EdTech “sandbox”: the CNIL supports 10 innovative projects

Project selection

For its second edition, the CNIL has chosen the theme of educational digital tools. This "sandbox" allows the selected organisations to benefit from the support and expertise of the CNIL for several months in order to help them develop a service or product that is virtuous in terms of data protection. 

Following a call for projects launched last January, the applications were examined on the basis of four selection criteria: the usefulness of the project for the public, the applicant's commitment to RGPD compliance, the maturity of the project (design or development phase) and its interest in the field of data protection.

In total, about thirty applications were submitted by private and public organisms proposing projects on a variety of use cases: educational activities, training for apprentices and alternating students, relations between parents and teachers, educational video games, cloud solutions, etc.

After a pre-selection process, a committee composed of CNIL members and external personalities met on 30 March to hear the 10 candidates with the most promising projects.

On the basis of the evaluation committee's opinion, the Chair of the CNIL has selected five winning projects that will be able to benefit from enhanced support within the framework of the "sandbox" in 2022.

The five winners

5 innovative projects in the field of education have been selected and will benefit from CNIL specific support:

• a digital solution that enables real-time collaborative management of the skills development and pedagogical follow-up of apprentices and alternating students, developed by the start-up Daylindo;

• Klassly and Klassboard tools to strengthen the school-family relationship, from the company Klassroom;

• DATA, an infrastructure for analysing and exploiting learning data from France Université Numérique ;

• MyToutatice, a "personal cloud" for students connected to their digital workspace, from the Rennes academy;

• an educational video game allowing the difficulty level to be adapted to the player's profile in order to maximise learning, proposed by the start-up PowerZ.

Personal advice for five other projects

The CNIL has decided to provide occasional support to 5 other projects of strong interest for data protection. This support will take the form of a consultative meeting with the CNIL teams: 

• Astrachain, an encrypted multi-cloud solution for managing sensitive data;

• Kdetude's Eleda solution provides teachers with a NoCode authoring tool that allows them to easily build randomised educational activities in mathematics;

• Kalygo DYS, a tool to help children with DYS (cognitive disorders that cause learning difficulties) learn to write, from Learn & Go;

• Babel, an AI-based user music profiling feature from Sight-O;

• Competence Portfolio (PEC), an update of a platform for interoperability with other private and public platforms, carried by a consortium of institutions.

Advancing an entire ecosystem

The 5 winners will be accompanied for several months by CNIL teams. These exchanges will help to identify and implement solutions adapted to the new problems of the project leaders.

At the end of this support phase, the CNIL will publish the lessons learned from these exchanges so that all innovators in the education sector can benefit from them.

The evaluation committee

The evaluation committee is composed of three CNIL members and three external personalities:

• Sylvie Robert, Senator and Commissioner in charge of educational issues at the CNIL and Chair of the Committee
• Anne-Charlotte Monneret, General Delegate of EdTEch France
• Jean Aristide Cavaillès, Inspector General of Education, Sport and Research
• Sarah Pauloin, Data Protection Officer of the Université Paris Cité and member of the association of DPOs in higher education
• Thomas Dautieu, Director of Compliance at the CNIL
• Bertrand Pailhès, Director of Innovation and Technologies at the CNIL

A look back at the first edition of the sandbox

Video in French