*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Atlanta, GA | Posted: November 17, 2010
Georgia Tech Media Relations
Laura Diamond
laura.diamond@comm.gatech.edu
404-894-6016
Jason Maderer
maderer@gatech.edu
404-660-2926
Summary Sentence:
Web site hooks up students from all across the globe, enabling them to get help at any time.
Full Summary:
OpenStudy debuted this August and already has more than 11,000 users from 151 countries, with a particularly large presence in the U.S., China, India and Brazil. All a user has to do is sign up and connect with a study group that covers their topics of interest. Source: GT Communications & Marketing
OpenStudy's Founders
Ashwin Ram Discusses the Success of OpenStudyThink about online courses. They’re great, right? You take a professor who’s interested in teaching a certain topic, say computer science, and hook him or her up with hundreds or thousands of students across the globe who want to learn. Add some podcasting technology and you’ve got an online class where people from all walks of life can learn about computer science. Except there’s one problem.
“What happens when the students need help? Who can they turn to?” said Ashwin Ram, associate professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.
So, Ram teamed up with his wife, Preetha Ram, associate dean for pre-health and science education at Emory University; Chris Sprague, a Georgia Tech alumnus; and entrepreneur Phil Hill in 2007 to create OpenStudy, an online system that links students with other students from around the world in real time, so they can get help at any time, day or night.
“We want to make the entire world your study group,” said Ram.
OpenStudy debuted this August and already has more than 11,00 users from 151 countries, with a particularly large presence in the U.S., China, India and Brazil. Using OpenStudy is free. All a user has to do is sign up and connect with a study group that covers their topics of interest.
But why would people bother answering others’ questions?
“We’ve found that people get significant gratification from helping people right now,” said Hill. “Connecting, conversing and helping a stranger in need provides a unique feeling and actually helps the learner to better understand the material herself.”
“We’ve seen some fantastic examples of students, worldwide, connecting and helping each other, such as a student from Los Angeles being helped with chemistry by a student from Istanbul, Turkey,” added Ram.
Currently about 90 percent of the questions posed on OpenStudy are answered, and each question asked receives input from an average of 4.5 other students.
Each user has a profile page that shows how many questions each one has asked and answered as well as how helpful their answers have been. A few weeks ago, OpenStudy added a feature that allows people to rate the quality of the answers they’ve been given.
“We’ve found that this feature helps to motivate our users. Strong peer recognition is really important to people who provide help,” said Hill.
OpenStudy has more than 350 study groups that users can join, such as AP History, Natural Language@Georgia Tech or Emory Biology. To join a course, just use the search function to find a topic of interest. The site has also teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare, the world’s largest provider of free educational classes. Students taking one of their courses can join one of 10 official MIT study groups on the MIT website.
“We will continue to extend the reach of OpenStudy so that study help is within reach of every student in the world regardless of location, social background or the time of day,” said Hill.
OpenStudy is a for-profit spinoff that was started in Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center and is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Georgia Research Alliance.
