Students may have received an unexpected email in their inbox this semester – an invitation to join the new education site, StudyRoom.
StudyRoom is a site and application, similar to Blackboard, designed for students to communicate without teachers present. They can share documents like study guides, send messages and create posts. Students can also create groups for specific classes.
At this time, 75,000 students are signed up across the country, said Emerson Malca, co-founder and CEO of StudyRoom. At Ball State, 3,316 students were using the site as of press time.
Unlike Blackboard, it is not endorsed by Ball State.
Malca said he wanted to have a service like this when he was in college.
“There was never a way for me to be connected,” Malca said. “I had a friend who needed help with physics, and I [asked] if she knew any classmates. She only knew two and it was a class of 150.”
He said, in today’s age of social media, the lack of educational communication was unusual.
“It was shocking because this the most social and connected generation ever,” Malca said. “There was nothing for them to connect in an educational setting.”
He decided to create StudyRoom in 2012. In January, the service launched at six beta schools. San Francisco State had 7,000 students involved out of 25,000 people at the university, Malca said.
Ball State, one of the first schools to launch, started signing people up this fall.
The service connects students using social media or email. It starts with a campus founder who invites others to join and spreads the word.
Hannah Jackson, a senior photojournalism major, said she got an email to StudyRoom for her Sociology 100 class.
“I thought it was a scam at first,” Jackson said. “I thought it was just some advertisement thing so that someone could get your money for something else. I was surprised when I saw that it was actually a thing.”
She has only received two notifications on her account, but likes the idea.
“Overall I think it’s pretty nice,” Jackson said. “It’s easier to see than something like Blackboard, where you just get an email. This is kind of in between Facebook and Blackboard. It’s more user friendly [than Blackboard].”
So far, Malca thinks the website has been successful.
“Everything went so great,” he said. “One of the things we saw the first day [was that] people were connecting, and towards the end they created their own study guides and [were] having meaningful discussions.”
Alan Hovorka contributed to this article
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