Enabling student engagement

If you’ve been in school, you know that most of your learning came from chatting with your peers and being able to discuss tricky topics with the teacher. Sadly, it required physical proximity and when you asked the teacher something, naturally few — maybe no-one but you — heard the answer or debate.

At the same time if you spent any time in a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) you loved the online discussions and links to blog posts, videos, and curriculum. What if your school was like that?

In comes Aula! As if Slack was designed for universities! Or the way an Learning Management System (LMS) should feel.

You can write code or equations and they look like they should or link to the right material. As an educator, you have a repository where you have your material. No more links to Dropbox or uploading files from your computer again and again. And, did we mention there was a mobile app too 🙂

When we got the intro to Anders, the founder, the first experience was a machine working around the clock and replying to emails sometimes before they were sent. A product we liked, with plenty of existing happy users (from Oxford, MIT, Durham, and others), strong recruitment power, execution, and a clear vision was enough for us to be onboard. The fact that they had a false start, needed to do a pivot, and were able to re-arrange the cap table, showed that Anders and team didn’t give up when things got messy.

We believe that as jobs will shift faster due to technology, more and more will see education as a lifelong project. More and more education will be blended, and that engagement and other people are the most important parts of learning.

Let’s hope that universities join the future and stretch their education beyond the classroom. And, naturally, that they understand that the existing LMS’s feel like DOS.

Welcome to the family, Aula!