The Prince Report
At most colleges, students will find themselves in large lecture classes, ranging between 200-600 students. Lots of students find this very intimidating and struggle building friendships with peers. In addition to harboring future friendships, the platform is looking to improve test results. Michael Prince of Chemical Engineering at Cornell performed a study examining the effects of active, collaborative on college students.
“Bonwell and Eison [1] summarize the literature on active learn- ing and conclude that it leads to better student attitudes and im- provements in students’ thinking and writing.”
Based on these findings we felt there is a lack of open collaboration at the course level. GroupUp aims to help pair students that are looking to work together by comparing user study information. By enabling students to create MeetUps, invite peers, we are filling the void for an education collaboration platform.
Figure 1 shows a massive leap in overall understanding over material when engaged in active learning. “Active learning is generally defined as any instructional method that engages students in the learning process” This engagement can and should occur in and out of the classroom. By increasing the engagement outside of the classroom through MeetUps, we expect an increase of classroom activity by the students. Students would have a greater understanding of the martial, increasing classroom confidence.
“…the support for collaborative and cooperative learning calls into question the traditional assumptions that individual work and competition best promote achievement. The best available evidence suggests that faculty should structure their courses to promote collaborative and cooperative environments.”
In conclusion, we predict that by enabling students to collaborate with their peers, student performance will increase coupled with an increase of student social engagement. Providing students with this tool will enable us to provide further complex functionality. Our future goals include partnering with universities while implementing a schedule importing, file sharing, personal tutoring, and more complex student pairing algorithms into the platform.