OpenStudy

» see openstudy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

OpenStudy opened in August 2010, which is roughly the year my own studying stopped. By then homework was somebody else's problem. Set it six years earlier and it probably does not find me anyway. The gravity of the place was American from the start: course codes from US universities, and a question queue that filled up on US evening hours.

The idea came out of a marriage. Ashwin Ram taught computing at Georgia Tech, Preetha Ram was a dean at Emory, and in 2007 they started building what they called open social learning with their former student Chris Sprague as CTO. The company sat in Georgia Tech's ATDC incubator in Midtown Atlanta and was funded the way an academic project gets funded, on grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, with the Georgia Research Alliance and then Learn Capital money arriving behind them.

The claim was that your school and your location should stop mattering the moment you had a question. A student in Lagos studying linear algebra and a student in Ohio studying linear algebra are, from the software's point of view, the same person needing the same thing at a different hour. The site paired them up in real time, and the early numbers suggest it worked better than anyone expected. By November 2010, three months after launch, there were 11,000 users from 151 countries. About ninety percent of questions got answered, with an average of four and a half students piling into each one.

It also did the unglamorous institutional work. OpenStudy ran study groups attached to MIT OpenCourseWare, and partnered with Yale, Notre Dame, NYU and UC Irvine. A free course on the internet gives you the lectures and leaves you alone with them. OpenStudy was the part that put other people in the room.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the smart score ~

The retention mechanic was a number called your SmartScore, which went up when other students found your answers useful, and it came with titles you earned as it climbed. This is ordinary gamification by 2026 standards and it was not ordinary in 2010, especially aimed at teenagers doing algebra at eleven at night.

What it bought was the thing every question site needs and almost none get, which is a supply of people willing to answer rather than ask. A homework site with no answerers is a wall of unanswered questions and dies in a month. OpenStudy's ninety-percent answer rate was the whole product, and the score was how they paid for it without money.

~ seven months ~

Brainly announced the acquisition on 14 June 2016, funded out of a $15 million Series B led by Naspers. Brainly had 60 million monthly users; OpenStudy was reported as having reached 54 million learners over its life. The press release is specific about what came next, and it is worth quoting because of what happened afterward: both platforms would operate as separately branded entities, with their own respective websites and apps.

Preetha Ram said joining forces was, excuse the pun, a no-brainer. Brainly's CEO Michal Borkowski said OpenStudy was started by professors who understood the importance of students helping one another. Seven months later the site was scheduled to stop service at the end of January 2017. Students on Brainly were asking each other what had happened to it in the first week of that month, answering themselves with the line that it was closing this month unfortunately.

There was no data export. Nothing was ported across. If you wanted to keep using a homework site you made a new account on Brainly and started your reputation again from zero.

~ what the professors were right about ~

The thesis has aged extremely well, which is the uncomfortable part. Brainly is enormous and Chegg built a public company out of the same impulse. Discord servers now do for a university course roughly what OpenStudy's real-time study groups did, with better software and no mission statement attached.

Two academics saw in 2007 that the internet could make one study group out of everybody, got the design mostly right by 2010, and could not keep it running on their own for longer than six years. They sold to the company that could. That company kept the users and retired the name within a year.

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