Even though we’re witnessing the dramatic expansion of learning/teaching methods nowadays, there are still barriers in the teaching and learning process and most of these barriers are related to the circumstances of the individuals involved in the educational environment. To get over these barriers Edunoor (a startup that is specialized in education and training software) has created a new way to connect teachers with students in an efficient way.
Edunoor offers online learning platform where a teacher and a student can have a course together. Edunoor was one of the startups that has joined the incubation program of FasterCapital in 2012. To talk about this journey and its challenges, we have interviewed Mr.Jonas Latner from Edunoor.
Can you please tell us more Edunoor and how the idea started in the first place?
Sure. The online tutoring market is a big one and it is expanding rapidly. The idea was to create an online platform where teachers can meet students and they can have together a private lesson. The platform will also record some of the private lessons and make them accessible to new students. Our platform will have an online audio/video conferencing system with shared white-board, file sharing, presentation and attendance recording. The system allows students to discover teacher based on social graph. If a student’s friend has taken a private lesson with a teacher then the student can find that teacher through search.
How did you come up with this idea?
Well we were exploring the private tutoring market and we identified several challenges such as a teacher/student have to be present at the same place and this required either of them to relocate for the lesson. This wastes valuable time for the teacher or the student and we thought that we could make the whole lesson offline.
But can’t they use Skype?
Skype is good if you want to have an audio/video conversation but this is not sufficient if you would like to have a private lesson (such as a shared whiteboard or the controlling of session recording).
So the solution allows for only one teacher and one student to attend or can it be used with multiple students?
No. You can have multiple students. There are several types of sessions: you can have either a one to one session or a session where there are multiple students. There are also sessions where there are two types of students, those that can interact or those that are silent. The session can handle hundreds of students attending together. The challenge in this case is for the teacher to interact with the students. That is why we recommend limiting the session to only several students.
Can this platform be used for all types of learning/training?
Yes. The whiteboard is quite flexible and the teacher can upload any material that they want to show to the students (pdf file or ppt file). We have cases where guitar teachers were able to use the platform and interact with the students.
Can it also be used beyond training?
Yes it can be used for instance for online meeting or where you have a seminar and you have multiple people who are attending and discussing a topic. The whole session can be recorded and thus can be viewed later by others or reviewed by the attendants.
What technologies are you using for this platform?
We started with Flash in 2012 but then we discovered that Flash is becoming obsolete, so we asked the technical team at FasterCapital to search for alternatives and they suggested WebRTC which was a new technology then. We rebuilt the whole solution over WebRTC which is becoming a de facto standard in the online conferencing industry with almost all browsers supporting it.
Looking back now after 7 years, was the journey easy?
No, it wasn’t but it was fun! We had a great technical partner and FasterCapital has consulted on business aspects like monetization and strategy to market.
What would you say to wannabe entrepreneurs out there?
Take the chance when you see it. Don’t just jump. Analyze the opportunity and try to assess it and if the odds are in your favor then go for it! The journey is worth it. It’s self-exploration. It has a lot of challenges but it is rewarding at the end even if you fail.
