Four years ago, I arrived at UC San Diego. As soon as I got here, I was scared - there were so many people! I mean, figure me, a student used to attending classes with 40 students that I used to think were big. Here I was, in cse 11, as just one of 300! I felt small - like a meaningless cog in a gigantic machine.
(I mean,) Don’t get me wrong, my professors were amazing. My peers? Pretty smart people too. But when I needed help with my studies, I just couldn’t reach them in time. I was frustrated. Paying thousands of dollars, for this?
How many of you have experienced this moment - when the professor is teaching, and you suddenly have a doubt. So you raise your hand, waiting for him to see you - but he never does. 10 seconds pass, 20 seconds, 30 - and you start wondering - what is the rest of the class thinking? Finally you put your hand down with shame. How awkward right? THIS IS HOW WE CONDITION STUDENTS TO FORGET ABOUT ASKING THEIR QUESTIONS. THIS IS HOW WE CONDITION STUDENTS TO GIVE UP ON THEIR QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE.
I knew this was a problem. I thought, the solution was to become a TA and address the very issues I had experienced as a student. But the problem did not end here. On the other side of the spectrum, there were 300 students in front of me. I did not know what they were thinking. I did not know the questions they had. I could only see a few of them. I hosted office hours, but only a small subset were able to attend so really, I was only able to help a small percentage of students.
It pained me that I could not help everyone. It pained me that I couldn’t help students like myself. I knew the problems
We needed a way, for students to tell professors they were confused. a way, to pair students together to work more cooperatively. we needed to make higher education a little bit more intimate.
This is precisely the challenge that my team and I took upon ourselves. Through countless conversations with professors and students, and many iterations in development, we came up with the solution to these problems - Mesh.
Mesh is an education platform made by students, just like you. Here at Mesh, we’re concerned with one thing - shrinking the classroom. We provide a modular platform that caters to individual user needs in the modern day classroom. We do this through our three core features: the confusion button, reflective assessment, and question curation.
The confusion button addresses a problem that is prevalent in large classrooms. Let’s say the professor is zipping through the lecture, and you have a doubt. Maybe you can’t understand what he’s saying; maybe you can’t understand what he’s writing. What do you do? Raise your hand and interrupt the class, at the risk of not being noticed at all? No. You press the confusion button.
When students press the confusion button, it is registered in our system. This is where our confusion algorithm does its magic. After the dynamic threshold is reached, the professor is alerted through haptic and visual feedback. The professor can now choose to pause the lecture and address doubts.
Now, simply knowing that your students are confused isn’t always enough. You need to know WHY they are confused. It is for this purpose that we have developed the question curation feature. When students have a doubt, they can ask the questions through their device. This question is then displayed to all students as well as the professor. Students can then vote on questions in the list, and the highest voted questions will automatically float to the top of the list. With the vote count, the professor now has knowledge of the most pressing questions their students may have.
It doesn't end in the classroom. After the lecture the professor receives a mesh report containing the exact topics which caused the most difficulty. This empowers them to better prepare future lectures and exams.
Say you still want more - say you want the students to engage in discourse with each other. The reflective assessment feature does exactly that! The professor can propose a question to the class, which automatically triggers their devices to display that question and prompt a response. After responding to the question, students then rate the answers of their peers - rating them as similar to their own, dissimilar or bizarre, in case they just don’t know.
When enough answers have been graded, the professor can end the assessment and see a list of the most “similar” answers upon which the class converged, the most “unique” ones and finally the most bizarre ones. The students with the answers in this list are also prompted with a notification congratulating them for having an interesting answer, gamifying the educational process. We want to tread further along this path and make learning more fun.
Our platform allows the instructor to understand how well their students are learning. The instructor has now effectively received a snapshot of the entire classroom, in real time. Mesh empowers the professor to refine the lecture not just to the course material, but the audience. This is just a preview into the power of Mesh. New features will be consistently implemented and brought to the end-user as a part of our modular platform. Learning used to be personal, let’s make that a thing again. Let’s shrink the classroom.
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