Knowmia offers free crowd-sourced education videos to teachers and students and also provides a free app for teachers.
It should come as no surprise that the co-founders of Flip Video have delved into the world of digital video platforms. Ariel Braunstein and Scott Kabat have begun a new venture called Knowmia – a crowdsourced video platform designed to help teachers find and create online video lessons.
Knowmia, part of Y Combinator’s latest batch of startups, organizes and curates video lessons from teachers all over the world. The idea behind Knowmia is to provide a centralized hub of educational video content. Videos vary in length from one to ten minutes and are pulled from video platform sites like YouTube and Vimeo.
In order to prevent low quality videos from slipping in, Knowmia has an “Editorial Board” of teachers. Currently there are 7,000 free lessons available on Knowmia. They cover a variety of subjects like algebra, chemistry and world history.
Braunstein and Kabat plan on keeping the video service free. Moving forward, they plan on monetizing the software by implementing supplemental learning tools like Mini Courses. These courses will add additional information to the videos like lesson plans, teacher comments and even quizzes. This will make it easier for educators to measure progress and memorization of the materials. As added incentive to create these mini courses, teachers will receive a cut of the revenue that their courses generated.
Knowmia also offers a free iPad app to teachers who register on the site called Knowmia Teach. The app is a lesson planning and recording tool for iPads that allows teachers to bring in resources from multiple sources, organize them in steps (like slides in a presentation) and bring to life a video lesson on any subject. Each lesson is completely customizable and easily accessible by students. In it’s simplest form, Knowmia Teach acts as an interactive whiteboard.
There is definitely a demand for quality educational videos, as evidenced by the popularity of iTunes University. Currently it seems as though the site is geared towards high school students, but a lot of the information could also be relevant for college freshmen or people who just want a refresher course. As the Knowmia site states “a teacher’s impact has no limits.”
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