Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Leo Shmuylovich, co-Founder Virtual Nerd



www.virtualnerd.com, he dropped out of an MD/PHD program at Washington University to build personalized, video-based teaching, what he calls a "dynamic whiteboard." They have pre-Algebra on up, will grow into help for professional degrees (like nursing) next.

Joe's goal was to create layers of connected mini teaching videos to make a "mindmap" - something that professionals know by heart, but are a tangled mess to beginners. With VirtualNerd, beginners can explore the mindmaps and untangle things at their own pace. This is a platform for students to enter into learning, watch videos, then find areas where they want more work and click on "learn more."

Learners can customize by keeping videos and screencasts in their own folders, even save outside videos (Khan Academy) in their folders.

And - of course- there are real time analytics. Learners' scores, and more granular data like time spent on questions, are analyzed and (if required) sent to a teacher.

But wait, there is more. If there is a wrong answer, the analytic report puts in a link to an explanation video on that issue. Learners can click on the link to see what they may have missed, or keep clicking through related videos if that didn't do the trick.

Update: Aplia started off like VirtualNerd, making dynamic on-line teaching tools (games! videos!) linked to textbooks and (later) provided analytics on student performance to teachers. Publishers were very sticky about making content that matched their textbooks.

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