Zaption

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

~ the goodbye ~

Zaption was built for people who stand in front of a class. Jim Stigler had spent a career at UCLA studying how teaching actually happens, much of it by filming classrooms and watching the tape, and he had already sold one video learning company to Pearson. His son Charlie was a Thiel Fellow who left the computer science program at Columbia to build the next one. They started Zaption together in San Francisco in 2012.

The product was a single idea done cleanly. You pasted in a video from YouTube or Vimeo, then laid things on top of it: a multiple choice question at 1:40, an open response at the end. A student watched it in a browser and answered as they went. The teacher got back a view of who had stopped watching and which question half the room got wrong, which is the part teachers actually wanted, because a video assigned as homework had always been a black hole.

By 2016 the company counted more than 200,000 users and about 60,000 registered educators. It had taken a $1.5 million seed round from NewSchools Venture Fund and others, plus roughly a million more in research grants from the US Department of Education. Instructure had partnered with it to put interactive video inside Canvas.

The sample lessons on the front page were a Common Core teaching analysis and a UCLA gender studies reading of a Katy Perry song. An American school system runs through that list at the level of the lesson plan. Turkish classrooms in those years were not short of video, they were short of broadband in the building, and nothing in this product was ever translated or sold here.

~ the chronicle ~

~ bought for the team ~

Workday announced the acquisition on 30 June 2016 and named the closing date in the same breath. Workday had no interest in running the product. It was building out its own corporate learning module and wanted people who understood how video teaching works, so the Stiglers and their engineers went to Pleasanton and the service got three months of notice.

The wind-down was handled better than most. Users could download and keep the lessons they had built, provided the underlying video was not somebody else's copyright, and paying subscribers got a prorated refund on whatever was left of their term.

~ what the closing page said ~

The homepage changed on about 1 July 2016 and then did not change again. A banner went across the top reading "Zaption has joined Workday. The platform was shut down on September 30th, 2016." Everything underneath it stayed exactly as it had been: the pricing tiers for Personal and Campus, the testimonials from teachers who no longer had an account to log into.

The Internet Archive kept crawling that page weekly into 2017, and the byte count barely moves across the whole run. A marketing site frozen mid-sentence with a death notice stapled to the top of it is one of the more common shapes on this website, and the September deadline was the only line on the page that was still true.

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