Education Marketplace creates ‘systemized’ content search


From massive open online courses (MOOCs), to open-sourced eTextbooks, to interactive quizzes, it’s now easier than ever before for people to bypass expensive big-name publishers to create their own educational content.

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Free educational resources are difficult to find online.

For faculty and their students, however, finding the best of this content can be a challenge. For content creators, getting the attention of those users in such a crowded market can be even more so.

That’s why the education platform StudySoup has launched its Education Marketplace, a new online outlet that its founders hope will become a one-stop location for creating, selling, and finding digital educational content.

When co-founders Sieva Kozinsky and Jeff Silverman created StudySoup, they saw it as just a way to collect all their course readings and notes in one place. Soon, they began focusing on how scattered the best course materials really are, said Kozinsky, who was in his third year of college at the time.

“We asked ourselves, ‘why is all this content decentralized,” he said. “You have notes in your notebook, readings in your textbook, content on an LMS. There are great resources out there, but there’s no systemized way of finding, using, and learning from all this material.”

See Page 2 for details on how companies are now attempting to round up digital content.

As more digital content appears online, companies are beginning to take a stab at identifying, cataloging, and centralizing it all.

In July, for example, Pearson announced that it had created a searchable catalog of nearly 700,000 open educational resources including videos from TED Ed, Kahn Academy, and YouTube EDU, as well as courses from the Open Course Library.

StudySoup’s Education Marketplace differs in that the content offered through the platform can be created with StudySoup’s tools and then be sold through it. Further down the line, Kozinsky said, the platform will offer a wider variety of content by big-name publishers.

StudySoup is already in use at more than 40 campuses, including the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, and the University of Minnesota. Kozinksy said StudySoup allows universities, presses, and publishers to make their content interactive and available for sale online.

“Really it allows anybody to create interactive content,” he said. “You don’t even have to be tied to university.  Anyone can come into the platform, and create material which can then be compiled into what we call a ‘course,’ and delivered to potential students.”

StudySoup will keep 15 percent of the royalties whenever a “course” is purchased.

The company hopes to soon introduce a peer review and user rating process to help ensure quality courses, without sacrificing the platform’s ability to allow anyone to create and sell content.

“A lot of our focus is toward higher education,” Kozinsky said. “But this also applies to a third grade history teacher or to my grandmother if she wanted to show the world how to create her quilts.”

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