Sophia, which operates a free online social teaching and learning platform, this morning announced that it has acquired Guaranteach, a Web-based service that provides tens of thousands of short-form tutorials along with assessment tools to students, teachers, colleges and schools.
Guaranteach offers nearly 23,000 short-form videos on math topics ranging from counting to calculus, developed by nearly 200 teachers and math experts. Guaranteach also offers more than 60,000 quiz questions, as well as assessment tools that match tutorials to the learning style of the learner and provide student progress reports.
Sophia will soon start offering the Guaranteach portfolio of math tutorials – previously available on a pay-per-use basis to schools – to individual learners around the world at no cost.
Notably, Sophia also plans to use the Guaranteach model to develop and offer a range of English and science tutorials in addition to math.
The deal will also help Sophia enhance its social learning solution, which is currently available for licensed use by K-12 districts and higher education institutions.
In public beta since March 2011, Sophia offers a crowd-sourced platform where academic information is organized in learning packets and can be created by anyone, anywhere using text, images, presentations, video, audio and more. The site is free and packets are rated for quality and evaluated for academic soundness by users and experts within the community.
Guaranteach was founded by Innosight Ventures, the venture arm of Innosight. Last year, Guaranteach received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with the purpose of enriching teaching and determining whether and how the use of short-form instructional videos will increase engagement and student achievement.
NewSchools Venture Fund was also an investor.
Guaranteach is an online math tutor. Powered by thousands of bite-size math videos on hundreds of different math topics, Guaranteach provides students with quick and easy access to a variety of explanations on any given math topic. Guaranteach’s business model relies on community sourced videos, which are then screened by educational professionals to ensure that each video tutorial meets certain educational standards. Through this approach, the Guaranteach video library has content which is not only broad - in that...
Sophia is a social teaching and learning application that makes free, credible academic content available to anyone at anytime. Their goal is to surround the traditional classroom with a worldwide classroom that connects people who want to learn, with people willing to teach. They want to build a community where everyone has access to information taught in a way that makes sense to them.
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