As the cost of education skyrockets in the India, online education is an increasingly appealing alternative to the traditional classroom. Everything from standardized test prep to undergraduate classes is being offered online. While some bemoan the fate of scholarly pursuit, the entrepreneur behind one education startup believes this is the shake-up academia needs.
ScimoX founder Rishi Patel says the educational system wasn’t designed with its end-users in mind. “Very little in the educational space is impacted by the questions students have,” he says, pointing out that this is the approach behind many tools students already use to find information, such as Google.
ScimoX platform that aims to get the best teachers—whether they’re teenagers in India or college professors in US—in front of as many students as possible. “Teaching, up until now, has been a one-to-few network,” says Patel. “It is going to change to become a many-to-many network.
ScimoX’s approach is a “Connecting Skills Tolls Technology model,” whereby students access videos and forums to learn about specific concepts, such as the Periodic Table of Elements for a chemistry class.
“We are not trying to replace school or a course,” says Rishi, who founded ScimoX with Deepak Kanaujia, an HR Manager who is passionate about applying crowdsourcing to education. “If you are a student who doesn’t understand a specific topic, we want to be the best place to teach you that specific topic with modern tools and technology.
Courses like calculus are taught in five- to ten-minute, easily digestible videos. Teachers choose how to present their own content. Some use animation, others rely on two-camera shots, and one teacher opts for Google Glass. By pushing the most-watched and most-liked videos to the top of the page, ScimoX also crowdsources the opinions of the students themselves. “Our goal is to become the best place to learn the subject about any given topic in any given subject with modern tool and technology,” says Rishi.
For now, ScimoX at least has an idea for how teachers will get paid. Instructors who opt in are compensated via YouTube advertisements, but so far it’s not enough to make the work very profitable.
Rishi says that if ScimoX is successful, that day will come soon. “Thousands of teachers are stepping up and creating really good teaching videos and putting them on the Internet, but they are not being brought together in a community. That is what we are trying to do.”
