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Meet AKTO, The First Global Sports Career eLearning Platform
By Sherman Morrison
November 18, 2019
What is arguably the world’s first eLearning platform devoted exclusively to the sports industry–AKTO–was officially launched in October to help young people from developing countries achieve their dreams of a career in the sports industry. While sports career eLearning in and of itself is not a new idea, an eLearning platform designed for and devoted to this singular purpose is.
AKTO Sports Career eLearning Platform
With a motto of “Play Your Future,” AKTO aims to help prepare youth for employment opportunities to grab their own slice of a global sports industry pie worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And the way it’s going to achieve this goal is through eLearning.
The platform will feature content developed and certified by experts from within the sports industry, delivered most often in the form of animated videos thought to be especially appealing to its youth-aged target market. Gamification features will also be prominent in order to keep student engagement high and evoke a healthy level of competition among learners.
Topics will cover key areas of the sports industry such as marketing, finance and governance. You can think of it as vocational training to prepare for directly entering the sports workforce, and/or as specialized pre-learning to help them get into a bachelor’s or master’s degree program in higher education.
Learners will have the opportunity to customize their learning path through an open model framework, with content doled out in a microlearning approach based on 3-minute videos. The company website is in its early stages of development and says pricing will be affordable but doesn’t give details. Learning takes place through the AKTO mobile app available for iOS devices from the App Store and Android devices through Google Play.
More than Just eLearning
Everyone knows there’s more to developing a successful career than just learning. AKTO recognizes this and plans to help learners work towards concrete job opportunities by facilitating direct relationships between leaners and potential employers. Employers could be federations, clubs, leagues or specific team properties. But in an interesting move, qualification for internship and job interview opportunities hinges upon learner performance and engagement. Only the top-ranking students will be eligible for those opportunities. After all, sports are competitive if nothing else.
Initial Geographic Focus
AKTO isn’t rolling out in all global markets at the same time. Its initial focus is beta testing in Cape Verde with the blessing of the Cape Verde Government, the University of Cape Verde, and the country’s entire sports ecosystem. When beta testing is complete, AKTO will be launched in addition markets, including Portugal at the end of 2019, Brazil in the first quarter of 2020, Mexico and other Latin American countries in late 2020, Africa and the Middle East in 2021, and then India and China in 2022.
Featured Image: Abigail Keenan, Unsplash.
I am a former summit learning teacher in Holyoke, MA. I can tell you, unequivocally, that the entire platform stinks. It is not even a curriculum, it is a hodgepodge resources lifted from Khan Academy, youtube, Engage NY, IXL lessons, scanned textbook pages, and other unrelated sources. These materials are often not aligned to common core standards, they are often of poor quality, they include numerous broken links. Students are expected to independently take notes as they work, but no consideration has been given to the lexile levels of readings so the material is often completely inaccessible to students. The math curriculum is devoid of any meaningful direct instruction. Many students disengage within a couple of weeks and spend most of their time browsing the internet or gaming instead of learning. As they fall behind, they see their home screen turn more and more red, causing greater frustration and discouragement. Students become so screen addicted that they rebel any time a teacher attempts to give them direct instruction. Worse yet, the necessity of teacher training in the platform’s usage necessitates the hiring of several consultants and coaches, many of whom explicitly state that their primary objective is to prove the platform viable so that it may grow to more school districts. Ultimately, school administrators are pressured to increase scores of online tests (many of which students attempt literally dozens of times over), so they pressure teachers to take tests with their students to ensure a passing grade. Essentially, schools are falsifying data to ensure Summit’s growth. Given that Summit pitches its product as a turnaround model for struggling urban schools, its practices are essentially exploitative.