The Owlfred Chronicles

We’re excited to announce the release of a mobile compatible version of OpenStudy. We’ve taken the social learning experience from the web and optimized it for smartphones and tablets. You’ll now be able to get help in Math, Physics, Writing, Computer Science, and your other favorite subjects from anywhere, anytime.

Our goal is to bring the best parts of OpenStudy; access to the community of 200,000 learners from 170 countries, answers to 75% of questions in 5 minutes, and assessment of soft skills through SmartScore to the millions of people who use a mobile device as their primary method to access the web.

OpenStudy is committed to providing accessible learning opportunities to students no matter where they live or how they get to the internet. Bringing a peer-to-peer learning experience to the hundreds of millions of smartphone users worldwide is a challenge we’re thrilled to undertake. We believe adding personal interaction to an often lonely mobile learning experience adds tremendous value to the education experience.

Visit OpenStudy from your mobile device to try it for yourself.

Austin – Our latest addition to the team.

I’m Austin Walne and I’ve just joined the fantastic OpenStudy team 2 days ago. They’ve put together an incredible learning platform; and I’m very humbled and excited to be able to contribute to the great work here.

Learning has been a passion of mine since I was young. I also grew up with a passion for computers and technology. I was lucky enough to use my first Mac (a Performa 637CD) in the third grade and immediately began learning as much as I could about it and this new thing called the world wide web.

Inter-connected networks have shown their immense power for collaboration to create amazing things. It’s revolutionized the way we communicate (Facebook, Twitter); find a place to stay while traveling (AirBnB); drive cars (ZipCar, Getaround); and the list goes on and on.

I’ve witnessed first hand how networks have changed the way politicians run for office and elected officials interact with their constituents. In 2007, I led digital campaign efforts for Fmr. Senator Fred Thompson’s Presidential Campaign. We were the first to allow volunteers to call potential voters anywhere they had an internet connection. That same election, then Senator Obama’s organizing platform my.barackobama.com, led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, set the standard for future campaigns to follow.

These same network effects have the potential to change education in ways we’re only beginning to imagine. Many people are talking about the challenges facing education. OpenStudy is committed to helping solve some of these big issues. I believe OpenStudy is a trailblazer in education technology and I am very enthusiastic about helping to share our story and spread our message to students the world over. It’s quite the adventure we’re all embarking on together.

If you’d like to connect, you can find me on the Twitter @austinwalne.

Many of you have been with us since the beginning.  Together we’ve experienced monumental growth in users, and from our end, we couldn’t be prouder of you—contributors from around the world who online-huddle over questions and problems!  And, judging by the laudatory titles, badges and points you have earned, you’ve built a reputation for yourselves as engaged learners and helpers.  You are the living evidence of a new movement of learning where we all have a part in expanding, applying, and sharing our educations. You have shattered classroom walls, adding to the foundation of a new culture of learning.

At the beginning, we at OpenStudy had a “simple” goal: Make the world one big study group, a global learning network of diverse learners bringing to the study table a breadth of insights and knowledge impossible to duplicate in a brick-and mortar classroom. Your participation on Openstudy represents the changing culture of education:  students become heroes and role models to each other; a grassroots movement of online learners bridging time zones, physical location, and socioeconomic status, one-helping-many and many-helping-one through a universal quest to learn.

On our end, we’ve learned many things through the first year of OpenStudy. In analyzing half a million collaborations amongst our community, we found a symbiotic cadre of regular learners and frequent contributors. We discovered that many participants nimbly switched roles from student to teacher and back again in the peer-to-peer relationships. What could be the motivating factors that bring people back again and again in different roles to OpenStudy?

We think that the answer lies in the new culture for learning that you helped build, a sense of fun and belonging for our OpenStudy users unified by a common purpose to help, problem solve, and work as a team.  We saw users develop relationships amongst a global set of peers. And through those relationships and interactions, each user’s participation could be reliably quantified.  Each participant’s problem solving skills, teamwork, and level of engagement could be mapped and generated into an individual scorecard that reflects a new, more relevant definition of “smart.”

