Grockit Launches Online Education’s First Personalized Study Program

brian buser March 11, 2010

24/7 Access to IRT Based Adaptive Curriculum, iPhone and Facebook Applications Allow for Unprecedented Personalization and Access

SAN FRANCISCO, March 11, 2010 — Grockit (www.grockit.com), an online educational company that focuses on collaborative learning, announced today the launch of its personalized test prep program that guides students through the entire test prep process. The program is the first of its kind to use the same IRT algorithms as actual standardized tests to continuously adapt instruction to each individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. The comprehensive study program includes:

• Live Online Instruction: Complete and personalized SAT, ACT, GMAT and GRE prep courses. The courses combine live online lectures led by the top instructors in the country, group study with peers from all over the world, and personalized homework for each student based on their unique strengths and weaknesses. Students can access their peers and their personalized homework assignments 24 hours a day. A schedule of courses can be found on http://grockit.com and start at $299. Features include:

An online learning environment that adapts to each individual student and is based on IRT algorithms that are backed by decades of research.
Access to nearly 100,000 students from all over the world that members can practice with in online study groups 24 hours a day.
The ability for students to choose their own instructor before signing up for classes by viewing instructor analytics along with student reviews.

• Adaptive Practice: Grockit’s IRT based platform personalizes the program to ensure students are always being challenged at the appropriate level and receiving the instruction they need when they need it most.

• Highly Rated Instructors: Grockit’s proprietary teacher ranking algorithm ranks teachers based on their actual ability, ratings by students and activity in the community. This detailed view into teacher performance allows for complete transparency, so students and parents know they are working with the best instructors available.

• Industry-Leading Money-Back Guarantee: Most test prep providers only guarantee a 1 point improvement on the exam, or they will let you take their course over again at no cost. Grockit guarantees students will improve 150 points or more on the SAT, 50 points or more on the GMAT, and 2 points or more on the ACT or they will receive a complete refund.

• Facebook and iPhone Applications: With Grockit, students can study any time, any place with the iPhone application and with their friends on Facebook. The Grockit application can be found on Facebook by visiting http://apps.facebook.com/grockit.

“We built Grockit based on the needs I saw during my decade as a test prep instructor and what we have created is the application I only dreamed of then. Grockit is the most personalized means of study with each component created to reinforce students’ strengths and reduce academic weaknesses,” said Farb Nivi, Princeton Review’s 2002 Teacher of the Year and CEO, Grockit. “Grockit is not just a test prep platform, it is a learning platform that has been enthusiastically embraced by the education community. We are already working on bringing Grockit’s robust learning platform to every K-12 school district across the nation.”

Grockit Live Online Courses Are Here

brian buser March 8, 2010

blackboard We’re excited to announce that Grockit now offers personalized courses to students preparing for the SAT, ACT, GRE, and GMAT. Grockit courses offer a set schedule of live lessons with the best instructors in the country. Students pick the instructor and schedule that works best for them. Students and instructors are connected online and also through audio conferencing.

Each course lesson is a combination of slide based lecture and group practice questions. The curriculum adapts to each students’ strengths and weaknesses as they progress through the course material. Students also get 24/7 access to Grockit Group Study where they can work with or compete against students all over the world who preparing for the same exam. We’re so confident about the effectiveness of our courses that we’re offering a money back guarantee on score improvement.

Please select an exam to see how that Grockit courses compare to others in the industry:

SAT
ACT
GRE
GMAT

We look forward to your feedback!

Grockit Names Chris Strausser Chief Marketing Officer

brian buser February 25, 2010

We’re excited to welcome Chris to the team! Here is a copy of the press release so you can get to know him:

SAN FRANCISCO – Feb. 23, 2010 Grockit (www.grockit.com), an online educational company that leverages the Web to deliver real-time and adaptive social learning games, announced today that Chris Strausser has joined the company as chief marketing officer. Chris will be responsible for Grockit’s B2C and B2B Marketing and will report to founder and CEO Farb Nivi.

Strausser is a marketing veteran having spent over 20 years building educational and consumer brands. Most recently, Strausser served as chief marketing and sales officer at Chela Education Financing, which was sold to Nelnet, a leading education financing company with net assets exceeding $20 billion. Before this, Strausser held various positions at Kaplan Education for five years including chief marketing officer of SCORE! Learning.

