Fighting insecurity among students — Learn capital invests
87% of first-year students find it difficult to cope with social or academic aspects of university life (source). Now, Learn Capital invests in Differ, a Norwegian startup with a goal of fighting loneliness in higher education worldwide.
Stress and mental health issues are the leading impediments to academic success. Still, students are hesitant to seek help due to the concern of stigma and being afraid of looking stupid.
Making all students feel like insiders
Today universities have a number of social onboarding activities, both most of these are offline only, costly and non-scalable. This includes freshmen programs, seminar groups, and teaching assistants services.
Differ is a chat app for students. With Differ, universities take their offline student onboarding activities online. Students are connected with an online mentor, get help finding study groups, and TA programs are taken online.
Up to 300 % increase in student completion
By focusing on social isolation alone, Differ has contributed up to a 300% increase in students completing their courses.
To help students feel safe at scale, Differ use chatbots to initiate communication between students and are part of a $5M AI research project to improve matching.
Learn Capital invests
Universities and online schools use Differ as their onboarding platform for new students, new semesters, in for course communication. Differ replaces onboarding to studies, semesters and courses that are usually done in Facebook groups, Snapchat, Whatsapp, on email or not at all.
Learn Capital is one of the believers in Differ’s approach and have decided to invest through their seed fund LearnStart. It’s Learn Capital’s first investment in a Norwegian startup
Project initiated at BI Norwegian Business School
Differ started as a research project at BI Norwegian Business School when identifying the technologies needed to be a leading university heading into 2020. The results were clear:
- The technology we needed did not exist, says Anne B Swanberg, dean of teaching and learning at BI Norwegian Business School. So we partnered with the Differ-team to make it.
Differ is made by EdTech Foundry that was founded by Kristian Collin Berge, an entrepreneurship lecturer at the University of Oslo. Since the start with BI, other leading institutions such as ETH Zürich and EU SchoolNet have started using Differ.
Started out as yet another learning management system
The team initially tried to build a replacement for the LMS in higher education but realized after some iterations they were solving the wrong problem.
- In the beginning, we focused on the institutions and their desire to engage their students. But efforts to engage students often have no impact if the students are insecure and afraid to participate, says Kristian Collin Berge. Students who feel safe and supported are more likely to succeed in their courses.
Solving an international problem
The investment gives Kristian and his team the possibility to step up the fight against insecurity in higher education.
-When we help students with their feeling of insecurity this will have a positive impact on student engagement, participation, dropout rates, and most other aspects in higher education, says Kristian. We believe it’s the right approach to improve education worldwide.
As much as 44% of US bachelor students are dropping out. With international investors on board, Differ are now showing their ambitions of fixing this issue problem worldwide.
