We take a deep dive into a new take on Learning: doing it 1,200 characters at a time. That’s via an app called Arist, a text message-based Learning platform which is claiming a 92% completion rate versus only 5% for video equivalents, and we find out a whole lot more from its two founders, Michael Ioffe (CEO) and Ryan Laverty. Both of these impressive young men are still at University, both Seniors in Bachelor of Sciences in Business Administration at “The Best College For Entrepreneurship” Babson College (Boston), both joking they also have “a concentration in changing lives and having fun while doing it.” (In case you’re wondering, Arist is short for ‘Aristotle.’) As they say, it’s an incredibly intimate medium, where over a typical 5 to 30 day course you can get “frictionless Learning” via assessments, overviews, case studies and more. After a walk-through of the proposition, we then cover a set of topics from how they started with literally no more than $100 but just got significant funding, the deep personal value they see in education, use cases that involve Kenyan deaf seamstresses are learning financial literacy through to:
- how you get to 92% engagement levels
- the Babson project-based experiential learning experience, where you have to start a company at a time most of your peers are still playing Beer Pong
- why we no longer have a content problem, but a content delivery problem
- condensing a 3-hour lecture into six texts as proof of “less is more” design thinking
- what trying to teach in an education context broken by war can do for your approach to pedagogy and tech
- Arist’s interesting consumption-based business model, which involves non-profits as well as Higher Education, brands, and (soon) B2C
- the specific modalities of working in text as a delivery medium, such as consent and privacy
- their ambition to get to 1000 user organization customers from the current 24 – inside a year.
Resources
If you’re invested in finding out more, Michael and Ryan asked us to check out the main Arist web, www.arist.co and reach out to them via their email links there.
Why not try out the model for yourself? Check out the current Arist course portfolio here
Or check out an exclusive LFG Course here, and let us know what you think.
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