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With a Former Disney Exec at Its Head, Edtech Startup Sketchy Aims to Go from Product to Service
Fresh off Sketchy's recent $30 million Series A fundraise, the study aid company for medical students has brought on former Disney executive Andrew Sugerman to lead the L.A.-based startup into a major expansion that will redefine the company.
The company, backed by former Hollywood executive Peter Chernin's investment firm TCG, has plans to establish an in-house animation studio.
Sugerman is now in charge of Sketchy's operations, content development and growth. He'll be working to increase Sketchy's reach and expand its subject matter beyond medicine.
He will build upon his experience as executive vice president of Disney's global digital media and publishing arm. Part of his role there was to spread Disney's franchises across multiple formats, including comics, books, mobile apps and social media.
He'll also draw on his education experience. At Disney, for example, Sugerman led a program to teach English as a second language to 30,000 students in mainland China. And prior to joining the House of Mouse, he spent seven years building distance-learning products as president of Swedish company EF Education First.
"There are a lot of learning companies that exist," Sugerman said, "but what separates Sketchy from all of those is the ability to create and tap into its visual learning platform."
Sketchy uses images like this to teach complex concepts
Founded in 2013 by medical students for medical students, Sketchy uses image-based pedagogy to help with memorization. As CEO and co-founder Saud Siddiqui has said, "Our brain has evolved to be really good at visual spatial recall."
Sketchy's teaching technique boosts information retention by 30%, according to Siddiqui. Since launching, the company has acquired 30,000 users.
As part of his growth plan, Sugerman wants to transition Sketchy from a product to a service.
Former Disney executive Andrew Sugerman is the new head of Sketchy.
"When Sketchy started, it was helping students to prepare for a specific exam – a product for a defined period, for a defined outcome. Where we're looking to make a broader change," he said, "is to make Sketchy a program for a student who can start as early as undergrad, when they're preparing for pre-med or in the sciences, then making their way to the MCAT, into med school, into an adjacent program – and Sketchy will be there from the minute you start, all the way through."
A new price tag may accompany such a change, Sugerman said. In the past, new prices emerged when Sketchy bundled formerly separate courses on microbiology, pharmacology and pathology. Something similar may happen as the company explores new ways to package its offerings.
"Pricing is an active conversation right now," Sugerman said
To this point, Sketchy has had a tiered pricing structure, ranging from roughly $230 to $550 for up to two years of programming.
Sketchy's team will be growing as well. Sugerman wants to hire people for product, sales and marketing and engineering roles. The recent fundraise puts the company in a good position to hire such roles, he said, and "build out everything we'll be building over the next 12 to 24 months."
One other buildout in Sugerman's plans is creating new characters, to try to arouse "an emotional connection" in learners.
That effort aligns, he added, with another Disney experience of his, when his group relaunched the "Muppet Babies" to "make our dreams come true" again, and created a new character, Summer Penguin.
"I view the future of Sketchy as combining story content and character development into one unified opportunity for learning that can have a major impact," he said.
Sketchy Medical is getting a Silicon Valley VC assist to help it shake up the $9 billion textbook industry.
The Los Angeles company announced Wednesday it has expanded its Series A round with a $3 million infusion from Reach Capital, a Bay Area venture capital firm that focuses exclusively on education. The investment comes after the Chernin Group acquired a majority stake in the startup for $30 million in September.
Founded in 2013 by four medical students, Sketchy Medical produces videos to help students memorize the dense material that getting through med school requires. Tufts, Georgetown, Tulane and University of South Carolina are among the schools that have purchased subscriptions for their students.
With its new capital, the company now wants to break into other fields as it launches its own animation studio.
"We've got this pedagogy that we've been able to successfully apply to really complex medical school material," said Saud Siddiqui, M.D., co-founder & CEO at SketchyMedical. "But we don't think that this method of learning is just reserved for those people. It's really something that really folks from all walks of life are going to be able to benefit from."
Siddiqui says Reach Capital, with its track record of getting young companies in the classroom, will be an ideal partner.
"They've scaled companies before," he said "They have been there. So having them at our side as we go out there into the hands of more students is going to be incredibly important."
Reach Capital was founded in 2015 by Jennifer Carolan who previously spent seven years as a public school history teacher in Illinois. She says she looks for startups that already have established "incredible user love" which she says Sketchy, with its 30,000 users, has already done.
