Edquip in Jury for WorldDidac Award

How we got involved

In June 2023 the WorldDidac Team reached out to Edquip, enquiring about whether Timo Wohlin-Elkovsky wanted to join the expert jury for the biennial WorldDidac Award, because his knowledge and experience makes him a good candidate for this role.

-          No hesitation, straight answer, of course we wanted to be part of the Jury!

For those of you who do not know, WorldDidac was founded in 1952 and has been the foremost industry association for the education resources industry, where education comes together.

Throughout the years Worlddidac has been organizing educational shows, trade missions, forums, and conferences in different countries around the world including Vietnam, China, Mexico, Thailand, Kazakhstan, India, Russia, Hong Kong, South Africa, UAE etc.

WorldDidac has been working closely with UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, and many more international organizations championing global education.

When being asked by such a prestigious organization to help judge the education products submitted to the WorldDidac Award, there is no doubt – we have to say yes.

Purpose of the WorldDidac Award

The purpose of the WorldDidac Award is to motivate manufacturers of educational products to develop high quality and innovative instructional materials.

The Organization strives to ensure that the WorldDidac Award is recognized as an accolade of excellence by maintaining a high standard and promoting continuous improvement.

Being an Expert Jury Member

Being a jury member requires a lot of commitment, including reviewing submissions and preparing for the physical attendance at a weeklong marathon of product-pitches in Bern, Switzerland.

The preparation requires a thorough analysis of each submission, reading countless documents and presentations, and preparation of questions, both for the applicants, and for the jury discussions.

Digital products are accessed and tested before the evaluation week, while physical products are demonstrated physically or remotely during the presentations at the evaluation week in Bern.

Each product submission is presented in front of the jury in 20-minute live pitches, followed by questions from the Jury. After the presentation the Jury withdraws for an internal conversation, before each Jury member sets their own rating, according to pre-defined evaluation criteria.

Before the evaluation week the products were also tested by teachers, who left their rating accordingly, and these ratings are weighted in with the ratings of the expert Jury.

Winners were then formally announced at the big award ceremony at the WorldDidac conference in Bern in November 2023.

Our takeaway

Being requested to join the Award Jury is a professional honor. This group of international experts have so much experience from different types of formal, and informal education, primary, secondary, post-secondary, vocational, and lifelong learning.

The biggest wow-factor, which again and again highlighted the experience from the Jury, was the internal Jury conversations after each 20-minute pitch. The crowd sourced intelligence with different experts input highly enriched the context in which each product was then rated.

Being able to humbly contribute to these conversations was highly rewarding. Especially when evaluating instructional technology for skills-based education, products designed for technical & vocational education and training (TVET).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the applicants who submitted their products to the WorldDidac Award and demonstrated continuous improvement and innovation of instructional materials.

We would also like to thank the members of the expert Jury for their time and effort. We had so many excellent conversations, lots of qualitative learning, and great camaraderie among the group.

We would further like to thank the WorldDidac team, who invited us to be part of the Jury, and practically organized the full evaluation week in Bern. Thank you to the team which made this all possible.

Finally, we would like to thank the sponsors, for their generous support of the WorldDidac Award, and their commitment to improving education worldwide, your support matters.