If you had to take someone's word when it came to finding the right educational content, could it get better than two of the most popular teaching fellows at Khan Academy?
And when those fellows say, "The problem is not of education access but of information overload," and they propose a solution, it's hard not to pay attention. Especially if the startup is modeled to be the Spotify for educational content.
Boston-based education tech startup Sophya, founded by Harvard alums and former Khan Academy teaching fellows Emma Giles and Vishal Punwani, was founded with the belief that when it comes to education, it's not the access that's a problem -- it's excess.
“Think of the compounded time wasted in school while learning on the internet," said Punwani. "School is now reduced to introducing students to keywords to learn later on the internet.”
He is not wrong. The global online education market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 10.26 percent, ballooning to $286.62 billion by 2023, compared to $159.52 billion in 2017.
Sophya wants to organize educational content online better for academic consumption by figuring out what information students are using there. Then, it will organize that into clusters based on the data gathered to power an education recommendation platform.
I asked Punwani if Sophya was comparable to Coursera. "[We're] less like Coursera and more like Github or Wikipedia, where we crowdsource information knowing what learners organically find useful," he said. "We do for education what Spotify does for music," said Punwani. That includes user profiles and peer recommendations and everything.
The four-month-old startup, which is a part of the Launch Lab accelerator at Harvard iLabs as well as MassChallenge's latest Boston cohort, has already launched a patented technology that allows students to take notes from videos and promises to build the "GPS for learning on the internet."
"Users can tell us who they are and where they are now and what they want to become, and we will give them an exact map of how to get there," Giles said.
To start off, the company will focus on health sciences, including medicine, dentistry, nursing, and pre-med tracks.
It works like this: The content is identified using data analysis and behavioral analysis. For example, if there are 10 medical students using Sophya's platform to study heart attacks, and all 10 of them look at different video content. The team will analyze the averages of how many users consume the information they find on the web and how they rank it. If a higher percentage of people identifies it as top-quality content, it gets on Sophya's algorithm, much like how Google ranking works.
Sophya is already working with the Harvard Dental School, Harvard Medical, Washington State University and universities across the world, including Monash University and University of Melbourne in Australia.
Giles and Punwani are confident this model can be scaled to be adapted for students everywhere.
"If we find the people in Southeast Asia or in India are tagging a piece of information as useful, the recommendations will get funneled to their peer groups as well," Punwani said. "That said, we want students to have as much personalization as possible."
Launched in January 2019, Sophya boasts of a seven-member team made up of a mix of engineers and data scientists. Starting off with a pre-seed round and grants, the company's mission for 2019 is to create a "lot of happy schools and students" with its initial product that's due to launch in two months.