Today we’re releasing SmartScore, a score we believe measures what “smart” means on OpenStudy, what it should mean everywhere today, and what it will mean in the workplace of tomorrow.  SmartScore measures and motivates social behaviors and social skills valuable in a knowledge-driven, team-oriented economy, like the one we call home on OpenStudy.

SmartScore is a snapshot of your high-performing skills in core categories of teamwork, problem solving and engagement—-areas in which you applied learning and development that delivered significant results to the learning community. Much is embedded in the three core categories: A willingness to help others; an ability to collaborate, communicate, and build relationships among the team; the willingness to contribute to finding solutions; and dedication to a task or group.  The data displays as both a point-in-time and longitudinally on your SmartScore, allowing for demonstrated growth.

The SmartScore is a lustrous addition to any resume or transcript for our cadre of OpenStudy pioneers. Use it to underscore your value as a knowledge worker and your individual level of social learning behavior skills.

We invite you to be the first in line for this exciting product as we proudly promote and launch SmartScore!

What’s your SmartScore?

Chris Sprague

CEO, OpenStudy

When asked to write a user narrative for the OpenStudy blog, I took a look at what other users had to say about their own OS experience.  I discovered that theOpenStudy community enhanced the lives of several people of all different backgrounds, whether they were ambitious, enthusiastic high schoolers overcoming a speed bump in pursuit of their dreams or older academics who are returning to school to pursuit past dreams put on hold. This was a very exciting realization. Not only is OpenStudy a great place to learn, but it helps make dreams come true. How awesome is that?! It is for this very reason that I log-in to OpenStudy whenever I can.

I want to make two points about why I am such  fan of OpenStudy.  I’ve always had a knack for learning. Things just seem to click for me. My friends noticed this as they were always coming to me for help. When I helped them, I discovered that I had another talent, teaching. It’s a great feeling when that lightbulb goes off and when you have helped someone. OpenStudy lets me grow as a teacher, even though I am not a teaching assistant or a tutor at my college.

OpenStudy is such a great community because people who are passionate about teaching are able to interact with people who are passionate about learning. It is also a community which breaks down so many barriers. People from different countries, different backgrounds, and different areas of expertise are able to collaborate in real time. Theoretical physicists and practical engineers, for example, are able to tackle a question in such a manner that the asker is allowed to understand the nitty, gritty equations and basic fundamentals of the problem. At the same time, they are able to gain some insight on how this knowledge can be used in real world situations.

This is the second reason I find OpenStudy uniquely helpful.  All students wonder is what they learn will be used in real life.  I often see questions like, “will I ever use Algebra in the real world?” Now with real practitioners answering questions on the site, it is great because it gives askers something tangible. And when you have something tangible it adds a sense of purpose to a student’s studies. I have never experienced this sort of relevance and context anywhere else.  As you can imagine, for an engineering student like me, the real world is very important.  Here on OpenStudy, we have engineers working in companies who drop in to talk to us students about how they are using what we study in their work.  This is what makes me such a fan of OpenStudy.

Thank you OpenStudy for creating a great community where I can actively pursue my passions of learning and teaching in an unique environment.

- Erik Ashmore

Grades never tell the whole story.  

They are one-dimensional, subjective, non-standardized and unreliable. Most teachers would agree that there are better ways to evaluate students and assess their progress.  Students stress about grades and all agree that it kills collaboration and sharing. And yet we keep using them.  April is the time of year when colleges decide who to admit into their hallowed ranks.  This is the time when the panic about grades, GPAs and scores hits an all-time high.  Studies of Kuh, Pascarella & Terenzini, and others have established quite clearly that student engagement rather than grades is the most significant predictor of student success and retention. Engaged students are the ones who raise their hands in class to ask questions, who chat with their classmates, and who stay back to interact with their teachers.  They are the ones who join clubs, participate in sports, find a cause to champion, volunteer, and who help out in the community. This is important, right? Well then, where is this included in the curriculum and where does it appear on the transcript?

