About the Author: Rusty Greiff is Grockit’s Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer and a resident of the greater Washington DC area.  Rusty has an extensive background in politics and education.

For over a year Grockit has developed and managed private-label and co-branded products for K-12 schools, virtual schools, charter school networks and major online Universities.  Today, I’m proud to share that Grockit and Georgetown University have partnered to provide premium online test prep and collaborative learning for Georgetown undergraduate students, and we will co-market Grockit premium subscriptions at a significant discount for Georgetown alumni.

As one of the most selective academic universities in the world, Georgetown continues to drive online strategies and initiatives that improve student success – we are excited that they have chosen Grockit as a solution for their students and alumni.  Georgetown will leverage Grockit’s personalized assessment engine, adaptive and social learning platform and gaming mechanics to drive superior student engagement.  Like us, they believe in the power of social and collaborative learning to prepare students.

We’re looking forward to working with like-minded universities in the future.  I promise to update Grockit followers with posts every time we create new relationships with Universities, so that you can know when your school has joined the Grockit community.

Just in case you’re wondering, here are just a few reasons why Grockit is attractive to major universities:

* Over the past few years, more than a million students all over the world have used Grockit to practice and study together online to achieve their best scores on standardized tests

* Grockit’s social learning has proven to help students learn more, faster and perform better

* Grockit has figured out how to add and move massive amounts of content, check and curate that content quickly

* Grockit already works with accomplished, forward-thinking schools with strong support and broad awareness

* Grockit is a leader in developing for the most pervasive and important platforms for students and teachers

* Grockit is actively trying to improve learning outcomes for millions of students in under-resourced communities

Today at Grockit we are proud to announce a fundamental shift in our business model, a shift that we believe is one more step in this necessary human movement towards increased access for everyone, including and especially those who are less privileged.

From today forward, Grockit will be a one-for-one business. For every Grockit account purchased, we will provide one year of free access to Grockit Academy to an under-served student. To do this we have partnered with the very organizations that work tirelessly everyday to reach and support these students. Organizations like Higher Achievement, KIPP, Level Playing Field Institute, Magic Johnson Foundation, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, and TLABs are just some of the amazing groups that Grockit customers can direct their one-for-one purchase towards.

Our desire to create Grockit for Good was motivated by the same reason I founded Grockit in the first place.

After teaching for over a decade I was unsatisfied with the progress of education, especially in light of rapidly advancing technologies that were not reaching students. I was also unsatisfied with the high costs that limited access and scale.

With that, we started Grockit to bring adaptive, social-learning to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world and we believe that our shift to a one-for-one business model is another step forward in our mission to bring effective, engaging education to everyone. We’re calling this new model, Grockit For Good, and if you know an organization that you think would be a good partner, we want to know. Grockit has always been about social-learning, and with Grockit For Good our customers are doing even more to help the world learn.

Farb Nivi
Founder Grockit

Grockit’s ever-growing bank of unique questions has been written and reviewed by expert instructors and seasoned content writers. We design our questions using College Board, ACT, GMAC® and ETS® released questions from previous exams, along with other specially-selected resources. This allows us to best model actual questions that you will see on your test day. Each question is characterized by its difficulty level and the specific skills that it tests, and we use that information to provide you with fine-grained feedback on your performance and learning. When combined with the data that we’ve collected from your recent performance, this meta-data helps us provide Challenges custom-built for you.

50th and 90th Percentile students alike will benefit from Grockit’s algorithms and incremental learning platform. We aim to challenge you with test-true practice questions to help prepare you for your test day. Good luck with your studies!

Whew.  What a year!  2009 will be remembered by us as the year Grockit went from a basic practice tool for the GMAT to full-feature learning environment that supports many types of curriculum including GMAT, SAT, ACT, and GRE test prep.  We are quite pleased with the growth in the product, customers, and team this year.  There is much work left to do, we know.  But let’s take a moment to celebrate our progress in 2009.

It was only February when Grockit came out of private beta and into the public with the GMAT group.  With that came the launch of leaderboards.  Leaderboards show off the top players and added a new layer of competitiveness within the community.  Of course, students are always most interested in their own performance.  With that in mind we created diagnostics which provide students an initial ability estimate.  In addition to diagnostics, skill specific perfomance analytics were added to provide students with precise knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses.

Skill specific analytics opened the door for other features.  We were able to add custom games and custom review sessions so that students could focus their study time on areas of most need.   Games were also made adaptive to the students.  This was significant because it allowed us to show the questions to students based on their ability level that would benefit them most at that time.

Tutors were also introduced to the Grockit learning environment in 2009.  With this addition students are now able to study in the three ways they naturally study; alone, with peers, and experts.  Tutors were a welcome addition to the Grockit community and students will have more ways to study with them in the coming months.  Towards the end of the year we added more achievement badges to games.  Badges are symbolic rewards for accomplishments in Grockit. Students see them as a fun way to share their activity with friends.

Such progress would not be possible without the hard work of a talented team.  In fact, the Grockit team doubled in size this year and is up to 23 full-time employees.  Feel free to get to know us a little better from our Facebook office photos.

By the way, did I mention that 1.7 Million questions were answered in Grockit in 2009!  This activity level by our early users has been very encouraging.  And we’re thrilled to help them achieve their educational goals.

Now it’s time to look to the future and we’re excited to do so.  2010 will be a big year as we release Grockit 2.0 and expand beyond test prep into K-12 curriculum.  Stay tuned, the journey has just begun.

Happy New Year!

