Ask any entrepreneur what they struggled with the most growing up, and a large majority will answer, “School.” The formal education system has always been a challenge for those that want to go their own way, because the learning process is systematized. You either adhere to the rules of the classroom and learn in the way that is expected, or you don’t—and as a result, many students underperform.
Which is what makes the education space so ripe for a revolution. In fact, some of the same students that always struggled to make it through the school system successfully are now returning to the space with their own ideas to improve learning processes for students everywhere.
Take Sophia Parsa for example, Co-founder of the text messaging education application, Toot alongside Shakib Zabihian and Randy Horowitz.
“I was always an average student,” said Parsa. “I really wasn’t interested in school because I was always too preoccupied with my own ideas. I think that’s why I have been so fascinated by the education space, because I saw how disinterested I was in it. So when I was in college, I started my first company connecting students with tutors on campus.”
Little did Parsa know that this would be the first step to building Toot, which just recently ushered her into the Forbes 30 Under 30 Education class of 2017.
“At some point I realized tutoring was a band-aid on a much bigger problem. The education system is flawed. It’s built for factory jobs, not the service economies of today. It doesn’t do a good job assessing a student’s intelligence or capabilities, or prepare them effectively for the modern day workforce,” she said.
Parsa and her partners started to question the problems students were facing on a day to day basis, and found that many students with tutors were struggling with similar things. And originally, they wanted to build a much bigger platform, but they kept returning to the question of how to effectively integrate technology into a student’s daily life seamlessly and effortlessly.
“If we were to build a comprehensive digital tutoring platform, we would be faced with the challenge of teaching young students how to use it,” said Parsa. “We would have to walk them through how to book a teacher, set a time, etc. It would be a lot of tools to balance: booking, scheduling, payment processing, messaging, etc.”
Instead, Parsa and her team decided to simplify the process and build a text messaging application. Each student, then, could simply message a tutor in the same way they would text a friend with a question, and tutors could respond to one-off questions.
“Data is what really helped us make some of these big decisions, because by seeing what sorts of questions students had, we better understood what they were struggling with. We realized a lot of students were using the same textbooks and facing the same sorts of problems. And we also wanted to keep in mind the age of the audience we wanted to reach. Text messaging is already part of the everyday life of a teenager. So giving them the ability to seek out help by simply sending a text message is an easy integration into their already established habits,” said Parsa.
In the near future, Parsa and her team want to provide schools access to Toot’s backend, so that Toot can become an extension of the classroom.
“That’s really where we’re headed,” she said. “We want technology to act as a solution to the issues our education system faces when it comes to personalized learning.”
The idea of personalized learning is a hot topic of discussion as technology becomes more and more integrated into the classroom. And as Parsa went on to explain, software has the capabilities to understand where a student is in their education journey, and what they need most at any given time.
Toot is the first step in that direction.