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Nelson tech start up prospering with on-line kids learning, in a challenging new world

Contributor
By Contributor
September 22nd, 2020

Rising to the educational challenges posed by these unprecedented times, a prospering Nelson tech start up is aiming to make a splash this week with school kids from the West Kootenay and all around the world.

Called LIVE IT, the company is the only on-line learning platform in Canada that offers students, teachers and families learning opportunities about the natural world, with digital field trips that take them from sea to space — and as of Thursday, September 24, a beloved waterway on Kootenay Lake’s North Shore.

Kokanee Creek Provincial Park’s Kokanee salmon spawning channel and the lake’s most famous species will be featured Thursday, at 10 a.m. in English, and 11 a.m in French.

The show will be provided to LIVE It subscribers, which includes School District 8 and many other educational clients internationally.

“With school districts having cancelled field trips this year due to the pandemic, this is a great alternative,” says LIVE IT co-founder Mike Irvine. “This is what we do — take kids inside experiences and help them inhabit new worlds, without even having to leave their classrooms.”

Local students then get to ask their questions via Twitter, and experts including Senior Naturalist at the Kokanee Creek Nature Centre Joanne Siderius and other BC scientists will answer them, in real time.

LIVE IT produces a series of eight interactive episodes per school year including lessons that take kids up close and personal with wildlife, trek them to lava-spewing volcanoes and choppy Arctic waters with Indigenous guides and explore issues like natural resource transition, ocean plastics and wildfires.

The company has recently increased its local staff to seven, including Irvine and Nelson co-founder Melissa Welsh.

Around the world, the on-line educational sector is booming.

According to Forbes magazine, pre-pandemic, the on-line education market was estimated to be worth $350 billion by 2025. But now, faced with the new realties and pressures of our mid-COVID world, the sector is positioned to become far more commonplace than niche. 

“We want to address COVID-related on-line resource shortages at back-to-school time,” says Irvine, “and this is a made-in-BC solution.”

“LIVE IT is an alternative to on-line learning programs that lack professional rigour,” Welsh adds, “and platforms that rely too heavily on US content, or fail to put kids first.”

Rather than making students passive viewers, the company’s series put them at the centre of these compelling stories, inspiring them to care for the world around them and empowering kids to act on that care.

Irvine is no stranger to inspiring efforts. Five years ago, he defended his University of Victoria Masters thesis underwater. The endeavour landed him coverage on the National Geographic and Discovery channels.

And the inspiration hasn’t stopped. Irvine says LIVE IT, which recently pivoted from a non-profit to a for-profit and is now selling subscriptions to the platform for the first time, is aiming to be Canada’s leading on-line learning brand for kids.

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