Outschool, The Startup Disrupting K-12 Education and Inspiring
New EdTech Startup at SCW New Tech: Outschool
Outschool is presenting at the Santa Cruz Works New Tech on November 4, 2020.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the future of education has dramatically shifted from the traditional classroom setting to an online learning environment, which can be quite a difficult transition to make. However, the online environment has made the process of learning much more engaging, valuable, and convenient. The mission of Outschool, a marketplace for a variety of live online classes, is to inspire students to love virtual learning by linking their personal interests to educational topics, connecting them with like-minded individuals, and giving them the autonomy to choose their own path. In timed sessions, students participate within small learning groups conducted over live video chat, where they are safely connected with teachers and classmates to have fun, social, and interest-based learning experiences.
Outschool, Inc. was founded in 2015 in San Francisco and launched in 2017, with a marketplace and remote learning platform. The first group that the community served and learned from were secular homeschoolers. As a result, families supplemented their children’s traditional brick and mortar education with Outschool’s interest-based courses. The Outschool community and courses have become central and made available to more families and organizations than ever before. Through the thousands of high-quality course offerings, there is a class catered towards every interest. Students are able to explore new passions, encounter new perspectives, and build new skills by enrolling in classes with peers who share similar interests. Learners between the ages of 3 to 18 can take core subjects like math, reading, and science, as well as interest-based topics like health and wellness, coding and tech, and life skills. A few of these courses range from Spanish with Taylor Swift to LEGO Engineering to Pet Reptile Social Hour.
Educators on Outschool get to focus solely on what they do best: teaching classes on topics that they love. The community of passionate teachers and accessible learning platform, which allows learners to interact over text, audio and video, provide a comfortable and engaging experience. Since Outschool also handles enrollments, record keeping, and many of the other tasks that traditionally take up a teacher’s time, they get to focus all their energy on delivering exciting lessons to their learners. Young learners form real friendships on Outschool every day as they continue to expand their knowledge and build up their skills. In order to come to the aid of these educators, Outschool has worked towards partnering with organizations of all sizes, so that they can increase their reach to learners all across the globe. Education-based organizations and camps offer their courses to the engaged community of thousands of families on Outschool. They have partnered with public, private and charter schools, as well as corporate benefits programs to provide families in their community access to courses. As of now, Outschool’s team and community of educators, that have more expertise in this type of learning than any other US-based organization, currently serve over 500,000 learners in over 200 countries. By making learning fun, social and self-directed, Outschool’s vision is to build a global education community that supplements local schooling.