Yesterday, MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative announced its goal to reach 1 billion minds as part of a 10 year vision. As part of its plan to get there, OCW listed three key initiatives: OCW Scholar (aimed at independent learners), Highlights for High School, and OpenStudy – a technology platform enabling the equivalent of study groups online around each course.
OpenStudy is the brainchild of co-founder Ashwin Ram, Preetha Ram (both graduates of Yale here in New England), and Chris Sprague (CTO and Ram’s former student). The e-learning company raised $1.27 million in seed funding in 2008 to build a real-time, collaboration platform for students to connect in groups online no matter their location. The platform is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Georgia Research Alliance.
The idea was to create a social learning network, with a mission to “make the world one large study group, regardless of school, location, or background.” The platform’s technology actually employs artificial intelligence recommendation engines to match students in environments like MIT’s OCW. In their own words, “It’s like walking into a library or coffee shop and finding just the right group of students who can help you with what you’re studying right now or someone struggling with a problem who could really use your help…halfway across the globe.”
What sort of an impact and activity has it spurred with MIT OpenCourseWare, the first institution it launched with?
- Thousands of students have worked with one another discussing videos, solving problem sets and collaborating
- An average 4.7 users answer each question asked
- 90 percent of questions asked getting answered
While the company is based in Atlanta, in speaking with Ram today, we learned that MIT OCW isn’t the only University and organization here in the northeast leveraging their technology.
Yale, which has been piloting OpenStudy for quite some time, just this week announced the partnership publicly. The integration comes with launch of the equivalent of OCW for Yale. “Since we launched Open Yale Courses in the fall of 2007, we have wanted to give those taking the courses an opportunity to connect,” says Diana E.E. Kleiner, founding project director and principal investigator of Open Yale Courses. “This pilot with OpenStudy provides an interactive element to the Open Yale Courses experience, which we hope our users will find exciting.”
Ram told us that although the university hasn’t issued a press release around it, NYU has also adopted OpenStudy for a subset of their courses. (Just this January NYU’s Open Education program expanded to four courses.) While many of MIT’s courses leveraging OpenStudy focus on math and the sciences, NYU’s center around literature and sociology. Also in New York, SmartHistory.org has partnered with OpenStudy for their courses.
You can learn more about the specific courses being offered by Yale, NYU and SmartHistory.org here. We look forward to hearing about more institutions here in the northeast adopting OpenStudy!
Have you been in an OpenStudy group? How has it helped you? Let us know in the comments!
