A former prodigy student and his startup valued at three billion euros. Behind GoStudent, Europe’s first unicorn dedicated to education, is a 26-year-old Austrian named Felix Ohswald who at school has always forged ahead and that at a certain point he realized that a tool was needed to help the students. This is how this platform dedicated to online repetitions was born, present in 22 countries, including Italy, which has just collected another 300 million euros from names of the caliber of Deutsche Telekom, SoftBank, Tencent.
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Minister Bianchi to Italian Tech: “Let’s open the construction site for the school of the future”
by Emanuele Capone
“I live and grew up in Vienna”, he tells himself in a video link. “I have always loved mathematics and I specialized in financial mathematics between the Eth of Zurich and the University of Cambridge. It is a branch that deals with the calculation of risks related to investments. But in 2015 I started helping my brother and his classmates with some sort of online tutoring until I realized that there were no adequate digital tools. Hence the idea of creating one. At first it was a chat in which the kids could ask questions and get answers. A few years later the platform has evolved into a platform of personalized video lessons in which a teacher is put in contact with a student and his family and then measures the results of the repetitions. It is not a short term tool but aims at medium and long term. distance. We collect feedback, we make sure that there is continuity in the lessons and if the results are not what we hoped for, we find an alternative teacher “.
Some might say that online education, the so-called distance learning, risks being cold.
“Our repetitions, which unlike a lesson in the classroom are personalized, do not replace the school but are added to the training path. Secondly, one of the advantages of digital is being able to collect data during the lesson and have a clear idea of the quality of the teacher, which is impossible to do in the physical world. We ask the family how they are with the teacher, we check the grades at school, we measure the speed of improvement, we aim to make sure that a lasting and fruitful bond is created with the student. Finally, an online platform gives access to better professors who may live in distant areas and who would otherwise be impossible to reach. It is possible, for example, that the right person for a certain boy who lives in Rome lives in Milan as well as in Palermo “.
How many subjects do you have on the platform?
“All those present in middle and high schools”.
Enough, please, with these useless attacks on Dad
Mark De Rossi
How many professors do you have who teach on GoStudent?
“About 10 thousand and one thousand and 100 employees”.
What happened during the pandemic?
“Many have noticed online. Even my grandparents started making video calls. The consequence for us was to have more clients while the number of professors who signed up increased fivefold. But there was also a negative effect. : lower pressure at school has led to lower demand for the number of lessons “.
And what have you learned not only during the pandemic but in general in these first years of GoStudent’s activity?
“Technology is great. Twenty years ago you had to go to Boston to hear a Harvard professor. Today, even if you live in Vietnam, you can watch that lesson online. But it wasn’t enough for us. That’s why we focused on individual lessons: one teacher, one student. This allowed us to understand, for example, that a lesson in which the teacher and the boy talk, or in which he is not only the first to speak but there is an exchange, the learning levels are much faster.. And it is the first time that it has been possible to measure such parameters. Thanks to what we have learned, when we add group lessons in the future we will do so knowing what works and what doesn’t. ”
The Punic Wars of Cingolani
by Riccardo Luna
She was a prodigy student, attended college while still in high school and graduated at 18. What did you dislike about the education system?
“I still find it absurd today that professors at university force themselves to teach when they don’t want to. Some of them are brilliant academics but bad teachers and to force them is really silly. Teaching is not knowing everything about a subject, but being able to explain by involving. Mathematics, for example, is a subject marred by the traditional way of teaching it. Our best teachers are those who manage to bring a subject to life “.
A last question. What are your plans for the future?
“Education is the fundamental part, the one that takes up the most time, in the first 25 years of life. I think the time has come to renew it just as Elon Musk and others are changing mobility. We have enormous opportunities ahead of us thanks to digital and this also applies to school “.