Since leaving the days of syllabi, grade tracking and homework, one group of Belmont alumni have managed to put their entrepreneurial talents to use, develop a useful new app for students and get back to… syllabi, grade tracking and homework.
Economics graduates Carson Ward, CEO, Logan Mathews, COO, and Jonathan Rankin, Creative Director, have developed Skoller, a classroom crowdsourcing app that provides students with a way to manage all of their class grade and assignments in one place – their smart phone. How does it work? With the hard work of the Skoller team, including Vanderbilt junior Bruce Brookshire, CTO, and a team of programmers, syllabi extractors, campus ambassadors and interns. Students simply upload their syllabi, and the team pulls out important dates and assignments to populate the user’s task list. Students can also input their grades and track their progress, and there is now an option to chat with other users in the class.
The ‘crowdsourcing’ element of the app stems from the collaboration of students in the same class. Not only can users chat with each other, but a change to the syllabus made by one student can be seen by all the other students in that class.
“It’s really on the students and the power of the technology to crowdsource changes,” Ward said. “If a test due date changes and you go into the app and change that, we’ve grouped you with your classmates, so they get a notification with the option to copy or dismiss that change. So we crowdsource changes, and it will get easier and more reliable as more people join in.”
So far, the app is available at 14 universities, including Belmont, and is continuing to grow. Since a recent re-launch following an app redesign and code reconfiguration, Skoller has seen current users spend triple and quadruple the amount of time on the app. They’ve received positive feedback from both users and funders, and their goal now is to expand their user base.
The app is available for download in the Apple App Store, or you can sign up here.