Check out this snap-shot of live SAT games

We have updated our GMAT top players list to calculate the list on a weekly basis. Until now, the top players list has been calculated over all time. This led to a list that was very static and difficult for a player to get on. By switching to a list calculated over the past 7 days there is much more opportunity for a player to make the list and it also shows a fresher picture of who is working a lot on a particular test within a more relevant time frame. We may add the top players over all time list back as an additional view. Now go get working on your GMAT and get on that list!

Before I could start, however, she launched into a detailed recount of the life of Dr. King and what he fought for, and took great pains to explain “he didn’t have a dream, he gave us a dream. Not like when I have a dream about toads and dancing, but a dream for us that we made come true.”

She really means it. My daughter is six years old, and is half way through her first year of kindergarten at a public school in San Francisco, in a Spanish language immersion program to boot. She’s speaking Spanish 90% of her time in class. Her classroom is a perfect example of cultural diversity. She’s one of two people in a class of 20+ who in her own words (spoken with intense excitement) “has pink skin and blue eyes! Everyone else has every color skin and eyes you can imagine!”

Being taught by my six year old daughter about civil rights, equality, and the benefits of cultural diversity is more than enough to make my heart burst with pride and admiration. The answer to my question of “where did you learn about this?” is what pushed me over the edge into total stupefied gratitude.

“From my teacher, Mrs. Strong, silly. And she was crying when she told us, and I knew it was a good cry.”

People like Mrs. Strong inspire me. They strengthen my resolve to see Grockit succeed. Grockit increases the ability for people like Mrs. Strong to improve the lives of others (as well as their own). When I think about that potential I get the chills, and hope that I have the emotional capacity to fathom the impact of that improvement.

During those nearly twenty years I’ve been careful to write and speak sentences similar to the one that ends the previous paragraph. Does it standout as carefully written to you? If you’re a software developer you might think it’s a wordy way of just saying a word that I find, frankly, ugly: users.

I think it’s ugly because it totally disconnects the living, breathing, emotional, and real human being sitting in front of your application and turns them into some sort of component in a system. It changes how you design things, how you prioritize features, and how you predict the adoption (or rejection) of both. You need to remember the eccentricities of human behavior, emotions, and rationale (or lack thereof) if you want to make applications for people. It’s ugly because it’s a low resolution word that is used when really high resolution words are required in order to properly think about the problems you’re trying to solve.

Consider the studies done that suggest that people who speak a language that doesn’t have two words for two slightly different colors consider the colors to be identical. For example, in the English language, we have names for the somewhat similar colors magenta, fucsia, and pink – if we didn’t have the word fucsia, there’s a high likelihood that we’d call a swatch of fucsia pink or magenta.

It’s easier to say ‘user’ than it is to say ‘someone who is studying for their GMAT test’, and I’m not always as diligent in avoiding the word as I’d like to be, but I catch myself often because I know there’s a difference between ‘an affluent liberal arts undergrad student’ and ‘returning to school after 20 years of putting off their MBA student’. Both are ‘users’, and both students, but their motivations and expectations are likely different enough to warrant consideration. If I do say ‘user’, it’s not without having first put in the effort to think a user as a person.

The rewards of being able to think clearly about the problems and desires of the people you’re creating solutions for far outweigh the extra bit of cognitive effort required to avoid the easy path.

We wanted to share a bit about the experience, and event, from our perspective.

How TC50 Affected Grockit

We didn’t anticipate this, but the deadline and goal of working towards the TC50 demo had a powerful affect on us as an organization. Setting a goal and deadline around sharing what we’ve been up to actually did a lot to the product, beyond just motivating a presentation of it.

The deadline forced us to continue to think about our product in critical ways that helped us tweak, add, and remove features. On paper, it may sound strange that a conference deadline would affect your decisions about your product, but given that after each choice we felt better and more internally satisfied by our decisions, we are excited about the calls we made.

Dealing With The TC50 Team

While we are, of course, super excited to have been chosen as a Jury Selection honoree, this is even more special given that we were all but disqualified from Techcrunch50 about four days before the conference started. We were unable to make either of our scheduled rehearsals and this resulted, understandably, in an unhappy TC50 organizer. After a phone conversation that I highly recommend future presenters do their absolute best to avoid having to have, we were given the opportunity to rehearse our demo the Friday before the event. We managed to get back into the good graces of the TC50 team.

The Event

Techcrunch started as a tech blog, they added things like Crunchbase, a conference (with Calacanis), and now even a Tablet PC. This is a great start-up energy and it permeates the TC50 event. The event is low on pomp and, instead, all about the people. Everyone treated us with serious regard and concern. Dan Kimmerling, especially, made us feel like we were the only presenters there.

We could probably have done without so many F-bombs over the mic though. It’s one thing when a presenter’s demo goes awry and one slips out, but Calacanis and Arrington make Al Pacino sound like your kindergarten teacher. That said, I laughed pretty hard. On a side note, and as a foodie, I was actually pretty impressed by the VIP event food.

The Aftermath

Well, firstly, we saw about a 50x increase in traffic to our homepage and an equal increase in Beta requests. Our marketing director, Borat, had this to say “Niiiiice! High five!” But, more importantly, the feeling around the office was really the best part. We were pumped after our presentation Wednesday morning, and this was hours before the winners were announced. The feeling of group accomplishment and a greater transparency with the public were really worth the hard work. Being honored by a Jury Selection winner made a great feeling even greater. We’ve also had a lot of folks reach out to us with great encouragement and support for what we are developing, some requests for interviews and more than a few blog posts and articles around the web.

Final Thought

Hopefully we’ll have something cool to launch at next year’s Techcrunch50. Hopefully they’ll have us!