Cerego, ALU target African future leaders with innovation
Cerego, a player in predictive learning technology, has partnered with African Leadership University (ALU) for the 2018 admissions cycle. The integration kicked off in July of this year with the goal of broadening the university's insights into student applicants.
African Leadership University (ALU) is re-imagining education in Africa, building a new generation of ethical and entrepreneurial leaders equipped with 21st century skills to transform the continent.
ALU aims to develop at least 3 million African leaders, problem-solvers and innovators for the continent by 2035.
By integrating students' learning with the real world, empowering students to take ownership of their own learning, equipping each student to think entrepreneurially and employing the most engaging and inspiring learning methods, ALU is pioneering a new take on higher education and leadership development. ALU is focused on expanding access to tertiary education for Africa's growing population of young people.
To reach and assess prospective students, ALU has adopted an alternative approach to the typical university admissions process, incorporating the Cerego platform as core component. Beginning with the Learning Challenge course offered through Cerego, ALU will educate prospective students on the institution, its mission and the skills necessary to become a future African leader - including how to apply ethics and values and more.
Cerego's AI-driven learning platform and data insights will allow ALU to simultaneously educate prospective students and to measure their diligence, agility and overall understanding of the information.
This 360-degree view of each potential applicant will be used in conjunction with an English language proficiency test and application forms to admit students. Content on Cerego is offered on desktop and mobile and is available offline, making the application process more accessible.
"Partnering with ALU speaks to the core of what we're trying to do with Cerego, which is to help increase human potential," said Andrew Smith Lewis, co-founder and CEO of Cerego. "Ultimately, by delivering content through Cerego to a larger pool of applicants and applying the subsequent actionable insights to the university, we are able to broaden both access to the application process and the true view of individual applicants to this unique program."
Cerego offers a solution that can reach and measure students across Africa in a standardized way. The course focuses on delivering a mix of content that measures learning agility rather than just knowledge recall.
Using Cerego helps the admissions process become more scalable and less reliant on traditional signaling factors, such as the reputation of a student's secondary school, providing all applicants the opportunity to show their learning abilities. Over 1,300 applicants are currently using Cerego in the process.
"The partnership with Cerego represents an opportunity for us to enhance the quality of our admissions process while making it more scalable and user-friendly," said Fred Swaniker, Founder and CEO of ALU. "Never before have we been able to assess learning agility of prospective applicants while also educating them about who we are and what we stand for. This will allow us not only to make better decisions, but it will also allow applicants to better understand whether ALU is a fit for them or not. The early results are already very promising."
Cerego is being used with over 1,000 universities in the United States with plans to continue expanding offerings internationally.
Cognitive science and artificial intelligence drive the platform's algorithms to deliver actionable information to administrators and professors using Cerego in an academic setting.
