This week a new digital education platform emerged to challenge Zoom’s reign as the leading platform for remote instruction.
Engageli launched with a whopping $14.5 million in seed funding, despite being only a few months old. But it is backed by a powerhouse team of entrepreneurs, professors, and ed-tech pioneers: Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera; Dan Avida, co-founder of Decru (a storage security company); Jamie Nacht Farrell, a former executive at 2U and Trilogy; and Serge Plotkin, a Stanford University emeritus professor.
While Zoom has become synonymous with remote learning, it didn’t take long for Avida and his wife Koller to realize that the platform wasn’t engaging high school students. Watching their daughters making the abrupt transition to Zoom classes in March motivated them to look for other options.
“I noticed that they weren’t always fully focused on the teacher or class and were clearly missing the social engagement, so we decided to find and recommend to their school a better tool than the conferencing software that the school was using,” Avida told Inside Higher Ed.
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