A British company aiming to improve online engagement in higher education has just raised more than $1.5 million in funding and is eyeing the United States market.
BlikBook started in 2010, but is now gaining popularity in England and Ireland. This summer, the platform is being used in courses at a third of universities in the two countries. The company recently announced that it will move its headquarters to Dublin, though an office will remain in London, where the company was launched.
“This is a nice first test for us in geographic expansion,” said Cheyne Tan, BlikBook’s managing director. “We’re really driving out trials in the U.S. now. We’ve been selectively, and quietly, doing tests there. It’s definitely a market that understands this type of thing.”
That “type of thing” is student and instructor engagement online. BlikBook is a social platform that allows students and educators to connect online through a specific question. For example, if a student had a particular query about a subject, he may normally just send a Facebook message to his friend who sits next to him in class.
With BlikBook, the student can post the question online and anyone logged in for that course can help provide an answer.
Those responses can be shared through social media, and a student is able to sign up to receive a notification every time a new answer is posted to the question. As the platform expands to places like the United States, Tan said, answers can come from knowledgeable sources all over the world.
“It’s connecting different pockets of academic knowledge,” he said. “If I wanted to ask a question at London Business School, I could get an answer at Harvard or UCLA.”
See Page 2 for what else BlikBook can do.
BlikBook is about more than connecting students to each other and the answers they need, however.
It’s also about helping professors learn more about the students they are teaching.
An educator may see a student for two hours a week, but once she is out of the classroom, there is not a way to easily see how the student is comprehending what she has learned — until she shows up the following week with her homework or for a quiz.
“With BlikBook, a professor can see which students are engaging, and which are not,” Tan said. “He can see which students are influential, which are not. Where there are issues, and where there are not. It’s building a picture of what’s happening inside the classroom but also outside.”
This information can do more than help individual professor’s learn about student behavior. It can provide broader data from many schools about how students learn.
And this information can be valuable in more ways than one. BlikBook is exploring the possibility of selling some of its data as a way to generate revenue for the company and its investors, which includes Leaf Investments, Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland.
“The real value of this platform is where we sort of apply a data lens to student behavior,” Tan said.
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