O3 – Educational Pyramid Scheme

One of the biggest challenges in education is to improve key competences and digital skills. Therefore many initiatives on European and national level are set, all of them facing similar problems: finding an effective way to bring innovation to school and to reach as many people as possible and identifying a practicable solution fostering the intended competencies. So far, little is known on how to overcome these challenges. To meet these challenges, the intellectual output O3 aims at trasferring a well-known concept from the field of commerce to the field of education: the pyramid scheme, originally a selling and marketing scheme. This will be effective for education, too, as we use two very effective ways of learning: the first one is discovery learning, which benefits from the automatic pattern recognition of our brain, that can automatically extract rules, structures etc. from good and expressive examples. The second one is learning by teaching. This way of learning is effective because explaining something to others means retrieving information from the long-term memory, which is new input for the brain, and starting the memory process from the beginning. That is why information is stored more deeply and sustainably.

Innovation: The pyramid scheme is well known as commercial concept, but definitely innovative in the field of education.

Impact: The benefit for those who teach (teachers, educators, students, pupils): learning by teaching is a very effective learning method because retrieving knowledge from the memory, which is necessary in this case.

Transferability: The pyramid scheme can be transferred to all situations where knowledge is taught in small groups but shall reach a large final target group.