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To conclude the fourth year of the Master’s Degree in Educational Entrepreneurship, the students presented their final projects on March 23, 2023, during Demoday. The ventures focused on addressing latent educational challenges in Latin American contexts.
This master’s degree from Tecnologico de Monterrey is the first graduate program in Latin America that focuses on developing entrepreneurship in the educational field. During their studies, the students created an entrepreneurial project supported by personalized mentoring and connections with different international, business, governmental, and civil society sectors. The academic training of this program focuses on today’s educational challenges to propose solutions that improve different scenarios.
Dr. Jan Rehák, the national director of the Bachelor’s Degree in Entrepreneurship and professor in the Master’s Degree in Educational Entrepreneurship curriculum, headed this session of Demoday. Project advisors Dr. Roxana Contreras and Professor Eduardo Luévano accompanied him.
The event was attended by special guests who gave feedback to the students regarding their “pitches.” These guests included professor Laura Tamez, online graduate coordinator of the School of Humanities and Education of Tecnologico de Monterrey; Marisol Díaz Infante, coordinator of EdTech Entrepreneurship at the Institute for the Future of Education; César Sánchez, coordinator of EdTech Entrepreneurship of the Institute for the Future of Education; Miguel Rodríguez, manager of Emprendimiento Monterrey; and Dr. Leonardo Glasserman, director of the Master’s program in Educational Entrepreneurship at Tecnologico de Monterrey.
“Pitches are concise, fresh, and direct ways for students to express their learning,” explained Laura Tamez. Jan Rehák kicked off the Demoday and introduced each project consecutively.
The nine initiatives presented were:
ROBI.ai
We are innovation (We I)
Aceleradora de liderazgo para la innovación
Núcleo docente
Ruta emprendedora
Teaching DLI & Co
Ruta MATE_A
Eduplanify
My Virtual International
ROBI.ai – Ernesto León
ROBI.ai is a virtual assistant and educational tutor in social-emotional care. It provides a chatbot with artificial intelligence and a specialized contact center. The assistant serves as a support to achieve students’ mental well-being and improve their school environment.
Since the pandemic, it has been evident that emotions directly influence academic performance and learning. Therefore, this project addresses the emotional conditions affecting the students.
Ernesto León’s challenge was to expand coverage by the Ministry of Education in Panama for students’ timely and rapid mental health diagnoses through a channel available 24 hours a day. ROBI.ai was validated through Telegram, employing a questionnaire for adolescent students in the Psychology curriculum. The population determined that the bot was easy to use.
We Are Innovation (We I) – Alhelí Ávila
We Are Innovation is a corporate exchange and accompaniment training hub. It focuses on developing internal and intrapreneurial talent through educational and social projects. It focuses on leadership, innovation, and creativity and is oriented to developing STEM (science, engineering, technology, and mathematics) and Industry 4.0 skills.
This model’s activities center on gender equity; its instructional design includes synchronous and asynchronous exchanges of experiences, resource availability, and interactive courses, and it links key users.
Alhelí Ávila established an online prototype to connect and develop companies’ human talent and strengthen the management and implementation of educational and social programs focused on STEM. The prototype was validated within the International Congress of Educational Innovation (CIIE) framework, where the solution was pitched to potential customers and collaboration networks.
Aceleradora de liderazgo para la innovación – Andrea Ospina
The Leadership Accelerator for Innovation is a community for women in society and education to harness their creative strengths to transform the world. Through IDEA cards (Spanish acronym for the idea, discovery, focus, and actions), women can see their potential and materialize their ideas.
Andrea Ospina points out that the path of innovation is uphill for women, so she developed this project and validated its effectiveness in a sample of 10 women. She found more profound ways to perfect this resource by analyzing the weaknesses that invalidated the prototype.
Núcleo docente – Beatriz García
Teaching Nucleus is a repository for sharing high-quality open educational resources. To optimize the time teachers invest in research to design their classes, educators can use this tool and make their teaching practices in upper secondary education more professional.
