Origins
We began our journey at the University of Agder, 7 years ago, working under the e-learning expert & physics professor Per-Henrik Hogstad. Ever since, we’ve dedicated our lives to radically improving education. First, as a research team. And eventually, after getting backed by the Research Council of Norway, as a company. As we built our first prototypes of a learning platform, it soon became evident that a major bottleneck needs to be solved first, before other aspects of education can be dealt with successfully...
A Shorter-Term Mission
To improve education, we first need to bridge the gap. The gap that you feel right now. The gap between industry and education. Why? The reasons are many. Here’s a few of the top ones:
- Without clear input from industry, students are stuck with unrealistic expectations. This creates a mismatch between supply and demand, which in turn force highly educated stuents to take low-paying jobs.
- Increasing automation requires more rapid adjustment of curriculums. To do so, the state of industry plus a prediction of it’s future demands needs to be accounted for; faster & better.
Bridging this gap is a technically challenging, systemic problem. And as a team with a strong R&D base, we love that. We’ve worked hard to prove that it’s possible. And now we aim to empower hidden IT talent to turn possibility into reality.
The Long-Term Vision
There's a saying: "be stubborn on your destination, but flexible on how you get there." We've been stubborn about our destination for a long time. Often to our own peril. We're a purpose-driven company. Profit is important, because it measures if the market wants what you build, and it forces you to be efficient. And profit is a great way to propel us towards a positive contribution to society. But what we really care about, at the end of the day, after everyone has gotten their money, is if we made a difference to people in need. If we made the world a better place. If we changed lives for the better.
Here's our vision, which has been guiding us from the year DIGGIT was founded, co-created by the company's 3 original founders (Magnus Lysfjord, Tarek Rahou & Simen Fossnes):
"DIGGIT, as a company, is actively developing services, tools and technologies that contribute towards closing the gap between industry and education. The motivation and value upon which the Company has been built is usefulness. The key of any country’s societal development is based on education. It is how a generation of people pass its knowledge, know-how and values to the next one.
This is why we're working to accelerate the advent of a new educational system, pillared on the advances in technology that will enable exploratory learning, personalized learning experiences tailored to each individual, and the most stimulating education in the world; verified by our algorithms.
This system will serve as an alternative to the current education system, allowing for a seamless and gradual, piece-by-piece transition. And through building this new system, we allow for the change of our current societal dogma of school and learning being perceived as necessarily boring and hard, into school and learning being AWESOME."