With 01Edu, his newest edtech platform for innovative teacherless schools, Nicolas co-founded an accessible and high-quality school movement which features collective intelligence and peer-to-peer based learning.

All applicants of Pathfinders Program 1.0, the primary program of UAEU Expo 2020, went through the 01 Edu, Piscine Method, a competitive two-week bootcamp being the first to be applied in the UAE. Taking a radically different approach than the classic teaching methods today; no teachers, no classes, learning is facilitated through a peer-to-peer learning and co-créative process in a professional environment.

We spoke with the co-founder of 01 Edu, and the founder of the Piscine Method, Nicolas Sadirac and learned more.

Recruiters have identified a worrying misalignment between graduate know-how and the industry’s demands. How does the 01 Edu address that gap?

Today, especially after Covid, we are in an industry that needs innovative and creative people, whereas the traditional education system tends to produce people who are rather repeaters with a learning process based on duplication, accumulation of learning knowledge and ability to re-apply previously found solutions. This ultimately produces passive people who are more into repeating processes than into creating new solutions.

At 01Edu we clearly aim to put creativity and practicality in the centre of the talent learning experience. Within this framework, we develop human capital by producing talent who do not necessarily know everything, but who are problem solvers. They learn how to learn, know how to look for information when they need it and implement solutions. They have a logic of purpose in what they do.

How does learning to code help upskill the future generation, in your opinion?

What is important to us at 01Edu is that future generations move from this passive state to an active state of learning, and coding is a great way to do this.

Digital is everywhere and code will enable the next generation to be more in phase with their environment.

It's not so much about learning to code. It's more about how you learn it. Hence during this 15-days Piscine we tried to extract the knowledge part as much as possible and to give as much space as possible to the collective work and the co- creative capacity of each person.

What is the market acceptability of graduates skilled at 01 Edu?

I invented this education model 25 years ago and since then, trained more than 25 000 young students who are shaping the new digital world. Some work for the most innovative companies in the world (Facebook, Tesla, Snapchat, Google), many have created their own company (Lumapps, Docker, Melty).

As a consequence, I’m confident in the high acceptability of graduates who are creative talent with an aptitude to shape the market.

What are the shortcomings of the traditional education system?

Today, our educational system (and consequent professional insertion) has only the appearance of meritocracy.

The traditional school trains in skills useful to the society of yesteryear: ability to memorize, to reproduce instructions, obedience and discipline... and selects by overvaluing academic results disconnected from a changing professional world.

In reality, our system is not meritocratic. It rewards only a very narrow typology of skills that have little to do with intelligence, and it struggles to identify a large number of potential talents that it tends to put aside by contributing very little to the social elevator.

The traditional school is now leaving too many talents on the side of the road.

We believe that we cannot engage in the digital transformation with a system that organizes the present and the future exclusion of a growing number of talents and of those who do not adapt to this outdated model.

At 01Edu, we advocate a more meritocratic approach with a mission to redistribute opportunities through coding, especially for young who are usually excluded from the traditional school system. The 01Edu platform training program provides its talents with the technical language, mindset, networks, collective intelligence and experience required to feed the future needs of companies with their talents.

What does the future of education look like?

We want the future of education to be co-creative, collaborative, supportive, diverse and inclusive!

Firstly, education must and will be increasingly oriented around creativity and co-creativity. We have reached a level of complexity of issues that require collective results. It is clear that the limit of individual creativity has been reached. Everything that was possible to invent individually has already been invented. Today, we need groups of collective intelligence capable of finding solutions that are much more adapted and complex than individuals.

Secondly, education is usually very competitive, we put individuals in competition, we classify them, we grade them against each other, we create a kind of competition. We are in a logic where we put individuals against each other, whereas in reality, it is by functioning collectively that we become the most efficient. The education of the future must therefore be more inclusive and reaffirm human values and supportive behaviour.

How do you see the University of Future aligned with the 3C’s of 01 Edu System?

At 01Edu, as the University of the Future, we believe in the development of human capital and their potential through collective learning, interactions and creativity

We are deeply convinced that no one should be left behind, that is how we will achieve a fairer, more diverse and better world.

The University of Future addresses the question of what kind of education will generate leaders of tomorrow. It is essential to find a solution to cohabit and live together properly. These are issues of great complexity that require very specific soft skills that are rarely developed in traditional universities.

And this is why 01Edu is aligned and committed with the University of Future Programme to rethinking and reshaping the world of tomorrow.

Would you like to share your feedback about your experience with the Pathfinders?

It was extremely interesting to meet students during this programme and see how they would take the coding experience of the Discovery Piscine.

Most of them had no previous coding experience and didn’t know exactly why they would take a coding course as the induction to the Pathfinders program.

But they had authentic awareness regarding the need for deep change and understood their mission. And in particular a need for seeking meaning in what they do, and not just being in a competitive system that they don't understand. Eventually, they understood why coding and computational thinking was so important to build tomorrow’s world.