When was the last time you were offered a job based on your college transcript? When employers sift through entry-level applicants, they look beyond the GPA for evidence of teamwork, passion, problem solving, communications. And yet you will not find any of these attributes on the college transcript. These skills are developed during experiences outside the classroom: experiential learning, problem based learning, real life experiences, projects, co-ops. Our learner faces two challenges—to pick the right experience to learn these skills, and to produce credible documentation of these skills.

Today’s world is dynamically changing, technologically evolving, highly global, constantly online, and demandingly collaborative. Do we have educational experiences to train our young learners for this brave new world, a connectivist world where Google places encyclopedia facts at a eight year old’s fingertips, where online chats connect an Atlanta coed with an Ankara teen in seconds, a world where notions of privacy are being challenged by texting tweens. At OpenStudy, we asked ourselves what environment would make it is easy and fun for learners of all ages to prepare themselves for the new tomorrow? Our answer: Open Social Learning.

OpenStudy’s first disruptive innovation was to enable peer learning.  We set out to prove that learning could occur in an open social platform that offered peer learning help. The platform exceeded expectations. It has grown to over 100,000 users from 170 countries, and it offers a free, scalable, 24/7 learning help that users report is “addictive”. 80% of surveyed users report improved learning outcomes.

But there is more.  I’ve written countless letters of recommendation to help students apply for jobs, graduate school, and medical school by evaluating and documenting soft skills. I could see something remarkable emerge on our peer learning platform. Students began building and demonstrating these very skills. They learned to articulate their questions and answers, to maintain courtesy and openness, to work together in teams. They were truly passionate about learning. Some became leaders and offered support and mentoring.

Watching the interactions on OpenStudy, we realized that this ecosystem was just the right environment to develop key soft skills: helpfulness, courtesy, teamwork, problem solving, engagement, to name a few.  Today, OpenStudy is a global extracurricular extraordinaire, experiential learning for the 21st century, with access for all.

SmartScore is OpenStudy’s bold new initiative to challenge the traditional notions of intelligence normally quantified by grades. SmartScore will report on skills and competencies demonstrated on our platform that are relevant and meaningful for both student and workplace success. SmartScore is a 21st century version of real world intelligence.

We are hacking education and rethinking evaluation and assessment. You can think of it as going beyond grades. We call it a SmartScore.

Join us for our SmartScore launch on April 17th at the Education Innovation Summit to learn more.

Got your SmartScore?

We’re very excited to have our co-Founder, Dr. Preetha Ram, speaking at this event in San Jose, CA on April 14th. What is TED? It stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and is a forum for thinkers, movers, and creators from across the world who want to change the world.

About Dr. Preetha Ram.  Preetha is visionary, educator, innovator and entrepreneur. She has a passion for education and this passion has led her to develop OpenStudy, with her cofounders, Chris Sprague and Ashwin Ram and with a dedicated and imaginative team.

OpenStudy is a powerful platform for open social learning, where anyone from anywhere in the world can find help anytime of the day or night.  Our global peer learning community offers support, socialization and learning help.  It grows because learners who come to learn, love it and stay to help.  The theme of the Tedx talk is “Pay it forward” and on OpenStudy, our community does this every day, every minute.  From our math whiz in Kenya to our English guru in Texas to our Computer Science maven in Australia – each time an OpenStudier  is helped, they create a viral effect, as they themselves will help someone else. Our hashtag is #Take10Teach10. (Preetha’s blog)

We want to take the opportunity at TEDx to showcase our community to the world – but we need your help.  So, what do we want you to do? We’ve got some ideas for you!

1. Join the OpenStudy Viewing party
2. Host a Viewing Party
3. Share on Twitter and Facebook
4. Tell your family and friends
5. GET PEOPLE INVOLVED!

