Thousands of students are enrolling in gigantic open online courses.
Would students go for vast open online study groups, too?
OpenStudy, a start-up company spun off by Georgia Tech and Emory University, is betting the answer to that question is yes. Its Web site is the latest effort to create a social platform for independent learners who want to help each other study the huge trove of educational materials published free online by universities like MIT.
“Our mission is to make the world one big study group,” says Phil Hill, chief executive of OpenStudy, whose founders include Ashwin Ram, a Georgia Tech professor, and Preetha Ram, an Emory University dean.
The free site opened to the public last week. It has 3,000 users so far, including a pilot project with MIT that suggests OpenStudy as an option from the Web sites of several open courses.
Here’s how it works: Users build their own personal study networks by following other students and joining groups. When they have a question, the site pushes it out to their extended network and matches them with people available to work with them.
If the site is the Match.com of study help, as Mr. Hill brands it, the key question is whether students will be able to find a “date.”
In an e-mail to Wired Campus, David Wiley describes this risk as the “lame party” effect.
“Imagine showing up at a party that has plenty of food, music,
decorations, etc., but no people are there,” writes Mr. Wiley, an open-education pioneer based at Brigham Young University who has blogged about the troubles faced by a past online study-group attempt.
“How long will you stick around? Not very long. Similarly, if users come to the site, ask their question, and there’s no one around to answer it, they’ll quickly leave and probably not come back. When most early users exhibit this ‘lame party’ behavior, how do you get the critical mass your site needs to succeed?”
OpenStudy understands that risk, and its founders say they hope to build up critical mass by working with more university content providers beyond MIT.
If you’ve tried OpenStudy, drop us a note in the comments below and tell us what you think.
3 Responses to Start-Up Aspires to Make the World ‘One Big Study Group’
philhill - September 8, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Thanks for the story Marc. David makes some good comments on the importance of building a real community where students can consistently and convenently get help. We are seeing 98% of our questions answered and a high user retention. There are students visiting from 109 countries with an average of 5.3 students collaborating on an answer (30% in real time i.e. when the student needing help is present). Our experience is built on providing ‘understanding’ to the the student needing help which makes it a very inclusive way to learn, as opposed to just being ‘mailed’ an answer to problem like most Q&A sites. This is why we are seeing high levels of engagement and stickiness.
mjsteffen - September 8, 2010 at 9:41 pm
I have some experience with OpenStudy as a student, and I’ve found the community to be very welcoming.To be honest, it’s not so hard in a university to find friends to study with, but to me part of the fun of openstudy is that it lets you talk to students from other schools, and compare what you’re learning with what they’re learning. You get the best of both worlds, in that sense.
platemaster - September 9, 2010 at 3:47 am
OpenStudy is much more different than the other online courses you have heard about. If you are looking for collaborators for your questions, as mentioned above they will be answered %98 of the time, if they start answering nearly instantly since they will get a nofitication directed to their e-mail box, you can actually ask questions and learn step by step and this works its way up when you have multiple users with the same problem or multiple people asnwering a question. OpenStudy is not getting your homework done, but studying it with someone else like you or someone who can help you LEARN it, so in that way you can help others one day.