If you were back in college, sitting in your dorm room at 1AM, where would you go to get academic help? Would you head to Blackboard for assistance? Maybe not, since your professor will see your access time. Would you pull up your Facebook page? Yes, but everyone is cramming when the clock strikes 1AM. How about a phone call? No, better not wake up your study buddy. So, where would you turn to?
Ross Blankenship, co-founder and CEO of StudyHall, had his first experience with a startup in January of 2004 when he created Top Test Prep, a site to help students prepare for tests at all levels. As Top Test Prep continues to grow and gain notoriety today, Blankenship has sought to expand his startup career further with StudyHall alongside his fellow co-founder, Ben Winter.
I had the pleasure of talking with Winter about how StudyHall came to be, progress thus far, and what the future holds. From our phone call I was able to see first-hand how invested Winter is in this business venture, completely committed to the mission of improving a student's ability to find assistance, 24/7.
"A StudyHall session", he told me, "is a live video chat with two of your classmates that includes synchronized document capabilities." It's like a whiteboard that is able to track your changes, it bears a close familiarity to the highlighting edit tools in a Microsoft Word document. While users make changes, marking it up with a pen as they scan through the words on the screen, these edits are seen through the video feed by all invited to the session.
"Originally, that's what we had," Winter said, "but now we've blown it out to a much more robust supply of tools and features that students can use." Students also have the opportunity to make picture-less profiles for the site, a practice that ensures they can project themselves in the most academically professional way possible. Grades, GPA, school activities, major, and enrolled courses are examples of ways that students choose to identify themselves. The system also has the capability of recommending a student to connect with five other students by using either their ".edu" email, who your friends are, and what notes you take.
Within the documents you basically have your own academic cloud with notes, papers, tests, exams, problem tests, articles of research, etc. Everything you need to get through your academic career all conveniently compiled in one place. StudyHall also allows users to be more organized, similar to how Facebook allows you to combine all of your photos into separate albums.
The idea for StudyHall originated from a personal experience, but it has expanded to include the various experiences their interns have had at college as well. All of the StudyHall interns are students providing a way for Winter and Blankenship to track common trends they have issue with, attempting to solve all of the present problems at once. They have found that one such trend is that collaboration among students within a more restricted area has allowed more control and more willingness to share.
What makes StudyHall stand out from the rest is its ability to share. Users can allow others to view their work, but they retain sole ownership over their document. This way users can monitor who they are sharing with. "I had lots of friends on the football team and I wouldn't want to have all my notes shown to them. I would want to reveal them to my study partner, Kim, but maintain ownership so that I could still share my notes if I wanted to at a later date." Unless you are the owner of the document, you cannot view it or send it without the owner's acknowledgement," Winter explained to me.
With the goal being to have people connect over different schools, Winter believes this is possible. "Taking calculus at Harvard is the same as taking calculus at Stanford, so why shouldn't two students who are both econ students, who have the same GPA and same course load, not be connected and study together?" StudyHall is aiming to foster that interaction. This also goes for high school friends. "Relationships that developed over the course of eight years shouldn't just cease to exist anymore academically."
More often than not, Winter has found StudyHall being compared to Blackboard, hence StudyHall has recieved the nickname the "anti-Blackboard." The main difference? Institutions don't have access. "Without the professors, students will be more open and willing to share. You would never post on a thread that you missed class on Blackboard because the professor would know, but shouldn't there be a space for that?"
"Later we invision injecting professors and institutions in a partial way with office hours online, but we want the professors to have their own page so it's separate than the student collaboration going on," Winter relayed. "We understand and want to capture the value of the institution and professor, but we would rather have it be an environment students are already collaborating in."
The most exciting thing to look forward to now is which features students run with and which they don't. Will different schools or school populations use different parts more frequently than another? Winter and the rest of the StudyHall crew are aiming to have 30 to 40 schools using the site by next year. Right now, at seven weeks away from the official launch, they are in their finalizing stages at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Middlebury, and Georgetown.
"We want to be the academic platform that other people work off of for academics, the student center of academic life for every college."
[Images via StudyHall]
