17-year old Arjun Mehta and his friends want to bridge the education gap.
When Arjun Mehta joined The Harker School in San Jose, California, he quickly realized the disparity in learning in the private institution from the public school he attended his freshman year. Wanting to do something to bridge the gap Mehta realized that there was a great opportunity to connect students from different schools to share knowledge.
Using technology as a resource, Mehta in October 2011 developed a platform called Instunet that would enable such collaboration amongst students of different schools. Buoyed by the initial success Mehta roped in his classmate Divyahans Gupta and his friend Simar Mangat to scale things up.
The bridge:
“Stoodle.org’s mission is to help bridge the national achievement gap in education by making it easy to learn online in real-time from friends and teachers,” says Mehta, CEO, Stoodle.org.
The entire platform is built on HTML5 technology. In a typical use case scenario – a student needs help on a homework problem, goes onto www.stoodle.org, launches a classroom,shares the unique classroom URL with his classmate via Facebook/Email/IM, his friend joins the class, and the online tutoring begins.
Teachers also use Stoodle.org to host online open office hours or question and answer sessions. In order to do this, they would simply send an email to their student(s) with the classroom URL and the time they will be online in the class. The students could then click the URL around the given time and the online teaching begins.
“We provide a digital whiteboard with drawing tools plus image uploader, text chat, and voice chat in order to simulate an actual face-to-face tutoring experience. Anything that can be taught or collaborated on in real life can be done online through Stoodle.org. Students can collaborate on homework problems, group assignments, or just peer help in general,” says Mehta, 17.
Proof of the pudding:
The startup saw further validation of their platform when in June 2012 they pitched their company to Neeru Khosla, Executive Director of the CK-12 Foundation. Khosla loved the idea and decided to bring it under the CK-12 umbrella and give full support to the project. The CK-12 Foundation is a California-based non-profit organization that provides free online education materials to students.
“After I met them I thought what they were doing is impressive. I liked their approach and the fact that they had a very clear vision of what they wanted to do. They had the capability and they were trying hard,” says Khosla. Around the same time the trio also decided to change the name of the startup from Instunet to a catchier Stoodle.
For Mehta this is not his first brush with entrepreneurship. At the age of 12, when Mehta was in Grade 6, he partnered with his father Karl Mehta to start PlaySpan. The startup in 2011 was acquired for about $190 million by Visa, making Arjun and Karl millionaires. Karl Mehta in April 2013 joined Menlo Ventures as a Venture Partner.
Progress has been steady for Stoodle and even before its official launch in December 2012 the startup had about a 200 users which has grown to about a couple thousand now. The startup has also seen changes as the original version of the platform were based on Flash technology and its inflexibility caused a lot of pain. “Stoodle.org is a platform that is more intuitively used on touch screen devices like the iPad, and non-compatibility with the iPad was one of the biggest pieces of feedback we got. We then made the switch to HTML5,” says Mehta.
Mehta says the future vision for Stoodle is to have students and teachers using it in every high school across the country and even expanding it internationally to facilitate cross-country online tutoring. Product-wise, Mehta wants to optimize Stoodle.org for other mobile devices other than the iPad.
Mehta admits that running a startup while balancing academics is definitely very difficult, but it is something the founders have figured out how to do over time. While the startup does not have a revenue model in mind but in the future they may license the technology to private schools. “However, we know for certain that we will never incorporate advertisements or charge students to use Stoodle.org. We will always keep it free as we believe that anyone wanting a proper education should be able to access one,” says Mehta.
While the company is based in the US, its benefit, application and utility can be availed by anyone across the world. “Indian students (and international students for that matter) can by all means use Stoodle.org. We are just not actively marketing Stoodle.org in those markets at the moment. Anyone can use Stoodle.org,” says Mehta.
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