Students studying computer science at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., developed a Web site that enables students from any university to share tutoring services, class notes and documents, and other educational material.
The Web site, www.schoology.com, is set up to be an online resource for all students. The site allows users to upload notes, download documents from others, and buy and sell tutoring services.
The site is open to students and teachers in high school, undergraduate universities or graduate school.
Users are paid for the material they upload onto the site, and all the documents are free to download.
“Everything is free to use, and will always be free,” said Jeremy Friedman, the site’s co-founder.
The payments users receive are a share of the advertising revenue from the Web site, which the designers distribute to users. They developed a program that calculates the popularity of the uploaded documents. From that it determines the percentage of the advertising revenue the uploader will receive. Overall, the Web site gives 90 percent of its ad revenue back to the users, said Friedman.
“The program computes your slice of the pie and then gives it to you,” he said.
The Web site’s other function is online tutoring. Students may become tutors and sell their tutoring services to other students through an online chatting application. Tutors set their own rate per minute of tutoring.
“We’ve sort of created an eBay for tutoring services,” said Friedman.
In order to prevent cheating, Friedman said, students are allowed to chat with prospective tutors for as long as necessary before paying for their services.
“Tutoring is entirely free to start so that you never really get into a setting where you don’t know what you are going to get,” said Friedman.
Students rate the tutors based on their experiences for other users to see.
Currently there are no registered tutors and no uploaded documents from students at the University of Oregon. But University students have a variety of opinions about using an online resource like Schoology. Some like the idea of having an additional forum to discuss course work and seek help, while others feel they would not be able to trust the information uploaded there, or would rather do the work themselves.
“I think something like that is a good idea,” said freshman journalism major Sierra Warren. “In case you can’t get to class or something comes up, it’s good to have that sort of resource.”
Other students are more leery.
“Who knows where the information comes from? I would rather get notes from someone I know, not the Internet,” said freshman architecture major Michelle Girard.
“If (a student) is struggling in class and needs help, they can ask a classmate … There are resources already available on campus for students,” said junior Spanish major Laura Jordan.
The Web site founders were taken aback by how popular the site has quickly become, though others in the field are not so surprised.
Burchan Bayazit, who developed the programming course where the Washington University students did a lot of the work on the site, said he encouraged all the students in the course to do a project that had a commercial element, hoping they would become popular. He did admit, though, that the Schoology program was “the most promising.”
University computer science professor Yannis Smaragdakis said he is not at all surprised that a site like Schoology developed by students would be so widely used.
“Lots of things have been developed by students that become very popular,” said Smaragdakis. “Many of the successful Facebook applications have been designed by students.”
Schoology was developed and is maintained by four computer science students at Washington University: Friedman, Timothy Trinidad, Gregory Mervine, and Ryan Hwang, who are all juniors. They developed and began working on the site in the summer of 2007, said Friedman.
Last fall, the students enrolled in a creative programming and rapid prototyping class, taught by Bayazit, and continued work on the site as a group project for the course.
“(Bayazit) helped us with the project, and he basically allowed us to work on it in his class,” said Friedman. “He was a real mentor and inspiration.”
The group continued working on the program through the winter, finally launching in February of this year. From that point the Web site’s popularity took off, currently being used by “well over 2,500 students from around 60 to 70 universities and high schools,” said Friedman.
But Schoology is still a work in progress – designers are still developing the site and plan on making changes to it this summer.
“We’re still in the data phase,” said Friedman, who attributes the site’s rapidly growing success to “word of mouth.”
The developers’ next step is to expand the site’s capabilities and hopefully expand its user list as well.
“Our original idea was to create a collaborative environment for students, kind of like Blackboard. Now we want to get teachers on board as well, and that’s what we are trying to do now,” said Friedman.
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