Digital Shift

Democratizing digital teaching and learning - enabling socioculturally appropriate education for the global digital education paradigm shift.

An ingrained problem: The approach to education has remained nearly identical over the past century. Teachers deliver content didactically and impersonally, while students spend class-time memorizing facts and figures in a passive manner. Research demonstrates that students don’t engage strongly with this approach. Not only do students not fully grasp concepts from class, but they also have trouble applying material in hands-on work or practical settings.

An innovative solution: A relatively new model addressing and largely overcoming these problems is the ‘flipped classroom’. In it, students initially engage with print/media conceptual material in a self-paced manner, then use class-time for application of concepts. This has been shown to reduce the focus on rote memorization, instead shifting to learning through application - with a teacher present to assist. It’s resulted in boosted engagement, superior student outcomes, and higher teacher satisfaction during school.

Digital Shift (us!): The entire educational paradigm is now shifting to personalized education using media, and teachers/students are struggling to keep up. We built a platform to help educators regardless of socioeconomics, language, or culture successfully implement and go much further beyond the flipped classroom methodology. We help teachers and students through the paradigm shift in an education-centric way. The platform is one part digital media creator, allowing easy, streamlined, and soon-automated creation of personalized, engaging digital content; and one part education social network, where teachers and students share their content, and store it in personal learning portfolios. As we shift away from lectures and textbooks, teachers/students rely on digital media (e.g. video) to support their learning. So instead of spending time and money scouring the internet for content that isn’t right for them, or on using difficult content creation tools, teachers/students can now use Shift to create, share, and store exactly the personalized content they need.

Using advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, the most time-consuming parts of digital content creation are automated, streamlined, or simply eliminated. Teachers: populate their own Channels with material custom to their students, build portfolios that enable easy student access, and now have evidence of work for career advancement. Students: populate their own Channels with content for self-study, peer-to-peer teaching, and graded video assessment.

Initially, content will be diagrammatic (read: Khan Academy-style), but this is Phase 1 – our Shift team has significant AR/VR capabilities to be integrated into the core product as the market develops and as we grow. Shift also provides collaborative digital learning tools to facilitate P2P learning, and allows teachers/students to receive credit for their creations.

Our founding team has deep experience in creating multimedia content for educational purposes and has the technical expertise (AR/VR/AI/ML) to ensure that Shift stays at the forefront of this industry pivot. Our engineering team is progressing strongly with our pilot, set for trial implementation in at least 3 schools in Q4 2018.

We undertook deep market research with our Users to ensure our design and user experience were suitable. We’ve combined each important software capability into one platform, ensuring that educators have a streamlined and eventually automated process for navigating the digital education paradigm shift.

We built our first-of-a-kind platform from the ground up to allow teachers and students to build and share video content today, while being ready/compatible to next enable building and sharing of AR/VR content. Shift is also content and language agnostic - so educators speaking any language can use it to teach any subject, unconstrained by borders.

There’s a projected shortage of millions of teachers approaching. This can be potentially mitigated by leveraging good technology to maximize the scale potential of existing teachers, and by enabling motivated students to also emerge as great teachers.

Our cloud-based, AI-powered platform automates the content creation/sharing process even at low-bandwidth, helping teachers to create content in an always-accessible way, and providing a place for students to interact with it. Our tech thus enables teachers to spend their time doing what human teachers are most needed for: spending time with students, building mental scaffolds, providing guidance, and working through problems.

We’re continuing to improve our core value proposition - allowing teachers and students to build and share content on our network. We’ve got 3 pilots starting in Q4 2018: we hope to meet User demands, learn as much as we possibly can in exploring our hypotheses, and iterate to improve based on feedback. Ultimately over the next 12 months we want to develop a scalable process for deployment at schools around the world, so that from month 12 to 36, we can deploy at as many schools around the world as possible - to improve education and thus, lives.

Students in non-English countries often receive translated content. While helpful, it’s not as helpful as having content created by native teachers who understand their context. So, decentralizing content creation and empowering grassroots education is key for us.

