Covid Created a Permanent Lose-Lose for Professors
During Covid, professors were put under tremendous pressure to move from high-quality in-person education, to remote, recorded lectures for students to study at home. But most professors were already working full time on teaching and research, imagine having to become professional directors, editors and actors as well!
It turns out, professors were making the same content. Imagine, 15,000 versions of Time Value of Money being created across the world, at home, using Camtasia! Frustratingly, many students didn’t seem to value the effort.
Covid Accelerated Student Disengagaement
Today’s students have grown up using affordable, high-quality resources like Netflix, YouTube andTikTok, all remote and on demand for $10-15 per month. Even at school they use digital platforms for learning. Students are no longer used to traditional learning resources like (digital) textbooks, and even screencasts.
At the start of the pandemic, many students engaged with recorded lectures and traditional resources like physical and digital textbooks, but within a year, they stopped engaging. But this was not the fault of Covid, this was the next step in a trend - students are engaging less with traditional teaching techniques that worked even 10 years ago.
Blended Teaching Saves Professors Time and Engages Students
We wanted to solve the 2-sided problem of:
If we could centralize the creation of these learning tools, we could put the budget, pedagogical expertise and tech behind it to create content that professors and students would love! We could then charge a small amount to each user (similar to Netflix), and that would fund the creation of more material and compensate educators for helping build them.
And the best part is, if we are able to replace the traditional (digital) textbook with these advanced, affordable learning resources, students will save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year, whilst also having a substantially better learning experience.
In 2023, we moved from London, UK, to the USA, created a film studio, invited real estate professors from across the world to come and join us for 2-5 days of filming each to create videos, quizzes, case studies and learning exercises that professors can plug and play right into their learning management system.
Professors Have Built a Cutting Edge Content Library
We now have a library of over 1,300+ videos in use at 20+ institutions, with almost 10,000 students enjoying content created by professors. We have also built a tech platform that plugs into learning platforms like Canvas and Blackboard, so students can easily access materials and grades are automatically synched. It’s a work in progress and a labor of love for us and many professors, but the results are worth the efforts!
Many thanks to:
...and others for contributing fantastic resources for professors and students.
If you are teaching the following, let us know and we can show you what has been built for you.