Welcome to Campuswire Pro
Campuswire, now with tools for Active Learning and Video Office Hours
Today, Campuswire is taking the next step in our mission to optimize the world’s teaching and learning.
We shipped Campuswire V1 in 2018 as a complete course communication tool and home base for your classes’ Q&A, announcements, and discussion.
Since then we’ve grown at a break-neck pace: today, tens of thousands of professors, TAs, and students at more than 120 schools rely on Campuswire for all of their course communication.
We’ve iterated and shipped improvements at an equally rapid pace.
Campuswire V2 shipped in December 2018 with a brand new UI, tons of performance improvements, and a new set of features like digest emails, stealth mode, and message deletion.
V3 shipped in August 2019 with unresolved question tracking, another UI update, Class Insights, an Android app, and Dark Mode.
We’re confident that Campuswire, as it stands today, is the most complete and powerful course communication tool in the world.
But our mission is to optimize the world’s teaching and learning at every level, not just at the level of Q&A and discussion. That means we’re constantly having conversations with professors and students to hear their feedback and understand what they need us to build.
We’re lucky: our users are super engaged — our average student spends 2.5 hours getting help and answering their classmates’ questions on Campuswire each day, and our average professor checks their Campuswire course several times daily.
Many of these users are extremely vocal about their experience. They constantly make suggestions that empower us to keep improving and keep building great features.
In the last year, nearly 70% of product feedback came from just 34% of our professors and TAs (user feedback is our super power and our secret weapon, and it guides our engineering roadmap).
When it came time to decide what to build next, we relied heavily on those power users to share their biggest teaching challenges and help us plan our next steps in optimizing the world’s teaching and learning.
Our professors told us that these were the most severe challenges they faced:
- Engaging students during lecture — professors are constantly searching for new ways to keep students engaged during class time and to make their lectures actual pedagogy-based learning experiences, not just hour-long blocks of content delivery.
- Measuring student engagement and student understanding (especially in real-time) are persistent challenges. For professors to teach well, they need to know how and when their students are engaging — and with what content– as well as know how well they’re understanding what they’re learning.
- The massive demand for office hours is making it impossible for professors to schedule, manage, scale, and ensure student access to office hours, especially in large intro-level courses. Students still love office hours and need that hands-on, face-to-face instruction and support, but they’re on tight schedules as well and can’t always wait in line to meet with their professor.
This feedback has guided our product and engineering roadmap for the past several months and helped lead us to where we are today.
We couldn’t be more excited to announce Campuswire V4 and Campuswire Pro (Beta).
Campuswire Pro (in its BETA form) includes Campuswire Lectures, which is our active learning tool and complete replacement for in-lecture clickers, and Campuswire Live, a complete Zoom/Skype/Hangouts replacement for hosting sharable, scalable live office hours, review sessions, and lectures.
With Campuswire Lectures, professors can upload their lectures into their Campuswire course, build multiple choice or free response questions into those lectures, and broadcast those lectures during class from their Campuswire web app or mobile app.
Students will use Campuswire’s mobile apps to respond to polls and questions, to receive immediate feedback on their responses, to see interesting ideas that classmates have shared, to check their understanding in real-time, and to stay more engaged during key parts of lectures.
With Campuswire Live, professors can host virtual office hours and review sessions for as many students as they’d like and easily share those live sessions with all of their students.
Professors are able to schedule recurring live sessions ahead of time (for weekly office hours or live lectures) or click to go live at any time (for impromptu review or help sessions). They’ll be able to share their screen, or integrate white-boarding apps or cameras, to capture their work and share it with their students.
Students will receive notifications when their instructors are live so that they can RSVP ahead of time or join at any point during the session. They’ll be able to join a queue to go live and ask their question, ask their question ahead of time so that instructors know precisely what topics to focus on, or even drop their question into the live chat.
Campuswire Pro also includes our new backchannel feature. Professors can now enable a live backchannel within Lectures so that students can ask questions during class or indicate when they’re confused.
This makes it easy for instructors or TAs to track recurring questions and difficult points in real-time, and circle back to them without interrupting the flow of a lecture. (This also helps shy students engage in lecture, allows professors to group and answer questions more efficiently, and makes it easy for professors to know when to slow down or come back to a challenging concept.)
Campuswire Pro represents the paid portion of our “freemium” business model (read all about that model and our thinking behind it here).
Professors who choose to build their course using Campuswire Pro will have two payment options: either have individual students purchase their own Pro account, or have their department buy licenses for their students.
Two things really excite us about this Pro model:
- This model aligns our interests with those of professors and students — we come into work every day thinking about ways to build a tool that improves the learning experience for students and helps professors optimize their teaching while saving a ton of time.
- Campuswire Pro saves your students money and time — rather than shelling out $30 or $50 just for an active learning tool and having to switch back and forth between their tools for Q&A, email, active learning, and video office hours, Campuswire now consolidates all of those tools at a lower price point.
We’re only successful if professors and students love Campuswire Basic and see the value in Campuswire Pro — if we’re not providing them with enough value, we don’t have data monetization or advertising to fall back on. Every day, Team Campuswire thinks about how we can build the best tool for teaching and learning.
From day one, we’ve tried to be super thoughtful about the communication that needs to occur in a university course. We model this communication on a spectrum of synchronicity: we built the Class Feed for super asynchronous communication like Q&A and discussion posts, and we built Chatrooms and DMs for faster, more synchronous chat with a shorter half-life.
With the release of Campuswire Pro in Beta today, Campuswire now addresses the entire spectrum of course communication.
We’ve got even more improvements coming down the pipeline. We’ve just released brand new iOS and Android apps, rebuilt from scratch, and our hotly anticipated Class Insights feature is shipping in the next couple of weeks.
We’re extremely excited to launch Campuswire V4 and to begin our Pro Beta trial— we’re lucky to be able to continue building a tool that improves the teaching and learning experience for professors, TAs, and students.
If you’re interested in joining the waitlist for the Beta group, shoot us an email here: brian@campuswire.com.
As always, we want to hear as much user feedback as possible. There’s a good chance we’ll be on your campus ahead of the new term, so please reach out with questions, feature requests, or if you’d like to meet with us.
-The Campuswire Team