Earlier in his career, Strausser ran marketing and product development for Jamba Juice when the company was in its infancy and had just secured its first major round of venture financing. He helped lead the company through its rapid growth phase adding more than 200 new stores. Strausser began his career at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, holding the position of vice president, management supervisor when he left to join Pepsico where he held senior marketing positions in the restaurant division with Taco Bell.

“Chris possesses the rare combination of proven marketing prowess with educational experience. He’s a perfect addition to our leadership team,” said Farb Nivi, CEO of Grockit. “In the short time since Grockit launched, we have created a whole new way for students to learn and a whole new type of learning environment. With Chris on board we look forward to scaling the company and expanding our suite of products.”

“I think Grockit is the future of education and I have been impressed with the platform that Farb and the team have built,” said Strausser. “I share the team’s core belief that integrating technology and the web into the educational environment allows for a more efficient, robust experience that will produce results. I am really thrilled to be joining Grockit to help roll this out.”

Announcing Grockit’s Summer 2010 Graduate Research Internship

ari bader-natal February 3, 2010

I’m happy to announce that Grockit will be offering its paid summer research internship program for the summer of 2010. This is the second year that we’re doing this (thanks again, Angela!), and I think it’s a great opportunity for doctoral students to apply their own research experience to a system that a large (and growing) community of learners uses everyday. It’s worth mentioning that Grockit has a large and interesting set of educational data, a variety of research interests, a very talented team, and a fantastic work environment. I just posted details about this program (with an application form) on the 2010 Summer Research Internship, and I encourage you to check it out.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on why we’re offering this, what we have in mind for the program, and why you (or perhaps someone you know) should consider applying.

Grockit, as you may know, is a San Francisco-based web startup building a platform for — and a community around — synchronous collaborative learning games. We strive to provide our growing global network of learners with a smart platform informed by peer assistance and adaptive support. Towards this end, we’re constantly exploring new ways to support collaborative learning online, and we’re frequently examining and applying techniques for analyzing the learning data that we’ve been collecting. One reason that we’re offering this program is to expand on the ways in which we pursue these goals.

Two of the challenges in studying computational systems for peer learning — both of which I faced in completing my own graduate work — is that these systems can take quite some time to build, and it can often take even longer to cultivate a sufficiently large community of participating learners. As a result, the time required to get from hypothesis to data analysis can be (or at least can feel) quite long. At Grockit, we’ve been making good progress with regards to both challenges, and hope that this internship will provide an enterprising graduate student with the opportunity to speed up this process for their own research questions.

In addition to the research opportunity, we’re offering a program stipend, an accommodation stipend, and a travel stipend. You’ll also get a healthy breakfast and lunch cooked in the office every weekday and the chance to spend your summer in vibrant San Francisco. So if you are a doctoral student studying in a university in the United States and interested in applying for a summer research position with us, I’d encourage you to submit an application.

The deadline is March 1, 2010, and you can apply today.

Reimagining learning

ari bader-natal January 28, 2010

Just a quick post to let you know that several hundred great new ideas on how we might reimagine learning have just been made public, spurred by the Digital Media and Learning competition. Not only can you read about each of these ideas, but — this week only — you can contribute to the conversation by adding your own comments. Be sure to check out our idea, which is about how we can leverage Grockit’s platform for live collaboration to create a new game that actively engages learners in asking questions and sharing their work with the world (through Grockit and Connexions). We’d love to hear your feedback, so please leave us a comment!

5 Reasons Why The Apple iPad Will Revolutionize Education

farbood nivi January 27, 2010

It’s all about the UI. The product is the UI. All these mantras boil it down to one thing. The book is still better than the screen because it has a better UI. Until today. The UI of the iPad gets us over that tipping point. The UI of the iPad will allow a student to be in collaborating with a peer in Grockit one second, in their full color, full page text book, the next second, and on the internet surfing for a information to go with the textbook info they are about to share with their classmate in Grockit. All on the iPad because it will be easy and fruitful to spend your time and interaction-actions with that sort of UI.

1. Price – It’s $599 retail which means Apple can probably already sell it into schools for $299-$399 and in a couple years there should be a $199 version. This is significant. We are talking about 65M K-12 students at $199 so about $12B. They don’t need the 60GB version and they don’t need 3G. Sound crazy to spend $12B outfitting each kid in the country with a device with a UI like the iPad? Not at all. It would single handedly advance education as much as the chalkboard.

