Everyone is welcome. All races, and all shapes and sizes may participate. Yes, in fact you the students of the world can come from anywhere and take charge of your own learning. You can come to take responsibility for your own education. You can bring the wealth of knowledge that the hundreds of millions of you have inside you to help raise each other up. Rise up! The social-learning revolution will not be televised, it will be online in real-time.
You can be good at math, or good at english or not yet good at either. You can raise yourself and your friends up, raise your standards, raise your skills. You can help each other 24 hours a day without downloads or plugins and you can do it all for free.
Why free? Because we have a social responsibility to do it. We must provide the students of our world the tools to help each other. We must do it just as we must pave the roads to schools or build the school buildings in the first place. If our students are obligated to get educated then we are obligated to provide them the means to be able to help each other when there isn’t a teacher and help each other when there isn’t an open school building. NFL player Dhani Jones, a vocal advocate for youth responsibility, calls it ‘extracurricular learning’ and I agree that it’s important not because of society, or parents, but because of YOU the student. It’s important for you to extend your learning outside the classroom and to amplify it inside the classroom. It’s important for YOU the student to take responsibility for your own learning. So, to do our part, we are launching the Grockit Academy as an always-open, student-to-student, algorithm-enhanced, online High School. We’ve decided not to wait until the new school year so we’re starting it as a Summer Enrichment Academy where you can begin learning with your peers from all over the country and world, right here, right now.
We launched Grockit Academy and made it free for students to work with each other in live, multimedia, collaborative online study rooms because we have a social responsibility to do so BUT, it also makes good plain economic sense.
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.
I’m happy to announce a recent improvement to a popular Grockit feature: In solo practice games, the questions that you see are selected based on your recent past performance. Grockit’s tailored Challenges — short assessment-oriented games that are unlocked over time — have a been popular way for students to benchmark their performance and get feedback on where they stand. We’ve now incorporated the core algorithm used to create Challenges into all solo practice games. Questions posed during these games are now selected in a way that takes into account both what you have seen in the past and how you’ve been doing on recent questions. We know that different students are stronger in different parts of a test, so you may notice that you’re seeing harder questions in one section than in another. You’ll find that the personalized question loader takes these variations into account.
