[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Eduflow (YC S17) - Async Social Learning
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Launch HN: Eduflow (YC S17) - Async Social Learning
David here, CEO and co-founder of Eduflow
(https://www.eduflow.com). Eduflow is a learning management system
that lets you build and run learning experiences where participants
can interact, participate actively and can do so asynchronously.
Learning needs to be active to be effective. For example, the best
way to learn to code is to write a lot of code. Online learning
still struggles with this. Mostly you get a playlist of videos to
consume and a quiz at the end, or you're required to participate in
live video calls. Our product lets you build active and social
learning experiences that work async. We went through YC in 2017
with Peergrade (https://www.peergrade.io), a tool for online peer
reviews. We got to a decent size, but ran into challenges. When we
landed a deal with a company or a university, we would be a small
part of the experience. We'd only get used a few times a year, and
only a portion of instructors would be using peer reviews. Peer
reviews were seen as a feature of a learning management system, not
a product in itself. We noticed that we could generalize Peergrade
to make a more flexible tool that would be able to match their
pedagogical designs and not force instructors to model their
courses after our tool. At some point we were generalizing so much
that we shifted focus to building a whole learning management
system instead. That's Eduflow! Our design is modular. Your course
starts out empty, and you add the learning activities that you
want. Activities can depend on each other--for example, a group-
based peer review flow where you first want learners to select
their group members (group formation activity), then submit some
kind of work together (submission activity), then give feedback to
other groups (peer review activity) and finally to reflect on that
feedback (feedback reflection activity). This modular approach has
been non-trivial to implement but it allows instructors to build
exactly the learning experience they want, so the experience for
the learner is extremely guided. And it allows us to extend Eduflow
by adding new activities which can then work with all the existing
ones. Some of our customers (such as Google, Adobe and Accenture)
are large companies that use us to run training and onboarding for
sales orgs, or to do peer reviews at scale. Others are educational
institutions (such as ETH Zurich and McGill University) that use
Eduflow to make their large courses more interactive. We sell a
subscription to our service, and we offer a freemium plan. Since
raising some money after YC Demo Day in 2017, Eduflow has become a
profitable 12-person company. Looking forward to hearing your
feedback and answering any questions you may have. Thank you :).
Author : utdiscant
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-10-27 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
| cloogshicer wrote:
| I teach a mobile dev class at a University and I'm always excited
| about new edtech. But I don't see how this is different from
| other LMSs. Not saying it isn't, just that your value prop isn't
| clear to me.
|
| Personally I don't believe in peer reviews for my class. I tried
| it but the problem is that the students don't know what they're
| doing yet - so when I reviewed their peer review comments, they
| often were extremely short and poorly written, or even plain
| wrong advice. Students themselves said they didn't benefit from
| the peer reviews, both giving and receiving.
|
| But even if I did believe in peer learning (I'm not claiming it
| can never work) - how exactly would your LMS help with that?
| utdiscant wrote:
| Thanks for this! Peer review is super tricky. It is something
| that can work well if things are set up right, and very poorly
| if not. Some of my learnings from Peergrade and Eduflow is that
| good peer review experiences come down to getting a few things
| right.
|
| 1. You want to make sure students have time to do it well.
| Instead of asking students to give feedback to large amounts of
| work, reduce the workload. Rather good feedback to one
| submission than poor feedback to three.
|
| 2. Use really good guiding feedback rubrics. These should help
| students write feedback that is actually useful. Instead of
| asking "Give feedback on the style" which can lead to "Great
| style", you want to ask things like "Find a place in the code
| where the style is good, and explain why it is good".
|
| 3. Ask learners to give feedback on the feedback they receive,
| and use that to incentivize learners to give good feedback. In
| my own courses using peer review, around 20-30% of the final
| grade was based on feedback quality.
|
| There are of course many other parts to this, but those are
| some of the most important. Eduflow has a bunch of
| functionality to support this, including a feedback reflection
| activity etc.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Congratulations on your new launch, interesting modular approach!
|
| As a seed investor who is a bit cautious in investing in EdTech,
| I am wondering if you get any requests from universities to plug
| into their established LMS (hooking into their login api for
| example)? And if they don't request that, do you get lots of
| issues related to user privacy and handling student data (going
| through compliance,...)?
|
| Only asking because we have previously identified these as one of
| the two highest risks in selling LMS software to universities.
|
| Also am curious to know what is your rough revenue share
| breakdown between academia and corporate? I a am guessing it is
| very skewed towards corporate, as we have previously identified
| another risk with EdTech is that it is very difficult to charge
| universities much (schools are even exponentially more
| difficult).
| utdiscant wrote:
| Thank you! Great questions!
|
| 1. This is actually something we do a lot. Due to our history
| of being a peer review plugin, we have always been able to plug
| into an LMS through the LTI standard. When we built Eduflow we
| kept this option, so Eduflow can be plugged into another LMS as
| an LTI tool. Often this is how we start our work with a large
| corporate client - we will function as a plug-in to their
| existing LMS to offer them additional functionality. Over time
| our usage grows, and for some organizations we end up becoming
| the main LMS.
