For today, the full list of Grockit activities that can be shared on your Timeline include:
● Total Questions Answered: To show off how much work you’ve done.
● Creating and joining a Study Room: So your friends can join and you can study together.
● Earning an Achievement: Showing off your accomplishments.
● Playing a Game: To show off how often you study.

We think it’s cool that Facebook is bringing various corners of the web into one place where people can share, interact, and discover a variety of content they wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. Grockit’s app for Facebook Timeline makes it easier for you to study with your friends, and show the world the hard work you’ve put into learning.

Discussions are now live-updating!

When groups of students are watching the same video at the same time, newly-posted questions and answers are live-updated on all connected viewers.

Embed video search results into another website

When you search for a video on Grockit Answers, you can now embed the results onto your own webpage, like this:

Here’s a short video explaining how to do this:

Start moderating classroom discussions faster

Moderation controls are now more readily-accessible, simplifying the process for a teacher to get started using Grockit Answers in their classroom.

Share videos and questions with your students through Edmodo

Any video, question, or answer on the site can now be shared with others through Edmodo.

Teachers and moderators now receive activity updates

Once a day, teachers and others who moderate videos will now receive an update listing all new Q&A activity on those videos:

Grockit Answers now powers all Grockit video courses!

You’ll now find Grockit Answers powering SAT and GMAT video courses. Grockit Answers also now provides opportunity to ask questions and offer help around every question video explanation on the site, both in reviews and in solo game explanations. Thousands of Grockit video discussions, added earlier this week:

Grockit has integrated with Facebook to help you ace your next exam with your friends. In the coming weeks, Grockit will make it easier for students to create online study groups within Grockit and solve problems with friends. What this means is that you’ll be able to find friends to study with, create permanent Grockit study rooms, and share your team’s progress on your Facebook profile.

We’re excited about this for a couple of reasons. First, this solves a big problem for people that use Grockit. Many people want to study with friends they interact with in other parts of their lives, and we haven’t had a great way of doing that within Grockit. Now, with our new Facebook integration, students can quickly select-and-add study partners from among their friends, even if their friends aren’t using Grockit today.

Second, this was a result of amazingly fast design and engineering work. Thanks to the fine folks at Facebook who delivered this API, we’ve been able to build something we think will be beneficial for our users in just a couple of short weeks.

The result is something that we think will make online social learning a lot easier to use. And this cross-team work matches up with our Grockit core value of Collaborteam — our made-up word to describe the transparent, selfless way we work together.

Here’s the press release from F8, the Facebook Conference.

Grockit Announces Facebook Integration to Make Studying More Social

SAN FRANCISCO – September 22, 2011 – Today at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, Grockit, a social learning company, announced a new integration with Facebook that will make it even easier for students around the world to create Grockit study groups with their friends. Now people using Grockit can quickly create “Study Rooms”, invite their Facebook friends and prepare together for college entrance examinations, such as the SAT, ACT, LSATs, GMATs, GREs, and more. Students can also track and share academic progress and milestone achievements towards their academic goals on their Facebook profiles.

“Millions of students are on Facebook, but they aren’t just socializing. They are helping each other with homework, sharing school resources, and in general hacking together a social learning experience online,” said Farbood Nivi, founder and Chief Product Officer, Grockit. “The cool thing about our new Facebook integration is that students can create, control, and access Grockit Study Rooms right from their Facebook profiles. Study Rooms include tons of content to help with studying, from practice questions, to video lessons, and even personal tutoring.”

Earlier this year, Grockit released research showing that students who study together on Grockit do twice as much work — and get answers correct more often — as students who study alone.

In addition to creating new study groups, people using Grockit can share the total number of hours spent studying, the total number of questions attempted, and their progress studying within Grockit via their Facebook profiles. People can control how their activity is shared with friends on Facebook from their Facebook privacy settings.

To learn more about Grockit’s Facebook integration, please visit: Grockit.com/social

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

The primary learning activity on Grockit is problem solving, so it’s probably not surprising that Grockit has developed a large (and growing) library of problems to solve. What began as a few hundred problems has quickly turned into hundreds of thousands of questions, answers, explanations, and more. Over the past few years, we’ve developed an assortment of technologies and processes to make this possible. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been revamping this infrastructure in some powerful ways, and I wanted to share a few (technical) notes on what we did, how, and why.

When you’ve got tens or hundreds of people authoring problems, things inevitably get messy. Invisible markup affects question formatting in unexpected ways, mathematical expressions are input in several different ways, questions often get modified and revised by a sequence of different authors, and it gets increasingly difficult to figure out who changed what, when, and how. In short, a fully-featured content management system (CMS) was in order. At the same time, however, there are some meaningful customizations that we made to our editor that a CMS wasn’t designed to support: everything from AP exam question types, alignments to various state standards, images externally hosted on Amazon S3, special handling of long reading passages, supporting open-ended responses to certain math problems, a combination of skill tags and taxonomies, and a slew of other requirements specific to the type of “content” that we needed to “manage.” Ultimately, we decided to take a hybrid approach, using a customized application for the high-level structure, and a version control system for low-level content management. The first challenge was building this hybrid application (an engineering problem), and the second challenge was moving from our existing system to the new one (a process problem). I’ll expand a bit on how we approached the engineering problem and how we tackled the process problem.