"We were attracted by the rabid fan base," Carolan said. "We look for companies that have been adopted by consumers first and then grow from there."
Carolan sees vast growth potential for Sketchy as it expands to other sectors and tries to disrupt the decades old textbook industry.
"The incumbents in this space are multibillion dollar public companies and those companies have lost between 50 to 90 percent of their equity value over the last five to seven years because they haven't transitioned to digital well," Carolan said.
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The pandemic has changed virtually everything from the way we work to the way we learn. Educators worldwide have made cumbersome adjustments to navigate the hurdles of teaching within an all-digital framework, with varying degrees of success.
The prospect of students confined to long, drawn-out Zoom classes and reading from online textbooks may not be the ideal version of online learning's future, but the COVID crisis has ushered new technologies into the education industry, and a number of lasting trends have emerged as a result. At Sketchy, an online education startup that teaches complex concepts through visual memory techniques, I've seen first hand how engaging students through entertaining digital content can change their experience for the better. Many of these trends will exist beyond the pandemic, including the growth of online education, the use of new technologies and techniques, and the development of more immersive and fun learning experiences.
Online Education Is Here to Stay
Zip codes once largely determined which schools students could attend, dictating their educational experience. Now that students from elementary school to college are able to learn online, location is no longer a barrier. That opens up a world of opportunity to study remotely. Even before the pandemic forced its use, online education's potential was growing more evident. In 2019, global investment in edtech reached $18.66 billion and the overall market for virtual learning was projected to reach $350 billion by 2025.
The shift to virtual classes has also forced educational technology to become more efficient to meet the needs of academic institutions and educators. Virtual tutoring, video conferencing and online learning software have all seen a significant surge in usage since COVID-19. As this technology becomes more advanced and accessible, more students will soon be able to switch to online education for the long term and schools may soon be able to go fully remote in the near future without losing prestige.
Educators Will Need to Learn New Learning Techniques
Students and teachers have discovered the authentic classroom experience can not truly be recreated virtually. Traditional, in-person class creates social pressures that can help motivate students to engage. Online, students may have less oversight and fall prey to more distractions— a combination which can greatly reduce their motivation. Since online education is only going to continue to grow, educators will have to adapt to this new environment and utilize different techniques to keep students engaged. A few trends are already emerging in this direction.
Student Engagement: As with in-person class, it's essential that students engage with each other and the instructor, and also crucial that they feel a sense of community and become familiar with collaborating across the screen. Breaking off into groups after a lesson to hold smaller discussions amongst peers provides a similar structure to that of the traditional classroom and reinforces the importance of participation.
Videos & Storytelling: At Sketchy, we've had great success teaching medical students with vivid storytelling and video content that utilizes the "memory palace" technique, a memorization strategy that relies on visual learning to recall complex information. This method has not only proven to be incredibly efficient, but also takes students beyond the typical classroom experience with characters and storylines that make the learning experience more engrossing.
Collaboration Tools: Beyond utilizing storytelling through videos and imagery, tools such as polls, quizzes, games, and interactive content based on the curriculum can make virtual instruction more engaging.
Immersive Learning Experiences and Technologies
Hours of instruction through Zoom can not only be extremely draining for students, it's often flat-out boring. However, for those who have access to the right technology, learning online can be more effective than traditional in-person education. Research shows that, on average, students retain 25-60% of the material when learning online, compared to only 8-10% in a physical classroom. Education technology must adapt to stand out in the competitive market that exists today, and offer students experiential qualities which pull their attention into focus.
Fortunately, today's online learning enterprises have massive amounts of user data to draw on to enhance students' learning patterns through machine learning algorithms. For example, when a student continuously struggles with a course lesson, the platform can readjust the content to provide more context to help the student. Furthermore, the promise of VR and AR to make the online learning experience more effective and engaging has never been greater, as equipment costs drop and education industry stakeholders embrace the technology more each day. With these tools, students can go on a field trip to Mars or take a deeper, detailed look at the human brain— all from the comfort of their home.
The pandemic has dramatically impacted the world of education. The shift online may not be permanent for everyone, but its use has ignited a trend that is definitely here to stay. The future of education is rooted in new technology and the internet, though it also poses challenges to educators, who'll need to look to entertainment, storytelling, and other visually immersive experiences to keep the (virtual) classroom alive.
Saud Siddiqui is the co-founder and CEO of Sketchy, an online education startup that teaches complex concepts through visual memory techniques.
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