Inspiration
As PhD students in the health sciences, we found ourselves in the need of replacing our bench-based activities with home office due to the COVID-19 outbreak. As researchers, it is important to keep ourselves updated with the latest scientific developments in our field. Scientific meetings are one of the most relevant venues for exchange of knowledge and networking. Nonetheless, these events have been cancelled under the travel restrictions arising from this crisis. A way around it has been to stream these events online, where other webinars and online courses are also available to continue developing professional skills. However, universities, companies and other content providers announce their events on their own websites, making it difficult to keep track and, in some cases, find relevant events. Moreover, websites attempting to organize this information in one place are somehow difficult to navigate or do not cover enough e-learning options. For these reasons, we thought that an easily accessible, all-in-one platform that provides direct links to the health sciences events taking place daily worldwide could be significantly beneficial.
What it does
Skill-up Daily provides an all-in-one integrated platform with all the relevant scientific events taking place around the globe. By using our easy event-finder you will know what is out there. Our platform will not only benefit people interested in attending online scientific events. Conference organisers, seminar lecturers, companies, and researchers in the field will be able to upload information about their upcoming online events and gain broader exposure. Additionally, the search tool will provide the users with the possibility of finding specific learning materials of their interest, by filtering results by category and field. This feature will also allow for finding non-time-sensitive materials such as courses and recorded webinars.
With Skill-up Daily we want to provide users with a community-based experience promoting and encouraging science dissemination at all levels. Using our star-based reward system users will be encouraged to “skill-up” their knowledge in order to discover top famous scientists in the shape of badges.
Challenges we run into
When developing Skill-up Daily platform we had to face a number of challenges to design and create a user-friendly platform integrating all our desired features. Our main challenge has been how to gather all the events available into an all-in-one user-friendly platform due to our limited skills in web development.
Accomplishments
Skill-up Daily helps researchers simplify their e-learning agenda and save time while helping content providers and organisers to share their events and increase their audience. Creating a broad community to share science and learn.
What's next
In future updates, we would like to collaborate with young researchers in our ‘Ambassador Program’, where students will be taking charge of Skill-up Daily’s social media accounts to share their own true experience using our platform. Furthermore, we would like to provide a broader range of online events along with bringing to our users a personalised experience with recommendations and the option to synchronize their calendars to get notifications for events taking place.
Future Business plan
- Key partners: Online courses platforms, Science events organizers such as European Union,s ITNs and ETNs, web-development experts, universities, marketing team
- Key activities: Keep the platform updated with the latest available scientific learning opportunities.
- Key resources: Website
- Value proposition: All-in-one platform that provides easy access to science events daily.
- Cost structure: Salaries (web developers, marketing), website fee(domain)
- Revenue streams: Ads
- Channels: online (website, e-mails)
- Customer relations: scientists, the general public interested in science
- Customer segments: early-stage researchers (phds), post-doctoral researchers
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