How Social Media & Game Mechanics Can Motivate Students

Link: How Social Media & Game Mechanics Can Motivate Students

Patrick Supanc is the President of College and Career Readiness at Pearson, where he focuses on new market development, digital innovation and product strategy. He has been a teacher in Indonesia, an education policy adviser at the World Bank and UN, and led K-12 market development at Blackboard….

Break the Digital Divide the African Way

Cameroonian android developers would love this one, a great way to start a post right…well a lot of thinking has been going on in the pulse team on ideas that will bring a real change to African education, and this particular idea which we expect to roll during the Pilot phase of Pulse was pitched in by one of our advisers.

University Professors who are to enroll in our pilot program will each receive an Android tablet PC, and this lands well as Cameroon prepares the Android Developer Challenge,

this will therefore be an opportunity for the developers to distribute their app and even monetize , Crazy idea or not, you may think, but we expect to introduce this feature later to all university students through university partnerships. We are so excited at the prospect of this feature and we hope the African and especially Cameroonian developers will find methods make extreme use of this. The reason why we are doing this is because we constantly question the status quo of higher education. Books , textbooks and pens though still valuable resources of our education,have had their time, today we starting a lil revolution, aiming digitize our educational resources, notes, textbooks, provide them to students. it will take time, money and effort to get this done, but we are going to start now.

Where will we take money to do this and are Tablets Pc not supposed to be expensive, well you are right, though we are still bootstrapped, we should be able to pull this over, so the team members Nara, Quincy, James, Horace and William are really putting all what they can to make this come life and yes tablets are expensive the average $300, but we are eying entry level devices (~$50 - ~$100) and we plan to start with the university of Buea, and will progressively extend to other universities. So if you are a developer and you are thinking, “Why come to Pulse, I can submit directly to the android market,” well you are 100% right, but think about your app coming pre-installed and potentially available to over 100,000 students.

• Will Pulse be selling Tablets ? No.


• Will these Tablet PC’s, be crucial for our platform to work ? No.

The Pulse platform will first and foremost work on the web and mobile,this feature just adds to break the digital divide the African way , we don’t even expect universities to get on board yet, but that shouldn’t stop us.

Now back to reality, do you think when we say we expect to give androids tablets to the professors who are to enroll in our pilot program, we may be joking or just trying to foster hype ? Well guys, No, as I speak write this post, I have ordered a my tablet and it should be arriving the US in a week or so, and later, all things being equal we expect to get our first shipment to Cameroon by the June-July.
Update : september -october 

If you are a developer and you are interested in looking into this, please drop us a note at android@pulse.cm #LesWaysFort my friend @izanefg will say, but we are strong believers of the pulse project and we shall continue provide news way to make things easier for the users.

I shall be explaining in later post,what we expect do with this Tablets, but right now, we just had to share this.

What is the Pulse Project ?

For sometime now,we’ve been secretly working on the #pulseproject, untill now!!!.So what is pulse ? and how did start ?

We started Pulse with  the idea to create a social network for the university of Buea, but after realizing a vast majority of African universities had no form of online student services, and how students depended solely on notice boards, in-class announcements and mouth to mouth communication, we decided it was time we did something about it.

Pulse is a social/geo-location platform aimed at connecting African universities, professors to their students. In order words, we trying to make African education look cool, Pulse will provide a platform where any university can own and operate its own high-end online students services at a low cost, without having to deploy any technical infrastructure, it will permit lecturers to communicate faster and cheaper to their students and lastly it will enable students to receive updates from their teachers and classmates through sms, web and email. We are building only for these category of universities and of course we taking into consideration the realities of African users, that means for us, that our platform will be centered around the mobile experience.

When will Pulse be ready? well follow us on twitter to know @dynastypulse

We made it to the Finals of MIT100k Competition

We are so happy to announced that our project was selected to be one of the finalists at the MIT100K YouPitch Competition. we also wish to congratulate the other applicants who made it to the finals e.g Investours (Havard) , NeuroPal (JohnHopkins), Ear(MIT). MIT100K entrepreneurship competition seeks to support entrepreneurs from all around the world who have great ideas and who give them the opportunity for top notch Investors listen to their pitch. For us  at Pulse, we sought to democratize education through the use of basic ICT tools in cheap and affordable way throughout Africa. We know this change can’t be done alone and thus the challenges that lay ahead are really enourmous, but so far we have alot of great feedback, encouraging us to continue in our project and this competition will allow us to meet great people, investors and mentors who may shape and advice us on different paths to take.

Well what is next step you may ask, we should be receiving the finals results tonight after the Judge and Renown entrepreneur Brad Feld has passed his decision.

Also this is a video explaining the purpose of the Pulse project.