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

The rise and benefit of the education “rock star” has become a hot topic in edutech.

On TechCrunch, Nancy Conrad discussed her foundation’s exciting Innovation Summit. The summit awards 27 high school teams an all-expenses-paid trip to pitch their startup dream to a supportive audience of entrepreneurs.  Conrad’s rationale for the summit: Celebrate the top achievers as rock stars and “change the culture of students” across the educational landscape; a hoped for trickle-down excitement for math and science.

Rock stars? There might be a better way for mass education than the celebrity/trickle-down model. I’m convinced that the peer-based validation and collaboration of social learning networks are better bets to jump-start broad scale engagement in math and science. We don’t need to make geeks into rock stars, we need to make learning less geeky.

Social learning platforms enhance the possibilities of grassroots collaboration encompassing a worldwide network of students where learners teach each other; a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach to education; an inclusive, geometric expansion of access rather than the winnowing process of traditional talented and gifted programs.

For sure, the rock stars of the tech industry capture our attention. Undergraduate CS majors at my alma mater are skyrocketing, and many have suggested the increase is in part due to startup rock stars like Mark Zuckerberg, Shawn Parker (recently played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network) and Kevin Rose.  But there are millions of potential entrepreneurs “out there” who don’t have access to a rarified educational pipeline.

And those millions can be served.

MIT OpenCourseWare plans to reach a billion minds with their free offerings – and leverage OpenStudy groups to connect those minds.  Almost 12,000 students have already joined the intro CS course.  Hundreds of OpenCourseWare consortium members have opened their content to other very promising social learning platforms, like p2pu and videolectures.net.

On OpenStudy, students are now asking close to 15,000 math questions per month – and the vast majority of them are answered by a global set of peers within five minutes. When I asked our top math helper why he answers so many questions, he gave the answer we all hoped:  the innate desire for peer-validation; knowing that he switched on the light bulb in a student’s head and that person was thankful.

Diverse combinations of teacher-learners that would never meet in a classroom work together online.  An MIT CS major in Boston tutors an AP CS student in Kentucky; a Shanghai student learns English from Emory students learning Mandarin.  What’s the common thread?  A social sense of co-ownership and an outlet for peer validation that transcends socio-economics and geography.

Game-like rewards have a place in education too.  In our study groups, students give medals as thanks for answers, learners earn badges by participating in discussions, and users progress through titles like “pupil”, “lifesaver”, “superstar” and “hero” as they help one another.  This is how we can make all students rock stars – by expanding the responsibility and rewards of teaching to a global set of peers.

OpenStudy has been described as a massively-multiplayer study group—an online learning game where everyone is on the same team.  And that’s the point of the open social learning movement: when it comes to something as foundational as education, we should all be on the same team, and we should encourage everyone to be a player.

We’re not alone in our approach to expanding educational access. The Gates Foundation recently awarded the Purdue Writing lab $1.5m to develop interactive, game-like features in a social learning environment to help improve high school writing skills. Already a supporter of Khan Academy, the Gates Foundation also recently teamed up with the Hewlett foundation and are helping to fund OpenStudy through their NGLC initiative.

President Obama issued a challenge to our industry:  ”I’m calling for investments in educational technology that will help create digital tutors that are as effective as personal tutors, educational software as compelling as the best video game”.

I want to say: there are many of us already answering that challenge!  Social learning has evolved into a movement of ideas that won’t stop until world-class, equitable and equal access education is achieved.  Rock stars will transcend the anointed few as droves of real-world heroes organically emerge through the collaboration of millions of social learners.

Sincerely,

Chris Sprague

CEO and Co-founder, OpenStudy