell us. As Education Community Manager, my primary role is to channel the thoughts and perspectives of our educator community into the development of the product suite.

To do this, we are building a framework to allow us capture those educator insights and transform them into output which will help mould our educational tools. Our aim is to engage in regular feedback sessions with educator participants in the pilot, who are already crafting engaging augmented reality content. It is this collaborative spirit that will allow us to provide the world’s educators with the tools they need to truly enrich learning environments through immersive and engaging experiences.

If you’re an educator and interested in participating in our pilot and helping us develop Blippar’s educational tools into the best they can be for you, visit our Blippar Education page to find out more.