Circles

Inspiration

Our premise is that education can solve social problems. Education technology is at the point where academic content is democratized. That means people generally have access to educational material regardless of their community or socioeconomic background, through self-learning sites like Khan Academy and Coursera. However, we wanted to target the obstacles of self-learning. It turns out that the average completion rate of Massive Open Online Courses is only 6.5%. We hypothesize that the main pitfall of the low course completion rate is lack of support.

Circles is designed as a platform for self-learners to collaborate, offer peer support, and hold each other accountable for their educational goals.

What it does

The platform allows users to create, search for, and join circles, where each circle has a timeline of goals and meetups, a list of resources, and a mode of discussion.

How we built it

We designed the wireframes on Sketch, which can be seen in the gallery. We built the app with Ruby on Rails, which has been deployed on Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

Most of us did not have web development background, so it was a learning experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a web app that includes many of the features we intended.

What we learned

We learned some web development and web dev workflow.

What's next for Circles

Connecting to other education platforms such as EdX.