VERITAS @ Innovation Challenge

One of the companies taking on the EdTech Austria Innovation Challenge is VERITAS, Austria’s largest educational publisher and also a valuable part of a strong international education group. Niki Donner, Managing Director of VERITAS Verlag, tells us more about the company and his expectations for the Innovation Challenge.

Please explain to us briefly what VERITAS does.

VERITAS learning solutions have stood for individual learning success for 75 years. Our biggest mainstay is schools. We want to positively differentiate ourselves from other market players through quality and service. We are obviously succeeding in this. We are the market leader in textbooks. Meanwhile, our textbook series are consistently hybrid. This means an optimal combination of printed and digital content, prepared according to the latest pedagogical and subject didactic principles.

“We want to continuously optimize our learning content with regard to individual learning success with its use. If we succeed in this, it will make us the best provider of digital educational content.” (Niki Donner)

Why is VERITAS participating in the EdTech Austria Innovation Challenge?

The core competencies of VERITAS are pedagogy and didactics. We are interested in any form of collaboration with other companies if it helps us improve our products and services. The digital transformation of education is now picking up speed. This also means, with a certain degree of probability: Many digital services and companies that will eventually become established on the market do not even exist yet. Or they are just taking their first steps. We are on the lookout for these services and the entrepreneurs behind them.

How important has digital learning been for VERITAS so far?

It is still of little importance when it comes to the share of sales. It is very important if you look at it from the perspective of the areas in which we invest.

In which direction is the topic currently developing from the publisher’s point of view?

When people talk about digital learning, it’s really mostly about tools for organizing learning. Most EdTech companies are active in this area. But our focus is on learning itself. That means didactics and, of course, pedagogy. The added value lies less in the digitization of content, but rather in the integration of content with technology in order to improve learning success. For example, through ongoing learning success analysis.

What are your expectations for the Challenge?

To meet exciting ideas and people.

Can you briefly describe what project or innovation you would like to implement as part of the Challenge?

Digital learning can improve learning effectiveness and learning efficiency. Our goal in this project is: We want to continuously optimize our learning content with regard to individual learning success with its use. If we succeed in this, it will make us the best provider of digital educational content. But we don’t just want to claim that, we want to be able to prove it.

Thank you for the interview, Niki!