2. Touchscreen- Compare the touchscreen of the iPad to a mouse on a regular screen. If you’re learning spatial concepts in Math or any subject, being able to manipulate the object with your hands should make it more intuitive and easier to grasp than manipulating it with a mouse. Imagine highlighting. One of the distinct UI advantages about books is that you can annotate them. Annotating with writing or even highlighting with a mouse is cumbersome. Annotating with an iPad seems like it should be pretty easy and intuitive as well as giving you the additional and awesome bonus of things like searching for just areas you’ve highlighted.

3. Screen Size – There is an old saying that ‘quantity affects quality’. Well that couldn’t be more true here. The iPad is a really big iPhone and that actually fundamentally changes the equation. The interaction I described above about annotating a text book is not possible on an iPhone. Well, technically you CAN highlight with your finger in your iPhone Kindle App but that is specifically not like annotating in your textbook because the Kindle on your iPhone looks nothing like your textbook and the iPad totally does look like your textbook. Screen size also lets you work easily in an app like Grockit which, like a textbook, is fundamentally different with more real estate. And finally, we all know that we loved books with pictures the most when we were in School even the images in textbooks. Making those images come alive and serve as a real learning medium is all about screen size and resolution.

4. Apps – Because the App Store already has hundreds, if not thousands, of apps that are either directly about learning or a useful reference when learning or studying, the iPad is essentially a product that is launching, from day one, with hundreds if not thousands of useful apps for learning. Again, the ones that have text, images or video become even that much more useful because of the screen-size.

5. iBook – Books are still a primary mode of learning in many many learning environments and being able to interact with them in similar and even some better ways than you can with a real book is either here with the iPad or so close that I’m finally convinced it’s happening.

Anyways, I’m pretty pumped to get one and we’re pretty pumped to build Grockit as an app in the iPad to do our part to help with the revolutionizing of education part.

ibooks_20100127-1 It’s all about the User Interface (UI). The product is the UI. These mantras boil it down to one thing. The book is still better than the screen because it has a better UI…until today. The UI of the iPad gets us over that tipping point. The UI of the iPad will allow a student to be collaborating in Grockit in one second, in a full color page textbook the next second, and then on the internet surfing for info they are about to share with their classmate in Grockit. All this on the iPad because it will be easy and fruitful to spend your time with that sort of UI. Here are five reasons why the iPad will revolutionize education:

1. Price – It’s $499 retail which means Apple can probably already sell it into schools for $299-$399 and in a couple years there should be a $199 version. This is significant. We are talking about 65M K-12 students at $199 so about $12B. They don’t need the 60GB version and they don’t need 3G. Sound crazy to spend $12B outfitting each kid in the country with a device with a UI like the iPad? Not at all. It would single handedly advance education as much as the chalkboard.

3. Screen Size – There is an old saying that ‘quantity affects quality’. Well that couldn’t be more true here. The iPad is a really big iPhone and that actually fundamentally changes the equation. The interaction I described above about annotating a text book is not possible on an iPhone. Well, technically you CAN highlight with your finger in your iPhone Kindle App but that is specifically not like annotating in your textbook because the Kindle on your iPhone looks nothing like your textbook and the iPad totally does look like your textbook. Screen size also lets you work easily in an app like Grockit which, like a textbook, is fundamentally different with more real estate. And finally, we all know that we loved books with pictures the most when we were in school, even the images in textbooks. Making those images come alive and serve as a real learning medium is all about screen size and resolution.

5. iBook – Books are still a primary mode of learning in many learning environments and being able to interact with them in similar and even some better ways than you can with a real book is either here with the iPad or so close that I’m finally convinced it’s happening.

Anyway, I’m pretty pumped to get one and we’re very pumped to build Grockit as an app in the iPad to do our part to help with the revolutionizing of education.

