New online platform to support students and lecturers

Young people spend the majority of their time online. It is a trend we have seen in others, in ourselves, and that a 2009 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation has confirmed. So why is the technology used to manage university courses, course work, and group projects often so far behind? A new online platform called iversity has launched to offer an easy-to-use―and free―solution for students and professors.

“Ideas don’t go viral on blackboards,” quips the iversity website.  So why are today's universities still so attached to them?  And why aren't institutions of higher learning exploiting the possibilities that web 2.0 technology can provide?  Not able to find an acceptable answer, Jonas Liepmann began to develop the idea of iversity while studying at the Freie Universität Berlin.  The question behind his concept was simple: “What if people could independently organise their teaching and research projects together online, free of institutional boundaries.”

Together with co-founder Hannes Klöpper and a diverse team of like-minded programers and friends, Jonas has since raised the seven-figure funding necessary to move from beta to launch.  Eleven thousand users signed up to try the beta version of iversity earlier this year, and with $1.6 million dollars of capital from the European Union, the state of BrandenburgBrandenburg
Brandenburg: Bundesland im Nordosten von Deutschland. Hauptstadt: Potsdam, and BMP media investors, the iversity team will be able to complete a full redesign, develop the online platform further, and, if everything goes as planned, launch this month.

So what does iversity offer?  According to Jonas, “iversity offers, what I always felt was lacking during my own studies – possibilities for real student collaboration outside the classroom.”  More concretely said, it is software that will help lecturers organize courses, research projects, and conferences and will give students tools for interacting and collaborating with their classmates that “standard e-learning systems do not provide.”

The iversity team expects the software to be a particular boon in Germany, where university enrollment numbers are on the rise.  Said co-founder Klöpper: “iversity appears at exactly the right point in time. For example, in Germany, not only is the number of incoming students rising year over year, but changes in the high school system in some federal states means that two full year groups will enter universities this year. Rather than just sitting alongside each other in anonymous lectures, iversity enables students to learn from and with each other online.”

Links

iversity.org
iversity on facebook