Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Volley -The student personal learning assistant picks up $2.3million

Interesting concept in Volley which uses your computer camera to analyze textbook content to provide additional resources, help and support to students.  The company just came out of stealth mode after gathering $2.3million in seed funding.

From Techcrunch:
"Once students take a photo of the work they’re struggling with, Volley analyzes the text and imagery in seconds to determine the precise topics at hand and lets the user choose the right one from a list. It can then point them to chunks of Khan Academy courses and Wikipedia articles, but also little-known reference PDFs uploaded by a teacher on the other side of the country that they’d never be able to find by Googling.
Orbuch says thanks to Volley’s “Concept Graph” it can also determine what prerequisites students would have to know first to figure something out. Kahn explains that “To understand photosynthesis, you need to understand glycolysis.” If a student missed a day of class or had trouble with a lecture because English isn’t their first language, Volley can fill in the knowledge gaps.

1 comment:

Inkling said...

Maybe, maybe not. While it helps to read widely, in my experience when you're taking a course it's best to focus on the course materials. Bringing in all these supplementary materials is more likely to confuse than help. When you're first learning a topic, it helps to have a coherent structure in which to place it. All these assorted materials lack that structure.