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Friday, June 6, 2014

Students Now Have a Crowdlearning Site

Crowdsourcing brings together a large group of individuals to find solutions for needed services, ideas, or content. Now, a Polish ed-tech firm has created a “crowdlearning” website, an online community where students can share their insights on one subject in exchange for help with another.

Brainly, originally launched in 2009 under the name Zadane.pl, targets middle- and high-school students with a Q&A platform that provides peer-to-peer help. In an effort to balance the number of answers with the questions, students earn points for answers and can then use those points to ask questions.

“Our advantage is fast answers,” Michal Borkowski, Brainly co-founder and CEO, told The Next Web. ”Generally, if the question received an answer, it’s there in 80% of examples in 10 minutes. Competitors at the U.S. market are way slower.”

Since changing its name to Brainly in 2012, the company has developed sites for students in 13 countries. It has more than 20 million users worldwide and nearly 60,000 in the United States since its launch here earlier this year.

“It’s interesting that math tops almost every country’s most popular subject, but then the more you think about it, the more it makes sense,” Borkowski told Forbes. “There is often more than one way to arrive at the correct answer to a math problem, and this is where peer-to-peer learning can really deliver value.”