We’re translating our UI so over 3-5 years we’re deployed in India, Asia, Africa, and South America. This will increase our userbase, further magnifying our network effect benefits. Part of deployment in these regions means ensuring the technology is available free/low cost, compensated by business model mechanics that allow the platform to thrive/grow. We believe we’ve found the right balance.

To do well with a freemium model, you need a mechanism to develop and nurture a ‘funnel’ of potential customers. We have three mechanisms of growth: organic (our built-in sharing function for teachers and students, word of mouth), industry (the traditional approach of conferences, workshops), and advertising. Our sharing mechanism is a key growth factor. In terms of retaining: people stay with you if you truly serve their needs, AND at a cost that’s amenable to them. We’re focusing very tightly on establishing the right product-market fit, including price optimization to ensure users are happy, and therefore remain with us.

We have approximately 80 users who we’re working on our current pilot with. We’re already allowing teachers to make and share content with their students, and this content is currently being used as part of curriculum in a leading school. Early feedback from teachers and students is very positive, and is helping us to iterate quickly. Psychologically, we’ve heard from teachers that they feel like more modern teachers, being able to teach using digital media they’ve created on their own, personalized for their specific set of students. Other ways we’re helping: fostering teacher development, providing ‘help center’ type support.

According to our model, and in line with our strategic plan, we aim to serve just over 2500 users in 12 months, and will be serving them in the same way as we’re serving our current users, albeit with more platform functionality. Being a platform, we can scale up our efforts with minimal cost on the back-end. Much of our initial development time was spent figuring out the most scalable way to build our core technology to enable this marginal cost.

In 3 years we aim to have 750,000 free users and 200,000 paying users around the world.

We’re fortunate to be steeped in skill, support, and advisors required to run a scale business for social/educational impact. Two of our co-founders are ex-Khan Academy video experts with a deep background in education and health (one is a medical doctor, one is a current PhD student at Harvard Medical School). Five teammates are programmers, with an average of ~2 decades of experience each (and two are teachers themselves). We’re incubating at a top Boston incubator, Harvard’s Innovation Labs, where we receive intensive, hands-on mentoring and workshops in everything required to build a successful, impactful venture.

Revenue models must obviously be realistic if they are to work. Too often, great initiatives tank because they aren’t built to grow sustainably.

In consultation with management consultants, and other industry leaders in education and business economics, we’ve done pricing research including school and teacher budgeting, market sizing, addressable market modeling, and of course a thorough assessment of international demand for the product.

We’re a SaaS freemium product with monthly and annual subscription types, designed to be low-touch and self-serve, though we will still also sign at institutional levels. Individual teacher and student subscribers can transition from free to paid as they outgrow tiers of service.

In terms of expansion, we’re initially starting in a higher education niche, at 2 US institutions and 1 Australian institution. We have signed up higher education faculty at institutions outside of these 3, in other large markets we want to test. After we’re satisfied with our technology scalability and reliability, and after we secure company infrastructure for customer support, we’ll open the product up to the developing world as financially feasible for the company to be sustainable prior to greater expansion. Our approach is research, test, expand, repeat.

The most important reason we’re applying is to form a cohort with other Solvers. We truly believe we’re onto something big, and through feedback and collaboration, the Solve community will maximize the likelihood of each team successfully implementing our visions. Solve is connected to persons and organizations with deep experience in our vertical, who may be able to help us think about and work through problems we may not yet be positioned to imagine. In our experience, mentorship in this way can save a startup from failure by providing key insights at opportune times.

We’ve found that school systems vary in basically every way imaginable, including by district, city, state, and country. A key barrier to success is finding experienced navigation through these variations - this experience likely exists within Solve’s network and would help a lot. Further, one of our key goals is international expansion to non-English speaking countries. MIT is so well-regarded that working with Solve would surely assist in global expansion if international schools found value in what we’re building (fortunately our early feedback says they do!).