|
| 2. Actually we have more than half of our revenue coming from
| higher education so far. This is mostly due to our long history
| selling to universities - but universities are actually able to
| pay decent amounts, and when you land them as customers they
| are extremely loyal and very rarely churn. Schools on the other
| hand are very challenging - we have decided not to focus on the
| K-12 market at this point due to difficulties monetizing it.
| ak_111 wrote:
| thanks that makes sense :) so while you are here, two more
| questions:
|
| 1- What is your route to market when you sell to a new
| university, do you sell directly to the instructors, or sell
| to some kind of central function with the university
| ("learning technology department")? The issue here is that
| the centralised functions are much more risk averse to paying
| for new LMS once they invest in supporting one.
|
| 2- Also, do you notice a difference between geography/type of
| universities and how much they are willing to pay? For
| example from our previous investments, usually it is easier
| to monotise European business schools (where departments have
| more autonomy over budget), but selling to large top-tier
| public universities is much more difficult.
| utdiscant wrote:
| 1. Good question. We do everything, but often there is some
| bottom-up demand from instructors. Either they will
| initially go for a self-service plan on their own, or they
| will push the learning technology department from the
| beginning to purchase licenses for broader use. The
| technology department often gets interested to ensure SSO,
| integrations and security are taken care of.
|
| 2. Somewhat. We have been able to work with all sorts of
| institutions, mostly in Europe and North America. We have
| all Danish universities as customers today, but that is
| also our home turf.
| kobiguru wrote:
| Hi David,
|
| I browsed your website and it looks really nice. Beautifully
| designed. I have been in the education business for close to nine
| years and still fascinating to see so many innovations. I have a
| few questions and maybe some suggestions.
|
| 1. Async model (Moocs) has been known for low completion rate
| while instructor-led cohort courses aren't scalable for large
| firms, how have you tried to solve this problem besides the
| community angle? ( I have thought about this and want to see how
| you have approached the issue)
|
| 2. How is the completion rate in passive learning scenarios like
| a corporate onboarding/training as opposed to a university class
| in Eduflow?
|
| 3. have you tried running classes, I saw that you have templates
| have you have used them yourself how has been your feedback?
|
| Not sure if you already do but it would be great to have a course
| dashboard with graphs along with the tables. A simple kanban
| board for the student and a teacher for easier course management.
| Lastly, give API access to the firm that could connect their
| internal tools or other no-code tools to EduFlow and give more
| contextual programmes.
|
| Disclaimer-Take everything I say with a giant pile of salt. This
| is just after some cursory look and I obviously don't know
| anything about Eduflow other than what I saw for a few minutes on
| your website.
| utdiscant wrote:
| Great questions and comments. I will try to comment on as much
| as possible.
|
| 1. I guess this is what we hope we can find a solution for with
| Eduflow. Pure self-led learning is not very motivating to most.
| Learning together with others is a great source of motivation,
| but this often ends up resulting in endless Zoom calls. So we
| try to balance this by allowing async social things. Examples
| of this could be peer reviews or something simpler like
| discussion activities. We also support setting things up like
| matching people in groups, and then having groups meet
| regularly, basically studying together.
|
| 2. I think it depends too much on the specific course.
| Generally the completion rate can be extremely high because
| there is an external pressure to complete. If you are going
| through corporate onboarding or taking a university course with
| a grade, then you are quite likely to complete all activities.
| In end, we are not in charge of the actual course designs, just
| the tool that enables instructors to deliver it. So we see
| everything from 1% to 100% completion rates.
|
| 3. We are currently running a course called Instructional
| Design Principles for Course Creation
| (https://www.eduflow.com/academy/instructional-design-
| princip...) on Eduflow. This is going well, and I think the
| places where we could improve is probably more about the actual
| content of the course (it was a bit too intensive for some
| learners). Before building Eduflow I taught data science with
| peer review (using Peergrade), and that was a pretty good
| success!
|
| 4. We are actually working on adding a bunch of dashboards to
| Eduflow right now. It is not just something instructors are
| asking for - it is also one of the most popular requests from
| larger customers. We offer an API already
| (https://docs.eduflow.com/) which gives access to data in
| Eduflow and manipulation. We also support Zapier which is
| pretty popular, especially for smaller customers.
|
| Hope this is somewhat useful, otherwise you can just let me
| know and I will try to elaborate :).
| kobiguru wrote:
| Thank you for your response, David. I want to dig a little
| deeper on point 1.
|
| You are using social accountability, be it online or in-
| person (office setting), to improve the completion rate. I am
| sure they have worked well for the clients you work with.