With the validation of this prototype, Beatriz García determined that teachers who search online for valuable materials to teach their lessons can access high-quality Spanish content. In addition, its functions allow teachers to create an account, interact with each other, review and share materials, and download content.
Ruta emprendedora – Cinthya Posso
Entrepreneurial Route is an educational platform where university users can develop entrepreneurial skills. Through innovative training, competitive professionals can produce high-impact projects that become sustainable companies in the long term.
Students choose their level of entrepreneurship through a flexible, personalized microlearning methodology. Cinthya Posso explained that the digital tool has a friendly language for greater adaptability and includes mentoring with experts. Completing each module offers an alternative credential to validate learning.
Teaching DLI & Co – Elizabeth Robles
Teaching DLI & Co. comprises a team of instructional coaches who teach a second language at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. In partnership with teachers, this resource helps improve teaching methods and students’ learning levels for more academic success.
Elizabeth Robles shared that the trainers get a clearer picture of reality thanks to the teachers’ experiences, which help to identify goals, select teaching strategies, monitor students’ progress, and overcome problems that would prevent the fulfillment of learning objectives.
Ruta Mate_A – Hilda Flandez
Ruta Mate_A is the only interactive game to learn mathematics while becoming familiar with the Chilean territory. The platform and mobile application include a three-level tour promoting gamification and exact sciences. With the help of coastal, maritime, and mountain landscapes, users can tour Chile.
The prototype validation among a group of teachers in primary education led to an understanding of which aspects to improve or maintain. Hilda Flandez concluded that its scope allowed changes in the mathematics teaching methodology in primary education while motivating students to engage in mathematics by making it relevant to their reality.
Eduplanify – Lucía Borrego
Eduplanify is a website with a catalog of educational projects in the format of didactic sequences to improve public education in primary schools in Mexico. Its methodologies contribute to the progress of primary education and encourage students’ critical thinking, self-management, collaborative learning, and problem-solving. It fosters lifelong learning and a sense of social responsibility.
The website lists the projects by phases or degrees, training fields or subjects, and urban or rural contexts. Teachers can download didactic sequences, introductory videos, and evaluation rubrics. All activities are designed with Project-Based Learning and Problem-Based Learning methodologies.
Lucía Borrego hopes that in a second phase, courses can be given to educators to create their sequences and build a collaborative network in different schools and scenarios throughout the country.
My Virtual International – Manuel Salinas
My Virtual International is a digital platform and mobile application where users can learn about different parts of the world; it has a free version and a monthly subscription option. Manuel Salinas explains that users can choose a specific region to participate in immersive cultural and entertainment activities through virtuality, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality. Similarly, the user can connect with service providers in their city of residence for food, clothing, and other services.
The advisors of the Masters in Educational Entrepreneurship ended the session by recognizing the students’ efforts during their stays and motivating them for their future paths.
“I wish you the greatest success because you are taking the first step, and it is a path that is just beginning. You will be able to motivate and inspire others to join educational entrepreneurship. I think that now that you take your projects to new markets, internationalize them, and try to positively impact both teachers and students, you will find a reward beyond the monetary. That reward of touching lives is insurmountable,” stated Roxana Contreras.
“The challenge begins where we are truly going to put it into practice, to make this academic project now a company that moves entrepreneurship to a real company, which is sustainable, and which generates economic activity for as many people as possible,” added Eduardo Luévano.
Leonardo Glasserman closed the event with a message of thanks to the students for their contributions with the conviction that, as the projects evolve and improve, they will generate opportunities and have a positive impact.
“The roads, the routes, the iterations that we see are not linear. Surely something must be validated, redone, and pivoted based on contextual circumstances. Whatever happens, I have the confidence as when we imagined this program long ago: we sought to reach moments where the value generated would transcend the economic part, and we know that what we do must be sustainable. Let these be initiatives that generate parallel opportunities or open new paths to what is being done,” Glasserman said.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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