Grockit K-12…Get Ready to Claim Your Network

farbood nivi January 27, 2010

k12

Every standard, every state, every student. How does that sound? Grockit will soon be rolling out K-12 curriculum aligned to the state standards for every state and grade in the U.S. Even better, we have created private networks for each district and school in the United States. So get ready to claim your school district’s Grockit network. Benefits include:

A collaborative network where students help each other learn
Adaptive content that matches to each student’s ability
Teacher tools including custom online classes and detailed student reports
Grockit’s complete IRT based assessment technology that can help prove your curriculum is working
Math, Science, English, and Social Science content aligned to your state’s standards
Training and support from Grockit

To learn more about Grockit K-12 and how to improve student engagement and raise your standards, claim your network by contacting us here. We will contact you shortly with more details and you will be one of the first with access to Grockit K-12. For those attending the National Conference on Education in February please be sure to stop by our exhibit and meet us in person.

Cheers,
The Grockit Team

Grockit SAT Tutorathon Offers Students Free Week of SAT Test Prep – Press Release

brian buser January 18, 2010

SAT Tutorathon Gives Students Tips and Tools Before the January 23^rd SAT

SAN FRANCISCO – Jan. 18, 2010 – Grockit (www.grockit.com), an online educational company that leverages the Web to deliver real-time and adaptive social learning games, announced today the beginning of Grockit’s SAT Tutorathon, a week of free test prep, including unlimited access to Grockit’s stellar roster of tutors, leading up to the January 23^rdSAT exam. The SAT Tutorathon also allows students to evaluate their skill level, tailor a personalized study plan to eliminate weaknesses and enhance strengths, and study individualized practice questions and tutor guided games free-of-charge from Monday, January 18^th to Friday, January 22^nd.

“We want to help students everywhere raise their SAT scores and with the next SAT just around the corner, we wanted to give students the tools they need to de-stress and boost their confidence going into the exam,” said Farb Nivi, CEO, Grockit. “The most important factor in success on a standardized test, or any test for that matter, is a student’s mental state and stress level going into the exam. Our goal in creating the SAT Tutorathon was to help alleviate the increased pressure surrounding students so that they can reach their highest potential.”

Grockit offers unprecedented transparency into the performance of its tutors, many who have achieved the 99^th percentile in the exams they specialize in. Students can access Grockit tutor statistics, detailed analytics, biographies, testimonials, and select the tutor they want to work with. Using Grockit, students collect badges, points and rewards for both learning and teaching, and are ranked on the Grockit leaderboard, which illustrates test scores, areas of proficiency, testimonials and star ratings. Grockit highlights the way students study naturally – whether studying alone, with peers or with experts. Since launching nine months ago, Grockit has already helped more than 50,000 students prepare for standardized tests including the SAT, ACT, GRE and GMAT.

Students can access the Grockit SAT Tutorathon here: www.grockit.com/tutorathon.

About Grockit
Grockit was created to leverage the best of the Web and offer students a real-time, on-demand, adaptive, global and social way of learning. Grockit offers test prep and learning games that optimize how students study. Led by an innovative and expert management team, Grockit is poised to change the status quo in test prep and the educational process. Headquartered in San Francisco, Grockit is funded by Benchmark Capital and Integral Capital Partners and angel investors including Reid Hoffman (founder, LinkedIn) and Mark Pincus (founder and CEO, Zynga).

SAT Tutorathon

brian buser January 14, 2010

tutorathon

Free SAT tutoring the week before the exam!

Grockit is offering completely free SAT test prep from Jan. 18 – 22nd, including access to study time with our expert tutors. Find out more on our College Prep blog.

Grockit Questions Are Tailored for You!

jake becker January 7, 2010

Here at Grockit, our philosophy is that students learn best when challenged with problems of appropriate difficulty. Each student has a unique toolkit of complex reasoning, quantitative and English language skills, and Grockit’s analytical software provides that student with feedback on their performance, their progress, and their strengths and weaknesses. This feedback enables Grockit students to tailor their practice and allocate their study time more efficiently.

Grockit’s ever-growing bank of unique questions has been written and reviewed by expert instructors and seasoned content writers. We design our questions using College Board, ACT, GMAC® and ETS® released questions from previous exams, along with other specially-selected resources. This allows us to best model actual questions that you will see on your test day. Each question is characterized by its difficulty level and the specific skills that it tests, and we use that information to provide you with fine-grained feedback on your performance and learning. When combined with the data that we’ve collected from your recent performance, this meta-data helps us provide Challenges custom-built for you.

50th and 90th Percentile students alike will benefit from Grockit’s algorithms and incremental learning platform. We aim to challenge you with test-true practice questions to help prepare you for your test day. Good luck with your studies!