America’s current education technology ecosystem suffers a tremendous weakness: Students are constantly forced to switch between learning platforms nearly every year, as they progress through K-12, college, and graduate school. At the beginning of each school year, students are painfully herded onto different learning management systems (or “apps”), and all their learning data from previous semesters’ studies is completely lost or ignored.
Such constant platform switching prevents students from leveraging past semesters’ mastery in a fully adaptive and scaffolded learning process. Without a systematic way to refresh their knowledge over the years, students forget what they’ve learned in previous semesters when they are repeatedly forced to re-learn the same subject many times throughout their K-12 and college journeys. Billions of dollars’ worth of education are wasted on one-time cram units that evaporate into thin air once the semester is over.
Solving this problem is one of the main reasons we founded Brainscape.
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As educators, it’s not our job to spoon-feed knowledge into students’ brains. Instead, contrary to the traditional “lecture” model, our job is to help students learn how to become better learners themselves. Motivating students to study class materials outside of class (rather than just relying on lectures) allows us to focus valuable class time on collaborative, project-based learning, while helping students become more self-driven learners for the rest of their lives.