OpenStudy Viewing Party

Register with us. On the day of the event (April 14th), we will open up a study group, Tedx San Jose, where we can all chat together during the talk.  We will watch the broadcast here.

When is OpenStudy Presenting?
OpenStudy will be presenting during ‘Session Three’ of the event, which begins at 3:00PM PST on Saturday, April 14th. You can see the full schedule here.

How do I host a viewing party?
 It’s easy! Have some friends, classmates, family (pets allowed) over to your house to watch the live webcast! By joining in the webcast, you get to interact and experience the event with people around the world! More information:

Twitter:

Use our hashtag, #Take10Teach10 and #TedxSanJoseCA when you tweet your reactions to the talk.

Let the world know.

Hey OpenStudiers! Owlfred here to let you know about some of the new features we’ve released – and most importantly, WHY we’ve introduced them. So, you know what OpenStudy is all about right? It’s a place to teach, to learn, and to interact with people all around the world in the best online learning community around!

So, with that in mind, how do you interact and learn from some of our amazing helpers if you’re not there to pay attention? Well, as of now, you can only ask one question at a time. What’s that you say? You have way more than one question to ask? No problem! Trust us, we’ve thought of that!

The way the new system works is that you can have one question ‘open’ at a time. So, if your question gets answered, you can simply mark it closed, and BOOM – you can ask another question. So, really you can ask an unlimited number of questions, it’s just that you can only have one OPEN at a time. What does an ‘open question’ mean? It means it appears in the list of questions for all our great helpers to see. If it’s closed, it still exists, it’s just not on that list.

So… I have a question and it doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention, and it’s sliding down the list of open questions! What do I do?!? Yup, you guessed it, we thought of that too . We’ve added the ‘Bump’ feature. If your question hasn’t been answered to your satisfaction in five minutes, hit the ‘Bump’ button and BOOM! You’re at the top of the list! You can bump a question more than once, but each time you bump a question you have to wait longer to bump it again.

Check out what a question looks like in our new format!

Note that moderators will be looking out for people who close their questions early just to re-ask them. If you want to ask the same question, you have to wait to bump it. As with everything we do on OpenStudy, we have added these cool new features to make OpenStudy an even better learning environment for everyone. This new way to ask questions and receive help should help even more people get help, and so that new users can get attention without getting pushed out by veteran users who prefer to ask all their questions at once.

Yours in Scholastic Excellence,

Owlfred!

Sergio Alvarez is a 9th grader in NY, failed every math class through 8th grade despite numerous teachers and paid tutors. He dreams of a future where he engineers planes, but you and I know the harsh reality: this is very unlikely. Kids like him get discouraged, bored, drop out of school, and wait tables all their lives. However, Sergio discovered OpenStudy, met Hero, an OpenStudier who took interest in him. Six months later we received a note from him telling us he was making 90s in his math class. This is fairy tale with a happy ending, only it is not a fairy tale. Sergio is an actual user in OpenStudy and there are many more like him. And for Sergio and the others, it is not an ending, but a beginning.

Our venture OpenStudy is unique. We call it open social learning. Help is always available for all the learners in the world, who raise their hands and ask for help. We offer a highly scaleable, low cost, global solution to the problem of providing learning help through an open social platform for peer-to-peer learning.

We have proven this disruptive model over and over again, to thousands of learners. Today there are 100,000 registered users, from over 40 partnering institutions including a who’s who list of the MITOCWs and OpenYales to the community college systems of West Hills and Piedmont. Our users ask over 1000 questions a day in Math alone and are usually helped within 5 minutes. Our impact on learning: 80% of our users surveyed reported that using OpenStudy had helped them gain a better understanding of their course material. And there are stories like Sergio’s.

