Knack Technologies

1. Personalized academic tutoring support is difficult for institutions to scale yet immensely valuable to the students who are on the receiving end of it.

2. Knack is a technology platform helping institutions scale intentional peer tutoring marketplaces. This enables our institutional partners to better support students on the receiving end of tutoring while also providing additional opportunities for students to have meaningful, flexible employment opportunities on campus.

3. Being a tutor is one of the most valuable employment opportunities a student can have while in college. Not only is it a great way to make money, but it's an awesome way to further develop the interpersonal skills (communication, collaboration, leadership, etc.) that will help better position themselves for success after college!

The potential scale of our problem extends to all college students across the country (from your traditional four-year institution to the two-year community college). 

As the demographic of the traditional student changes, technology must change with it. Our solution provides an opportunity for all students, whether it be an 18-year old first of his/her family to attend college or a 40-year old single mother, our platform provides both an opportunity to receive personalized academic tutoring support and an opportunity to receive a flexible, skill building employment opportunity while attending classes.

Essential human skills such as problem solving are some of the most difficult skills to teach because they require a trial and error approach to learning. There's no more effective way to learn how to problem solve than to face a problem in real life that needs to be solved. 

Being a peer tutor is the perfect contextual environment for a student to learn how to face and overcome real world issues in a safe and controlled environment. You have to learn how to handle different students in different scenarios and it's an invaluable opportunity to develop these skills.

We partner with institutions of all different demographic make-ups from four-year minority serving institutions to two-year community colleges. In addition to wanting to scale academic tutoring through our platform, our partners value the opportunity to increase these skill-building job opportunities for students on their campuses.

For example: We have a student named Sonia (22) who is a tutor on our platform and comes from a family that struggles to support itself financially. Sonia tutors on our platform part-time in addition to her other job and school work as a way to make money that she can then share back with her family to help them.

In addition to Sonia, we have another tutor named Jarmilla (40) who is a mother of three teenagers from Austria who tutors as a way to improve her english speaking ability while also making a supplemental income to help support her children.

Knack is a tutoring technology company that partners with colleges & universities to build intentional peer to peer tutoring marketplaces. In some capacity we serve nearly every student on a college campus that we partner with (whether it be as a student on the receiving end of tutoring or one who is on the tutor side of the platform).

We've built technology platform that handles the entire process for a student signing up to receive help or become a tutor, including profile creation, student-to-student matchmaking, session scheduling logistics, & post-session feedback.

For students with no prior tutoring experience we've built a tutor training program that can be taken online at the students needs. While we use this training program as an opportunity to educate students on what it takes to be a successful tutor, we also utilize it as a chance to educate them on the skills they'll be displaying/developing while tutoring and how they will be impactful in their transition into the workplace after graduation.

All tutoring platform's historically place the emphasis on the student who is on the receiving end of the tutoring interaction. What's really unique about Knack is our belief that the "tutor" side of the equation is actually the most important piece. We believe that by better engaging the tutor, and making this a meaningful and engaging experience for them then we can actually provide a better overall experience for the student on the receiving end. 

To accomplish this, we've intentionally streamlined the process to become a tutor so that we could open doors to more students and create a more inclusive process. From there we work to make sure these students are properly trained & qualified to provide a quality experience to students on the receiving end.

Over 30% of the students who signed up as tutors on our platform during our engagement with Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (one of the country's top HBCUs) had no prior tutoring experience. Through survey results we've seen strong evidence that these students value not just the opportunity to make supplemental income while they're in college, but that they value this opportunity to earn money through a job that's providing them with an opportunity to better position themselves for their future careers after college.

Direct student quotes from training are attached below:

"I never thought of tutoring for how it could benefit me. I got into tutoring because it was something I thought I was good at, not because I thought it could make me better."

"I didn't expect to see building professional skills listed. This is because I hadn't considered tutoring as a way to build professional skills, yet it makes sense with the interpersonal relationships being formed, the knowledge flow, and the different problem solving techniques that must be used."

"I initially wanted to make some money, but I am realizing that the skills I'm earning from tutoring will apply in other areas of my life. I also thought it was my job to teach students regularly, but it's really my job to make them experts on the subject so that they no longer need a tutor." 

1. 9 partners (90,000 students on average)

2. 50 partners (500,000 students)

3. 500 partners (5,000,000 students)

We believe there is an opportunity to partner with every school in the country in some capacity. Nearly every school has a need for one element of our platform; whether that be scaling academic tutoring support or scaling skill building job opportunities. Given the realization that not every school has the genetic makeup to support both sides of our platform, we've built mechanisms that allow for us to connect institutions in an intentional manner to fill the gaps when their own students are unable to do so.

One of the biggest hurdles we're faced with is the cultural barrier that comes with the shift in approach that our platform brings for an institution. Naturally institutions are risk-adverse so committing to a new model that repositions how they've been doing something for so long is a little intimidating.

We believe that the most efficient way to overcome these barriers is to amplify the stories of the students who have benefited from utilizing our platform. Whether it's a student that was too intimidated by the tutoring center who persisted in her/his course because of the support they received from the personalized nature of our platform, or a student who used the flexibility of Knack to supplement her family's income, we believe there's no better way to overcome these barriers than by telling our students stories.

Our 9 current partners are all in the United States. They are the University of South Florida, USF SP, Hillsborough Community College, Lynn University, Johns Hopkins, Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University, University of Florida, & University of Florida Online

11 full-time staff

Our team is combined of young technology savvy entrepreneurs who are primed to deliver on our promise to students and our institutional partners. We spent our first four years as a company building serving students directly without institutional partnerships and believe that this experience is invaluable in providing us a unique perspective on how to approach this problem. This experienced primed us for our current partnership model as it allows us to really understand the problems that our now partners are facing -- how can we better serve more students with increasingly fewer resources? 

We're currently partnered with the College Reading & Learning Association (CRLA). CRLA is the organization that helps colleges & universities across the country build and monitor their tutor training programs. 

Our CRLA partnership came from their interest in our positioning tutoring as a skill building opportunity and utilizing the training as an early chance to get students to buy into this.

We charge a licensing fee to our institutional partners to have access to our platform & all included services. From there institutions pay wages to the students who provide the tutoring and we act as a pass through for those dollars. 

We have raised a seed financing round from various education focused technology investors in San Francisco & the Florida area. It's our intentions to use our licensing model to grow until we're a profitable, self-sustaining business.

We're applying to this challenge because of the opportunity we believe this grant will provide us to better amplify the stories of our students. $20,000 of the grant we intend on diverting to scholarship fund that will be used to reward the most deserving tutors of the semester and we plan on using the PR platform provided here to let them tell their stories to folks in the education community.