Nisai Education Trust
Nisai Education Trust’s mission is to advance the education of the public in general – and particularly amongst teachers and educationalists – on the subject of online and blended education, to promote research for the public benefit in all aspects of that subject and to publish the useful results.
Online learning provides an opportunity to meet the targets of the UN SDG30 Goal 4 (Education) at scale and ‘ensure equal access to education and training for the vulnerable’. (UN 2018)
What we do
Online education in developed and developing nations has often been defined by ‘edu-tech’ companies and their relationship to the traditional education providers (schools, colleges). The model used is one that is geared to working at scale with little personalisation for learners and their individual needs and contexts, creating inequalities in the benefits realised.
This inequity particularly impacts vulnerable learners, who have a variety of barriers to accessing the education system due to individual learning needs or disabilities, economic or social circumstance, or lack of digital accessibility or digital literacy.
Nisai Education Trust carries out proofs of concept and action research into effective models of online education that meet the needs of the most vulnerable learners accommodate their individual characteristics and contexts.
Develops professional understanding of best practice in:
the organisation and leadership of online education,
the development of pedagogy and the curriculum for online and blended education for vulnerable groups.
Learning from Nisai Education Trust’s activity is published for public benefit, targeting teachers and educationalists, to improve future educational provision for vulnerable learners.
Our Partners
“At Nisai Education Trust we really believe in the power of innovation in education. The past 25 years have seen the start of a revolution in how we think about education and in how we relate to technology – all borne out in the response around the world to the Covid-19 pandemic. But there are huge questions to answer around how we are going to harness the innovation, and how new technologies will interface with more traditional education structures as we move forward. Our hope is that we can make some contribution to the understanding of online and blended learning, and share it widely with educators. If you share that vision, please do get in touch!”
Paul Keenleyside
Executive Director, Nisai Education Trust
Our Projects
In early 2020 everyone experienced a changed world – and needed to know more about delivering learning online through the pandemic. During 2020 and 2021, we dedicated ourselves to reaching out to educators to share our knowledge, and to ensuring that the projects we had begun were successful. You can see information about our projects below.
The NET Innovation Webinars
Watched by over 1200 practitioners in 4 continents, the NET webinars became a phenomenon during the Covid-19 pandemic when practitioners needed to support a range of students remotely and we are continuing the accessibility and collaboration that they became known for. The webinars bring together academic experts from the Universities of Bristol, Oxford Brookes and Toronto and outstanding practitioners in learner engagement and wellbeing. We aim to strike up rich conversations and provide a source of information and expertise.
The webinars cover topics such as the how innovation and agility in online education can reduce the challenges faced by learners with additional needs, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, supporting DME/2e learners in alternative provision and realising the potential of vulnerable learners.
Our small team is a group of driven, detail-oriented people who are passionate about their customers.
