Start-Up Aspires to Make the World 'One Big Study Group' - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education #yam

Will take a long while to reach critical mass, but may work if one large class all joined and take care to 'match' each other.


September 8, 2010, 02:01 PM ET

Start-Up Aspires to Make the World 'One Big Study Group'

Thousands of students are enrolling in gigantic open online courses.

Would students go for vast open online study groups, too?

OpenStudy, a start-up company spun off by Georgia Tech and Emory University, is betting the answer to that question is yes. Its Web site is the latest effort to create a social platform for independent learners who want to help each other study the huge trove of educational materials published free online by universities like MIT.

“Our mission is to make the world one big study group,” says Phil Hill, chief executive of OpenStudy, whose founders include Ashwin Ram, a Georgia Tech professor, and Preetha Ram, an Emory University dean.

The free site opened to the public last week. It has 3,000 users so far, including a pilot project with MIT that suggests OpenStudy as an option from the Web sites of several open courses.