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.

Phoenix, AZ – Who is smart? What is smart?  How is it measured?  Today at the Education Innovation Summit, we’re announcing SmartScore, adding a new dimension to student profiles to answer those questions. SmartScore is an individualized, data-based, quantifiable evaluation of “soft skills” that travel with the student from project to project, class to class, or job to job.

“SmartScore overcomes the limitations of traditional transcripts and assessments by evaluating behaviors broadly important to effective interactions in any group environment,” said Chris Sprague, our CEO. “SmartScore measures what ‘smart’ should mean today and will mean tomorrow: Adaptability, global citizenship, passion for learning, and enthusiasm for collaborative problem solving.”

Launching with three core attributes, SmartScore measures Teamwork, Problem Solving, and Engagement. Those three behaviors reflect the changing culture, dynamics, and needs of online learning, behaviors measurable through student contributions at the grassroots level—whatever the location or academic level of the student.

SmartScore is a snapshot of a student’s high-performing skills applied to learning and development that delivered results to the learning community. The data displays as both present moment and over time, allowing for demonstrated growth. To learn more and find your SmartScore, click here and login to your OpenStudy account.

Get some background on OpenStudy here: OpenStudy Media Kit

What They Are Saying:

“MIT OpenCourseWare’s goal is increase the impact of our resources tenfold in our next decade, and building community around our content is a key component of that effort. OpenStudy is a great example of how such communities can be built.  OpenStudy’s SmartScore encourages the teamwork and collaborative problem solving skills that will allow millions of independent learners to teach each other.” – Cecilia d’Oliveria, Executive Director, MIT OCW.

“SNHU is pleased to partner with OpenStudy, a leading innovator and disruptor in higher education. Their SmartScore provides a unique solution to credentialing soft skills that are not well captured in traditional grades. Their approach combines open social learning and peer learning to empower students from all walks of life to learn and demonstrate important skills that employers greatly value.” – Paul LeBlanc, President of Southern New Hampshire University

“Most Americans, especially in today’s rough economy, just need a low-cost way to obtain the skills that will get them a fulfilling job or at least a better-paying one. OpenStudy’s SmartScore allows job-seekers, mostly community college students, to demonstrate work force skills in lieu of, or as an adjunct to, a certificate or diploma.” – Dean Florez, Fmr. Majority Leader California State Senate

For more information: email press@openstudy.com

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

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.

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!