EF Education First, Dubai

In the early 1960s, a young Swedish man named Bertil Hult traveled to England for the first time. As a dyslexic, school had always been a challenge for him. But he was surprised by how effortlessly he picked up English in England.

Bertil became convinced that traditional classroom-based teaching was not always the most effective. In 1965, he decided to start a small company called Europeiska Ferieskolan that combined language learning with travel abroad. He called the program Språkresor, or Language Travel, which provided one of the world's first hands-on learning experiences outside the classroom.

Today, experiential learning is a cornerstone of modern education. For EF, it has been the philosophy behind every program for 50 years. This simple but effective way to learn has helped us become world’s largest educational organization.

We're not dogmatic about technology. It's a vital component of what we do, but we use it to support our goals for learning, rather than pursue it for its own sake. So we're always looking ahead – to see how it can help us transform education.

The EF research network enables scholars at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, Peking University, Moscow State University, and the University of São Paulo to access rich sources of data from language learning, teaching, and testing to more deeply understand the science of language acquisition and share the results with the field at large.

With a logo from Paul Rand and office furniture from Vitra, it should be immediately evident to any design professional that EF cares deeply about design. But design for us extends beyond graphics into experiences. To really create a world-changing service we need to be the best in visual design, interaction design and experience design, that magical intersection point of everything we do.

Today EF serves millions of students but tomorrow we’re aiming for hundreds of millions. Originally inspired by a joint research project between EF and Apple into the future of language learning, our mission for more than a decade has been to use technology to create a fundamentally better way to learn a language.