Our solution is really blindingly obvious especially to anyone with a teenager. Give them a Facebook like social site and the social interactions will then lead to engagement, the peer to peer learning creates a win-win scenario and users complain happily that they are addicted. Addicted to math! When was the last time you heard that?

As satisfying as this is, there is more. As our users engage with one another, young with old, the middle schooler with the MIT engineer, American, the Pakistani, the Tanzanian, the Turkish, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the black, the white, brown… they learn to interact, be courteous, they learn to be helpful, they learn to work together, to communicate. For the most active of our users, OpenStudy becomes their passion.

Communication, Teamwork, Passion, Helpfulness.

What does that sound like to you?

To us it was apparent that in our social learning platform, we had also created an ecosystem where our users could move beyond subject matter expertise to learning soft skills that matter. They were moving from the mind to the heart. Think of it as learning things that are not captured on a grade. Not only do our users practice these important skills of the heart, we can then report on on what they have learnt. With crowd sourcing, game mechanics and analytics, we can report on teamwork, problem solving, and most of all the elusive attribute, but in a way the most important: passion! You and I know this should have been taught in school, somehow? Right? But tragically, all too often it isn’t.

And finally, this is my core belief. In education, what lies between failure and success is a human. A teacher, a mentor, a friend, a peer. I believe all the technology being developed today will not solve the problems of education if it does not deliberately and purposefully include the social element. And I believe in the power of open social learning systems to solve some of education’s biggest problems.

Here is my Call to Action. Come experience OpenStudy for yourself. Be a Hero to a Sergio. Take 10 minutes to teach 10. And you may well learn something too.

Do you have a story like Sergio’s you’d like to share? Or perhaps you’re the ‘Hero’ in this story? Well, we’d love to hear it! Go to this link and tell us your #Take10Teach10 story!

OpenStudy has been pretty busy for the past few months, and promises to continue to be so over the next few! As Marketing Manager, I’ve been doing a variety of tasks, from community management to passing out candy at local colleges. But one of my favorite responsibilities by far is managing OpenStudy’s Ambassador program. Launched at the end of January, OpenStudy’s Ambassadors are responsible for engaging with new users onsite and helping them learn OpenStudy’s quirks and behaviors.

What makes a good Ambassador? Our chosen Ambassadors represent our best users and examples of the kind of users we love seeing. Each Ambassador must apply for the job and then goes through an interview with me.  They are polite, helpful, friendly, warm, outgoing, and ethical. They abide by our Code of Conduct, and are flexible when the Code of Conduct changes. They are willing to adjust their behaviors on site based on instructions, and even come up with ideas for us to implement. They are our Welcome Wagons and tour guides.

Ambassadors reach out to new users in chat, their first questions, and via private messages to welcome them to the site. They explain the norms of our community, introduce the moderators and the administrators, and act as a support for new users. Each website has its own culture, and OpenStudy is no different. Ambassadors help ease that awkward transition from knowing no one at the party to making friends. They explain where the chat is, and point them towards users they might find helpful.

Ambassadors also act as a great barometer of the site for us administrators. They let us know where problems take place, give feedback on new features, and a few of them are also Global Interns. What’s even more amazing is that they do it solely to benefit OpenStudy, and for no other reward. I love getting feedback from other users, moderators, and staff about my Ambassadors.

How do you become an Ambassador? Well, you start off by filling out this application (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BD3GW7T ). Then I will read through your application and let you know if you have been chosen for an interview or not. After your interview, you’ll hear back about my decision within a few days. Factors that go into my decision include your current level of activity on the site, your history on the site (yes, this means abuse reports), your interview, and what the rest of the staff has to say about you.

An important about being an Ambassador:

We require a scanned photo ID, so if you don’t have one, please don’t apply. A photo ID can be a school ID, driver’s license, or even a library card, as long as it has your photo and name on it. This usually means that our chosen Ambassadors are over 15.

If you’re still interested, I’d LOVE to have you on board. Fill out the application, and we’ll talk soon!

Happy Studying!

Laura*