Paragin & SOWISO partner up!

You most likely have seen that we have joined forces with Paragin. We guess you might feel surprised, confused and/or excited about this news. Since transparency is among our principles, we want to be very clear about why we are taking this step and what it means for you. That’s why we wrote this blog post.

Our story

Over 10+ years, we have been improving STEM Education around the world. We started as a small spin-off from the Eindhoven University of Technology. The first client of our e-learning platform was the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and since then, many universities, colleges, and high schools have joined us.

SOWISO founders Marc Habbema (Left) & Max Cohen (Right)

Our next achievement was becoming a digital publisher ourselves. So we hired our in-house authors to create ready-made content to be used by teachers. We started focusing on math, and now we have expanded our offer to other STEM subjects (e.g., statistics, physics, and even Python!).

In 2018, we created OMPT, an admission test that provides aspiring university students with a safe and easy check of their math competency. We develop online math exams that can be taken from anywhere, at any time, and show whether an applicant has the required mastery of (basic) mathematics and statistics to be eligible for enrollment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disruptive element as well as an accelerator of innovation in education. Our digital platform has provided teachers and students with extra support in these turbulent times.

Currently, over 265,000 students use our platform in 17 countries. 60+ leading institutions trust us, and our team keeps growing (50% in the last year). We continue enhancing and innovating STEM education, meeting our partners’ needs, and working together to help and service their students.

And now, we are ready for our next step, a strategic partnership with Paragin.

Just like SOWISO, Paragin is a growing Dutch ed-tech company. They are a domain leader in providing solutions for the development of competencies, knowledge, and talent in education as well as large and small corporations, municipalities, and organizations. Together, SOWISO and Paragin will form an international leader for assessment and examination software covering multiple vocations and higher education sectors.

The SOWISO team

What does this mean for the future?

There are many different types of strategic short- and long-term collaborations possible between the two companies. One example is connecting the SOWISO maths engine to Remindo, the assessment suite of Paragin. Remindo is a digital exam tool for generic formative as well as high-stakes / summative exams. It is being used at a lot of universities, colleges, and vocational training institutions, some of them also using SOWISO separately for their STEM teaching and learning.

Connecting the two platforms would open up the possibility to use the SOWISO item bank, consisting of thousands of STEM exercises, to be used when composing tests within Remindo. Teachers will also benefit from the fact that the maths exams are automatically graded, saving them a lot of time. Students will benefit since they can use the same user-friendly system for entering mathematical answers both when they’re learning, during practicing, and when they’re being assessed.

This way, the combined Remindo/SOWISO tool can cater to all schools, departments, and faculties that want to do digital high-stakes STEM exams.

We probably shouldn’t say this as a mathematics EdTech company, but one and one really is three!

What does this mean for you?

If you are a teacher, an author, a program coordinator, or any of our partners, we want to make sure you know that you won’t notice any differences (apart from even better products and services!). We are the same company and partner in your journey. We keep developing the same products (or even better). And our team, including management, will remain the same. For example, you will continue to receive the amazing customer service you are used to having from our colleagues.

The only thing that will change is that we will share knowledge, experience, and resources with our new partner, so we will continue evolving and progressing. Both Paragin and SOWISO believe in supporting students in their development and want to be trustworthy partners to educators worldwide.

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Any questions? Reach out to marc@sowiso.com

In this transaction, SOWISO was supported by law firm Bergh Stoop & Sanders. A big thank you to them as well!

Here you can read the full press release by Main Capital Partners. Main Capital is the majority shareholder of Paragin since 2021.