Daphne Koller changed the world of online education once when she co-founded Coursera. Now she hopes to do it again.
The pandemic has forced universities to host most of their classes online, recreating the in-person experience for students on the web. Koller believes she can challenge Zoom with a video platform tailor-made for education called Engageli.
"I think we're finally at a place where, because of this pandemic, we need to build the technology to support the learning experience that frankly, most people would have benefited from even without the pandemic," she told Protocol.
With Coursera, started alongside fellow Stanford professor Andrew Ng, Koller pitched universities on the idea of opening up their courses to an online audience that wasn't enrolled in the school, creating massive open online courses or MOOCs. Elite universities bought into the vision. But now, she thinks, enrolled students could use some help.
While many classes have moved straight to Zoom, Engageli is one of a handful of "Zoom for X" startups that are building alternative platforms catering to a specialized purpose. Unlike a Zoom call that ends up looking like a round of "Hollywood Squares," Engageli's platform is designed to let students "sit" at smaller virtual tables with groups of students, where they can chat or work on assignments while following along with the instructor. There's a built-in note-taking tool that syncs with the timestamp in the recording, plus different ways to do quizzes, polls and chats inside the window.
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