Learnist Refreshes ‘Pinterest For Education’ Site To Add Reading Lists And Improve Board Creation

Pinterest for education startup Learnist wants to provide its users with all the tools needed to create, curate, and share content that can be used to learn a wide variety of subjects. Now, less than a year after launch, it’s refreshed its website to make it easier for users to create and save those lessons.

Learnist was built by the team behind social learning platform Grockit, which was sold to test prep company Kaplan last year. While Grockit was focused specifically on online test prep, Learnist is a much more broad platform to enable its users to share learnings about anything and everything.

With a simple interface for creating lessons and boards, it relies on its users to generate the content which can then be viewed and learned by other users. It’s been used by academics to create course curricula, but it’s also attracted a wider audience driven by the more than 500,000 learnings listed.

Since launching last summer, Learnist has quietly been growing its user base. In September when we wrote about the launch of the company’s first mobile app, the service had signed up about a million users. In the past six months, that’s grown to 10 million.

While much of its growth has come from adoption of its mobile apps, the new version of the site has been tailored to create a more beautiful, immersive experience — and one that is easier to use. That includes an updated board creation flow, which will help get more users creating their own lessons. It also includes a way to save reading lists, so that users can come back to their learnings.

In order to get people coming back and provide more high-quality content, the company is partnering with celebrities and tastemakers like director Gus Van Sant, actress Olivia Wilde, designer Danny Forster, MythBusters TV host Kari Byron, Travel Channel host and former NFL linebacker Dhani Jones, and best-selling author Brad Meltzer.

It’s also signed up some major media companies like the BBC and Discovery. That latter partner shouldn’t be too surprising, as Discovery was part of a big $20 million investment in the company.