Our story

Carolanne Tremblay
Carolanne Tremblay

It all started with a teacher who had a deep desire to change the world of education. Louis-Raphaël Tremblay, our co-founder and CEO, was at the beginning of his academic career as a math and science teacher in 2007. Already, he noticed that technological products developed for the school environment were neither centered on the needs of the students nor on the needs of the teachers. He then decided to work on his master's degree in education in order to find new techno-pedagogical avenues, specializing in applied metacognition in a technological context.

It is during this master's degree that he designed the basics of the ISA_ algorithm, which is currently at the heart of all Optania’s products and which defines our company. This caring technology was then able to provide real-time metacognitive feedback to students, a first worldwide.

The first challenge was to make this technology work within school management. Louis-Raphaël is surrounded by a team of experienced web developers capable of materializing ISA_ and its algorithm inside an attractive interface able to meet the real needs of the school environment.

Then other teachers, psychoeducators, resource teachers and psychologists joined his team to materialize his vision of a new era for teaching. All of them had a real desire to change teaching and create a new era of techno-pedagogical tools to offer to schools, school workers and students, but also to change how teachers are perceived in our society.

Over the years, school boards have gradually been added as partners, allowing us to test our tools with students, teachers and school advisors. Considered a fundamental element of our development process, this constant proximity to the community has allowed us to discuss with them about their real needs, to use their user comments to refine the tool and to make it more sensitive to the school reality, more precisely its response to needs and the modulation according to the recommendations of the school world.

In addition to metacognitive feedback for students, our team developed the active monitoring in 2014, which allows teachers to analyze thoroughly the school records of their students, as well as a module to support victims and witnesses of bullying during the year 2015. At the heart of these three products, one element: ISA_, our caring technology able to support virtually every key player in school perseverance.

It is in 2016 that our team finally received a national acknowledgment in Quebec, which allows us to achieve the necessary notoriety to enlarge our pool of users by signing a partnership with Société GRICS. This major business partnership allows the distribution of Optania's tools within the 72 school boards of Quebec. For years to come, it is close to one million students whom we can accompany in their schooling and support them in case of intimidation.

Quebec, our gateway ... the world our goal!

In short, Optania is a team consisting of teachers, one resource teacher, one psychoeducator, two psychologists and a dozen programmers who contribute daily to the good development of the Optania project and who have the desire to develop the technological tools offered to schools. This team is deeply convinced that the tools developed for the school workers must support them and allow them to lighten their tasks, reduce their daily cognitive overload, support students and put students and school workers at the center of their thoughts.

Optania's goal: to give back teaching its former glory, to revive teachers' image and to focus our efforts on the needs of students, the heart of educational institutions.

Let us guide you

Contact Optania