4/23/2015 Emily Scott
When a group of University students looked to improve upon the online educational learning programs they used for class, they decided to create their own program called StudyCloud.
Written by Emily Scott
When a group of University students looked to improve upon the online educational learning programs they used for class, they decided to create their own program called StudyCloud.
Since its launch in early 2014, the award-winning educational platform with a focus on the university level has grown into a company with around 15,000 student users.
Akash Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer of StudyCloud and senior in Industrial Engineering, said the idea came to life when he and a group of other University students recognized they could do something about the lack of tools offered in this specific industry.
“There’s a huge emphasis on building tools for social media and data analytics, but education was lacking,” Agarwal said. “So we said: what if we could make something as easy and as fun to use as something like Facebook or Twitter and make it really focused on education?”
StudyCloud’s main focus is to provide a place where there can be a higher level of discourse between instructors and students as well as among students. In addition, it serves as a center for all course material, making it easy to sync all course files in one location.
“A lot of classes have used it as a way for students and teachers to get to know each other better,” Agarwal said, citing an example from an MBA-level course at Northwestern University that implemented StudyCloud. He said students and instructors would share companies and business models that sparked their interest. “They used it to talk about things they don’t have time to talk about in class,” he said.
The company is expanding, looking to potentially have over 100,000 users by next year. Departments within several institutions including here at the University and other schools such as Northern Illinois University and the University of Illinois at Chicago are already using the product. Pilot programs have also been run at a number of Illinois high schools and charter schools.
The full paid program was available for the first time for the Fall 2014 semester. Agarwal said that as StudyCloud has developed, it has become more standard and stable. “Pretty much any user could pick it up and start using it in a day,” he said.
Departments at the University such as Biology, Business and Electrical and Computer Engineering have used StudyCloud. Agarwal said that students using it for an ECE 198 course used it to help each other with their homework. He said it also was able to aid the professor and teaching assistants attempting to answer student questions.
Aside from expanding to new schools, StudyCloud has also won several awards including Startup with the Biggest Impact Award at the 2011 Global Startup Weekend Challenge and the 2012 Adobe Technology Innovation Award.
Looking to the future, Agarwal said there is one big goal the company is focused on: how to make StudyCloud the standard platform for education. He explained further that though there is a huge need for in-class time, there is an equal need for platforms that connect instructors and students and increase valuable discussion time.
“We want to be in that place where we can facilitate a lot of other companies and people to do great things,” Agarwal said. “We just want to be the backbone of that.”
Through helping to build StudyCloud, now a company with a full-time team, Agarwal has seen what he has learned during his time in Industrial Engineering relating to his work. “IE taught me that in real life, if you’re going to do anything, you’re going to collect a lot of data,” he explained. In his role as chief marketing officer, he said that from looking at trends, collecting data, and forming a strategy to move forward, he has learned how to make models that make sense of that data in order to make a good decision.
“It’s been a very demanding experience,” Agarwal said. “I’m pretty committed to making sure this thing works.”
Agarwal encourages professors who are interested in using StudyCloud for their class to visit www.mystudycloud.com or to contact him at akash@mystudycloud.com.