Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SpeakUp-LearnUp (Minimizing Bullying and Harassment with SpeakUp LearnUp!)

Teaser

The vision of Speak UP! - Learn UP!We want to give young people a voice and teachers the tools to stem youth violence.The UN Convention on the Right of the Child and UNCRC, Article 19: Protection from ALL forms of violence states “Children have the right to be protected from...

Summary

The vision of Speak UP! - Learn UP!

We want to give young people a voice and teachers the tools to stem youth violence.

The UN Convention on the Right of the Child and UNCRC, Article 19: Protection from ALL forms of violence states “Children have the right to be protected from being hurt and mistreated, physically or mentally.”
However, we can unfortunately conclude that the reality is not mirroring the Convention. Bullying & Cyber bullying, sexual harassment, racism and multi cultural differences are widespread serious forms of violence, happening around the world. Statistics show that this has become a global health crisis that are impacting the society, resulting in life long psychological problems, social exclusion and enormous costs for the society. It is important for society to stop this epidemic.

With Stand UP!, Speak UP! & Learn UP!, we provide a unique solution that consists of three tools: Our Speak UP! mobile app offers students of all ages a way to quickly and anonymously report any type of bullying or dangerous behaviours to their school or university. This information is collected in a database that the school or university easily can overview and decide on relevant actions.
Learn UP! is a digital education platform that allows teachers and coaches to access ideas about which programs to implement to solve bullying and other conflicts.
Stand UP! Is our stage for young people to express their ideas and share them with other young people around the world.

The Non-Violence Education International AB team is composed of experts who combine science, business, communications and education. Our team has the necessary business and technical experience to achieve excellence. We will offer the Speak UP! - Learn UP! - Stand UP! platform to all schools, universities, sport clubs and other after school settings.

Our solution will increase academic performance, tolerance, respect, cultural competence, break the code of silence and lead to cost savings due to happier, psychologically healthier youngsters. The overall objective is to reach as many schools, sport clubs and after school settings as possible and offer them a safety tool to create a healthier environment.

Work performed

Speak UP!

From the outcome, understanding the potential and need in the market, we conducted test of functionality of the Speak UP app and registered necessary changes that we needed to do in order to create an increased user experience. These changed include both technical as well as content related enhancements. We also researched customer preferences in term of how they perceive today\'s challenges, facing increased bullying and cyberbullying, sexual harassment, racism, etc. all in all this exercise resulted in some 20 improvements that we are planning to implement.

We have also found that there are different needs how each school and/or school district want to manage the system. We have created a structure that makes it possible to have an assigned single responsible individual all the way to multi responsibilities as well as aggregated information from a number of schools so the school authorities can get an overview of the health situation in their school district.

The issue of security and how to handle personal data will be changed mid 2018, based on the new GDPR regulations. We have involved the right expertise to guide us on these issues and we will be well prepared once the new regulations will be implemented.

Learn UP!

We will start to include the basic education offer, proven to work through years of analogue implementation by the work of the Non-Violence Project. Schools for Peace, Level 1-3 as well as Sports for Peace, Level 1-3 are programs that schools and the sport infrastructure need to start implementing, to establish a consistent violence prevention education program in their school or sport environment. In addition through the research we have done, and witnessing the dramatic increase in bullying and cyberbullying, it is also necessary to add a specific bully and cyberbullying program from the start, that can both support the school, its management, teachers, and parents as well as sport coaches, and youth leaders within sports. In our research over 90% of the respondents stated that they needed a comprehensive content to fight bullying on all levels. Further more we will also develop a promo-program “10 ways to avoid being bullied”, which we will make available as a comic strip type of “tip-program” for students and athletes to download.

Through Q&A with teachers we have found that they expect an easy, step by step solution that all teachers can handle, meaning that both teachers that have less tech experience as well as teachers that are familiar with a digital learning environment can use the system. In discussions with teachers, we have also found that some teachers would prefer to be able to take part of the introduction of the education content in an electronic book format. Consequently we will start adding Beta versions of the Peace Programs in an e-book format, to understand if this is a good additional way to service schools and the sport infrastructure with relevant program content.

For students we have found that to get across with a strong message in a digital format, the content has to be entertaining, proactive and include a story/characters or similar, something that our main target audience easily can relate to.

Learn Up! will also feature a monitoring system how well and in what way users complete courses. The majority of programs we offer are built on interactive exercises that the students do in their classroom.
In the learning process for teachers, sport coaches, volunteers, etc, to be able to deliver an inspiring and motivating lecture to youth, they will after each exercise they complete, have to answer a quiz, which indicates if they have understood the essence of that specific exercise. If they do not complete the quiz, they will not get access to the next exercise. And if they quit in the middle of the e-learning session, the system will remind and inspire the user to continue. By the end of the course, once you completed all exercises for a specific course, you

Final results

Since all our competitors are focusing on the reporting feature, giving communities and authorities the possibility to gather information, we focus primarily on giving students a voice AND servicing schools and the sport infra structure with an “incident management system” so they can both get the information, measure incidents, how their responses to incidents are managed, as well as monitor the results of any decided action. To support this, we also offer a digital prevention library of evidence based education programs and an e-learning classroom making it possible for a teacher, a sport coach or somebody else responsible to prepare and be able to deliver an inspiring prevention education to their youth.

Our Stand Up! feature will become a stage for inspiration, where young people can upload self- generated content and post their views and suggestions for solutions, inspirational, relevant and engaging content such as films, music, pod casts form around the world, creating a community of good examples.

The global education market is valued at $7 billion and in the next 2-4 years, digital text book sales will grow to represent more than 50% of the market.
No competitor before has combined the facts and insights of a digital reporting application with an easy to use digital library within an e-learning platform and a self-expression stage.

In 2024, Stand UP!, Speak UP! & Learn UP! is projected to have impacted approximately 8,800 schools, 750,000 teachers and 4,400,000 students. Our mission is to combat the epidemic of bullying, cyberbullying and youth violence in general. By addressing emotional abuse and bullying and other forms of violence at an early age, our future generations will be equipped with tools to solve conflicts non-violently.

Our system will not solve all the problems, but we know for a fact that bullying, sexual harassment, violence, drug use in school will initiate traumas and physical illness. According to Child Protection Hub, the Global economic loss from violence against children is 7 trillion dollars
If our system can stop part of this international health crisis at an average cost of € 3,00/ student it is for sure worthwhile the investment.
Based on Prof Ingvar Nilsson study; “Focus on the Individual - An once prevention is better than a pound of cure”, one can conclude that preventive initiatives and actions will result in a 336% return on investment.

Apart from offering a unique combination including a communication tool and a digital education library, we believe that the statistics emerging from each user’s report system could be utilized to gather and understand trends in Europe and how we can solve these health issues in a constructive way. In addition, we are sure that young people that will sign up and use the Speak UP! app will also through the feature Stand Up! reach out across borders and share ideas and thoughts about how to create a healthier society.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.nonviolence-education.com/.