Grockit’s new content editor banishes hidden HTML markup by replacing the standard rich-text editor with a plain-text editor that uses Markdown to signal formatting. Markdown was designed to keep things simple and intuitive, and that’s just what we were looking for. In order to know who changed what, when, and how, we rely on Git, a distributed version control system frequently used in software development, where many different people are changing different parts of a system over time. Beyond accounting for every last text edit, git allows us to do full-text search of content, and even do full-text search through past versions of content. Think “track-changes”, but on steroids. Git is generally accessed from the file system, but we were looking for a simple web front-end for our system. The team at GitHub, an immensely popular website for collaboration on open-source software development, put together a fantastic tool that we adopted and modified, named Gollum. Gollum was developed as a git-backed wiki (in the form of a Ruby Sinatra application) that uses Markdown for formatting, and incorporates the browser-ready MathJax engine for beautiful LaTeX typesetting of mathematical expressions in modern web browsers. For example: \[ P\left(X_{vi} = 1|\theta_v,\beta_i,\alpha_i,\gamma_i\right) = \gamma_i + \frac{1-\gamma_i}{1+e^{-\alpha_i(\theta_v - \beta_i)}}\]

Loosely-coupling the Gollum-derived editor with the Monarch-based application afforded us with a customized editor that supported change tracking and reverting, full-text search of current and past version of content, much-simplified markup, more beautiful math, and a slew of other improvements and enhancements. This new system, however, assumed that text is in Markdown format. All of the existing questions, answers, and explanations weren’t, though, and that left something of a challenge.

The challenge: convert each bit of content in the Grockit system from free-form HTML to a Grockit-flavored Markdown without losing the necessary visual styling, then verify that the conversion was done correctly, fix it if it wasn’t, and then deploy the approved version to the production system once ready. Then repeat, hundreds of thousands of times. Clearly, we needed an automated process. We know that automated doesn’t necessarily mean accurate, however, so we decided that a partially-automated, partially-manual process was the best way to ensure that Grockit questions, answers, and explanations would continue to be accurate. Here’s what we did:

The first step, an automated process to convert HTML to Gollum-ready Markdown (codename: Smeagol) got us started. Some of the changes were so minor that no manual verification was necessary, and the new version could be immediately deployed to the production system. For the rest, we used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, for each item, to ask three different people whether or not the before and after (i.e. Smeagol and Gollum) content looked the same. If all three agreed that the conversion worked, we felt confident in switching to the Gollumnized Markdown. If not, we needed someone else to check and fix the change. For this, we built on the Pivotal Tracker API to build up an organized to-do list for a team of Grockit content authors to work through. In our trial run with Algebra I in the Academy, 45,000 conversion quality ratings were submitted in the first hour alone! Once a correction was saved, Grockit would start displaying the Gollumnized version. The result: A rolling process (without race conditions!) to update all of Grockit’s content, one field at a time, to a much cleaner, simpler, more trackable, more searchable, more flexible form moving forward.

On the other end, it’s well-documented in education theory that watching an expert present a solution to problem helps students learn how solve similar ones. Why? Because problems with similar material and structure generally have a best solution path. And there’s nothing more predictable than a standardized test question. But without personal context, lectures of practice questions can get a bit boring or fall flat.

This is where Grockit’s “Official Guide” TV comes in.

Grockit’s expert instructors have filmed detailed explanations of over 75 hours for each the Official SAT Study Guide (2nd Ed.) and GMAT Official Guide (12th Ed.) and organized them by page, test, section and question number. Now, wherever students are in their own practice book, they can find a video explanation of that question, anytime, anywhere. No more starring pages to show your tutor. No more waiting two weeks to get a satisfying answer. This is on demand help for students in real-time.

Check it out:

Here at Grockit, we are trying to break down the barriers to student access to expert instruction. By providing students with tools to approach complex material with a discerning eye and a personalized schedule and pace, we hope to enable students to forgo paying $80/hour for an in-person tutor or $600+ on a course.

In addition to the Grockit “Official Guide” TV, Grockit offers students an additional 75 hours of solutions each for every single SAT and GMAT question in the Grockit database. These can be watched as standalone hour-long lessons by topic (SAT Writing or GMAT Quantitative, for example) at your convenience. And coming-soon, each SAT and GMAT question on Grockit will have a video explanation for students to access in their reviews, anytime.

Any ideas for other On Demand Grockit TV programming? Email us at courses@grockit.com.

• Check out the new title bar. We’ve added an information icon to help you learn about some of the features in Grockit and how to interact with them.
• We know you have skills, but sometimes it helps to have a refresher. When you click on a question’s skill tags (located on the right side of the screen), a related wiki search for that skill type will appear on-screen. This makes solving unfamiliar questions a little bit easier.
• Need a hint? At the bottom of screen, we’ve placed a hint button. Clicking the hint button will eliminate some incorrect answers by turning them red. (Maybe the answer is embarrassed for being wrong? haha)
• Time is on your side. One of the most requested features that you asked for was the removal of the timer from solo games. It’s gone! You can move at your own pace.

We love it when you send us ideas and ways to make Grockit great! Keep sharing your thoughts and telling us how to make Grockit better.

Screen shot of the new solo game interface.

Screen shot of the what happens when you click the “Yes! give me a hint.” button.