| Here are the few ways I have tried for corporate clients and
| have seen the completion rate increase in most cases
|
| 1. The candidate has to pay a high entry fee (for example USD
| 1000) and whatever percentage of the course they complete
| beyond the minimum 60%, they get that percentage of their fee
| refunded. So if someone finishes the entire course, the
| course is free for him and if someone does only half or less
| of the course they pay the full fee. The client then donates
| the money on the candidate's behalf to a partner NGO.
|
| 2. Another is a reward at every level. I don't have enough
| evidence to say these words, as I tried only once.
|
| 3. Course completion is tied to performance metrics but it
| has to be done with care because the goal is learning rather
| than a certificate.
|
| 4. Displaying % completed for the entire cohort (which can
| have side effects but is a good motivation device and can
| contribute towards social accountability.
|
| I did these experiments by combining different tools but my
| case isn't representative of anything in the industry. So I
| must repeat take everything I say with a kilo of salt.
| utdiscant wrote:
| Interesting! All of those things make sense, and combining
| a bunch of incentives and gamification elements like this
| is probably the way to super-charge completion.
|
| On the contrary, I am a bit skeptical personally about the
| long-term effects of adding gamification to everything we
| do. In the end, intrinsic motivation is the strongest
| force, and I worry (mostly on a personal level) that so
| much pressure on external motivating factors will make us
| immune eventually.
|
| In Peergrade, we had a small amount of built-in
| gamification like this. We would show you how much feedback
| you had provided compared to the class average. This led to
| fairly significant improvements in both feedback amounts
| and quality.
| codegeek wrote:
| I am in the LMS space so I think I can throw in a few comments.
| First, great job on the website. Well designed and explains it
| well. I say this as a founder who struggles to get our own copy
| correct :)
|
| Your biggest challenge will be figuring out exactly what market
| segment you are targeting. I see that you are doing Corporate and
| Educational institutions. Very different ballgame in terms of
| their needs, sales process etc. Trust me because I am doing this
| daily :)
|
| All the best. Always good to see competition in this space
| because even though there are so many players, I think we are
| still in the early days on eLearning in general.
| utdiscant wrote:
| Yes, that is definitely something we talk a lot about. On one
| hand, we are positioned in a way that is very broad, which
| means "not the best for anything specific". On the other hand,
| I (want to?) believe that there is a way to provide a
| horizontal product in this space.
|
| I take a lot of inspiration from Notion, Airtable, Trello,
| Typeform. They solve a generic problem and are almost mental
| models in product form. The modularity of Eduflow means that
| our customers are using us for very different things
| internally, which means that:
|
| 1. There are many gateways to using Eduflow. If you are looking
| for a solution to a specific problem, we can probably do it
| pretty well.
|
| 2. If we are used across departments and functions, then we
| become a lot more sticky, useful and valuable long term.
|
| 95%+ of our customers come inbound today, but you are totally
| right about the different way to approach these different types
| of clients.
| tomerbd wrote:
| What is this and how is it different from the other sitee that do
| the same thing
| utdiscant wrote:
| Thanks for the question. Differentiating in the LMS category is
| definitely not easy - there are many impressive solutions. I
| think our biggest difference is the way learners are activated
| in their learning. The ability to run guided peer reviews,
| discussions etc. If there is a specific product you are
| thinking of then I might be able to do a more accurate
| comparison.
| bklyn11201 wrote:
| Maybe a comparison with open edX makes the most sense
| utdiscant wrote:
| It has been a while since I checked out Open EdX, but my
| experience then was the getting it up and running was
| fairly complex, and that the platform from the instructor
| side was very heavy to work with. We have tried building a
| platform that feels more like Notion than like Blackboard
| to instructors.
| throwaway158497 wrote:
| Peergrade seems cool. But it seems like it is geared for
| institutions like universities. Is there a version that I can
| whitelabel and use for general public. Like, I let users create a
| login on my service and post their assignements, writings.
| Reviewers on my service will give feedback to users.
|
| Happy to pay, if the service is not expensive.
| utdiscant wrote:
| Thanks! We don't offer white-labeling of Peergrade. In reality,
| we don't really support it anymore since we are focusing fully
| on Eduflow now. Eduflow could potentially be white-labelled in
| the way you describe and includes almost all features of
| Peergrade and more.
| throwaway158497 wrote:
| Cool. Any ETA for I can try it in a white labelled form?
| utdiscant wrote:
| Reach out to me on david@eduflow.com and we can talk about
| it :)
| brudgers wrote:
| For many years, University of Phoenix handled async education
| with NNTP. Because NNTP is inherently designed for asynchronous
| communication in topic silos; is simple; and low overhead it
| worked really well.
|
| They built a new platform because internet bandwidth had
| increased to the point where it was competing with real time
| educational platforms.
| utdiscant wrote:
| Discussion forums (regardless of technology) are generally
| super useful for async communication and learning. We have
| tried to take a lot of inspiration from this. I think NNTP is a
| good example of technology rarely being a barrier if there is
| just enough intrinsic motivation to learn.
| [deleted]
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