Let’s talk money. Keeping schools open and running just to cover the electricity, water and maintenance costs a lot more than running computer servers. Maintenance and operations in schools is about $500/student/year. It’s probably more, but let’s go with it. With 65M students in K12 that gives us a total of $32,500,000,000. That’s thirty two billion dollars. But that’s not it. We need teachers and we should pay them more than we do. We have about 3 million teachers at about $50K each so that gives us $150,000,000,000. Yes one hundred and fifty billion dollars. So, schools and teachers, the backbone of our educational system, the people and places that shape our lives, are not free. As awesome as it would be, we can’t afford to make schools and teachers available 24 hours a day because we would more than double the $120B+ we just mentioned. But neither can we afford to leave our students without the tools and resources to extend their learning after school and across the world and to each other. Servers and bandwidth are not free either but relative to hundreds of billions of dollars they are and they can run 24/7. The most compelling economic argument, however, is that students collaborating and helping each other is FREE and, not only is it free, but there is a compounding affect on learning because all students learn from the interaction. Sorry for all the math but it’s just too interesting.

It makes sense for students and learning.

Research has shown that small group study is the best form of instructional design. Ok, well then let’s do a bit more math. There are 65M students and 3M teachers. We can create all the small group study settings we want if we match students to students and they become more responsible for their own learning and their peers’. There aren’t, however, enough teachers to go around to make small groups for everyone. The smallest groups you can get with a teacher is about 20. In addition to their instructional design benefits, small group interaction through a computer based system allows for unmatchable data acquisition, performance report creation, data on learning over time and assessment of students and instructors. This data can then be put to use by adaptive algorithms that create even more efficiency and effectiveness in the learning eco-system by customizing the student’s and the group’s experience. This can’t be matched by any other system and this isn’t students working by themselves with a computer – we are talking about live real-time student to student engagement.

It makes sense for teachers.

What about the teachers you say? I say, set them free! Teachers will be the first to tell you that managing a classroom of 20-30 students is not how they would design things. When I was a teacher I had this exact problem too and small group study is how I learned to deal with it. When I can organize students into meaningful groups, provide them with some rules of engagement and hold them responsible for each other, student engagement improves drastically, quality control improves dramatically and I as a teacher am set free. I am free to facilitate the small group study interaction and actually free to provide more individual instruction for each student because all other students are engaged in learning while I interact with individual ones.

It makes sense for schools and society.

Why limit your student population to a few hundred when you can leverage the knowledge of hundreds of millions? In Grockit, students from all over the world collaborate everyday. They have answered millions of questions and exchanged millions of live discussion messages about math, english, and even the SAT. The number one asset any student has in school is their peers and it’s our job as instructional designers and administrators to facilitate that interaction, prepare students for a global world and leverage the knowledge already there in the millions of students around the world. By continuing to crowd source, filter, and raise the best questions, answers, explanations, and hints to the top, as a society we benefit from the accumulation and organization of pedagogical knowledge. This will make learning increasingly more effective and efficient and we will all benefit from it.

In Grockit Academy, our goal is to participate in this movement by continuing to provide collaborative group study for free. For premium features like adaptive solo practice, detailed reports on your performance, and unlimited access to premium content, we offer a $79 yearly subscription. This gives you access to the same assessment and algorithms that, until now, entire school districts have paid millions of dollars for. This gives you access to as much math and english content as you would have in over $500 worth of textbooks. And, textbooks don’t learn about you, don’t adapt to you, don’t interact with you, and don’t connect you to the millions of students studying the same thing as you. Grockit Academy puts the power of an entire school district right in the palm of your hand, or tip of your finger if you’re using an iPad.

Last week I saw President Clinton speak and he closed his speech by saying something really cool.

“We have to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of interdependence.”

While it might sound esoteric, I think it’s just his way of saying that we have to put more resources and effort into the types of human to human interactions that create win-win outcomes. There are 65M students in K12 in the United States alone. In the world, the number of students is in the hundreds of millions. These students depend on each other everyday and will be running the world together in a couple of decades. There is a wealth of untapped knowledge in all of you and we are here to help the world teach itself. Welcome to Grockit Academy. Come on in, we’re always open.