It took a single semester of teaching freshmen physics at Harvard three years ago to convince Zachary Wissner-Gross that lectures — and the leading online learning programs that emulate them — are often the least effective way to teach.
"They all have the same basic format," said Wissner-Gross, who earned his doctorate in physics at Harvard after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from MIT. "All of them are linear, and the students' experiences are passive, whereas the majority of my students had to have lengthy conversations and work through problems one-on-one with each other or with me during my office hours. That was when they got the most out of the material."
His friend and former MIT classmate, John Lee, a senior software engineer at Google, agreed. Together, they thought they could build a better online learning platform. So in March 2012, the two of them founded their own company, School Yourself, and the following month, they released "Trigonometry," their first interactive "textbook" for iPad.
Two more former MIT classmates, Vivek Venkatachalam and Kenny Peng, joined their team. And the four of them wrote two other textbooks, "Hands-on Pre-Calculus" and "Hands-on Calculus," using iBooks Author. As of last week, the three books had been downloaded a total of more than 13,000 times through iBooks.
Because not everyone owns an iPad, though, they wanted to reach a larger audience by releasing Web versions, ones that would be even more interractive. So last week, they launched the free test version of their online platform for early calculus at schoolyourself.org. The platform is designed to be highly personalized, allowing users to watch 30 seconds of a video and then choose to solve a problem, see more examples or ask for a hint — or go backward or forward to other sections, based on their ability.
"It's very much like choose your own adventure," said Wissner-Gross, 28. "We're putting a lot of decision-making into the hands of students. We're trying to make it as close to a one-on-one experience as possible."
The next subjects the platform will tackle — tentatively some time in 2014 — will be trigonometry, probability and statistics, and physics. But for the moment, Wissner-Gross and his teammates are focused on calculus — and gearing up for the Oct. 30 awards ceremony for this year's $1 million MassChallenge competition, where they'll face off against 127 other teams from around the world.
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