EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

For over two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way professionals think, work, and communicate. Especially in education, an emergency switch to online teaching and learning has been observed. NGO Academy, the largest education provider for social enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe, realized that this crisis created various digitalization opportunities that will help them migrate from online emergency to long-term innovative education.

Goal

The mid-term goal of this consulting project was to gain a deep understanding of the education technology industry and the innovation opportunities that can be leveraged to improve learning, teaching, networking, and organizing in an online environment. Based on the identified needs of NGO Academy’s stakeholders, the long-term aim was to provide NGO Academy with a toolset and strategic action plan to transform their prior Moodle environment into an innovatively customized online platform. On this platform, users experience the organizational processes and interface as convenient and straightforward. They build their own community with diverse opportunities to connect and exploit creative and engaging means to learn and teach in a digital setting.

Methodology

NGO Academy’s online environment is split into three sub-environments: learning and teaching, networking, and organizing. In order to understand the needs of all three stakeholders (students, teachers, and administrators) within these environments, as well as general innovation opportunities in the industry of education technology, a range of primary and secondary data research was done. Specifically, three expert interviews, three teacher interviews, four student interviews, one student survey, as well as extensive research into industry reports and academic literature were conducted. Furthermore, a total of four user tests took place not only to evaluate NGO Academy’s current Moodle platform performance but also to identify the Moodle-specific needs and opportunities for improvement.

Results

The final result of the project was the identification of 12 stakeholder needs, as well as an extensive road map with a total of 10 plug-ins and four process innovations that enable NGO Academy to improve their three online environments within an own customized Moodle environment.

Cooperation Partner

• NGO Academy (https://ngoacademy.net/)
  Social Entrepreneurship Center
  WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business)
  Welthandelplatz 1, D2
  1020, Vienna, Austria

Contact Person

• Marianne Mann - marianne.mann@wu.ac.at

• Martin Mehrwald - martin.mehrwald@wu.ac.at

Student Team

• Csenge Bács

• Ádám Dévai

• Philippa Helfrich

• Nikolay Koroshev

• Anna Kovacs

• Antonia Ludwig

Project Manager

• Dipl.-Kff. Tina Marie Monelyon  

• Tuong-Vi Sophie Quach, M.A.