Education

Coursera Founder Launches Zoom Challenger For Higher Ed


In March, Daphne Koller’s two teenage daughters were in a Zoom session at their private high school. “We caught one of them in the middle of class playing Sims, and the other one watching a Netflix video,” she says. That led to a dinner table discussion with her tech entrepreneur husband Dan Avida. “We started talking about how great the need was for something other than Zoom,” says Koller, 52, a computer scientist, MacArthur genius and cofounder of online learning platform Coursera, recently valued at $2.5 billion.

Today Avida, Koller and two cofounders are launching Engageli, a Silicon Valley-based startup that sells a learning platform for real-time online higher ed courses. They say it does a much better job than Zoom of engaging students, hence the name. Koller, who taught computer science at Stanford for 18 years, also believes Engageli can offer a superior learning experience compared to traditional lecture classes. “If you’re in a 500-person auditorium in row 23 looking down at the instructor writing stuff on the board—the Engageli experience is much better than that,” she says.

In an online demo, Avida walked me through the platform’s functions. “You can have a quiz built into the presentation,” he said, displaying a screen with the question, “How many hydrogen atoms are in a heavy molecule?” and four choices (correct answer: two). While lecturing, a professor can get instant quiz results that show whether students are keeping up.

Another feature: students can send professors a choice of five emojis including a frowny face, indicating they aren’t understanding the lecture. “Professors don’t have to decipher the text messages they get on Zoom,” he says.

He and Koller are excited about Engageli’s “tables,” which allow students in large classes to break into groups of up to 10 students, similar to breakout groups on Zoom. Unlike Zoom, Engageli lets them communicate with individual classmates by text message while listening to the professor. “We noticed our daughters always had FaceTime running while they were on Zoom,” he says.

Engageli also has a Brady Bunch-style screen view option where students’ faces appear in rows of boxes. Additional features include the ability to display a high-definition video during a lecture (Avida showed me a Paris nightscape shot from a drone) and a tab where students can take notes on the platform.

Between posting videos, tracking real-time quizzes, monitoring emoticons and keeping tabs on the “tables,” won’t instructors have a tough time mastering Engageli? “For anyone who’s used Zoom or Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, Engageli doesn’t take long to learn,” he says. His team consulted with “several dozen” professors while it was building the platform, he says, including academics in the STEM disciplines and the humanities.

Engageli is introducing the platform through a pilot program with “a small set of universities we consider to be early adopters,” says Koller. She won’t name the schools or share pricing details

The online MBA program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne is among the pilot participants, says Assistant Dean Norma Scagnoli. Its 18-month program, which costs $22,000, is delivered through pre-recorded lectures on the Coursera platform. It also offers optional live sessions once a week that run 90 minutes and accommodate up to 200 students. Since 2016 the live classes have used Zoom. But since Zoom was designed for video conferencing, not instruction, its functions are limited.

“Engageli is more like a classroom,” says Scagnoli. She likes the fact that instructors can easily monitor “tables” and that students can text one another or the entire class in real time. Visually, instructors can more easily keep track of individual students if they see their faces around a virtual table.

Koller and Avida won’t say how much they plan to charge for Engageli and whether it will cost more than Zoom. For now, Scagnoli says her school is doing the pilot free of charge and sharing feedback with Engageli. She’s in negotiations over pricing and she hopes to introduce the platform to online MBA students in the spring.

Koller and Avida are moving into a field that will likely have stiff competition. Many predict that post-Covid, brick and mortar schools will continue to offer a portion of their real-time classes online.

In September, ClassEDU announced it had raised $16 million in venture money for a platform that would piggyback on Zoom and provide many of the same functions as Engageli, but for a broader range of institutions, including K-12 schools. It was cofounded by Michael Chasen, 49, the cofounder of Blackboard, one of the leading tech platforms for assigning homework, giving quizzes and tracking grades. Scagnoli says she was eager to try ClassEDU’s product, Class for Zoom, but it is not yet available. Chasen says a staggering 5,000 schools have already expressed interest. Class for Zoom will go into beta mode this month and be released by the end of the year.

Another competitor: New York-based Campuswire, launched in late 2016 by founder Tade Oyerinde, 27. He describes it as “Slack plus Zoom plus Quora.” Campuswire’s business has spiked in the pandemic. Three hundred schools now use it, including University of Illinois and UCLA, he says. But he has only raised $3.6 million and he expects stiff competition from well-funded newcomers. “There is going to be a knife fight over who’s going to be the company that delivers the optimal synchronous online learning platform,” he says.

Engageli has raised $14.5 million, including personal investments from Koller, Avida and their cofounders. Koller agrees the competition will build. “I remember well the early days of the MOOC movement,” she says. (MOOC stand for “massive open online courses;” Coursera, launched in 2012, was one of the first MOOC providers.) “I’m sure that here also there will be multiple competitors, some of which will make it and others not.”



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