Analyst Report: Recap a free student video response and reflection app that lets teachers and parents see how students learn
The old paradigm in education of teach, mark, move on is changing in today’s classroom. Students are leveraging methods beyond paper and pencil to demonstrate their learning. Today’s connected classrooms have the ability to leverage new tools to measure student’s comprehension and knowledge, with this focus, this Venture Analysis will examine the online tool Recap and it's ability to assist in learner reflection through students responses using video as the medium to demonstrate their learning.
Krysta Curtis, Product Owner at Recap, provides an interview on the vision of the application, view of competition, product adjustments and future areas of development for this student video response, teachers' questions app.
Krysta has an extensive background in Product Management and as a UX Designer. Her online portfolio page can be found at www.krystacurtis.com
What Is The Core Mission Of Recap?
Recap allows for more than just ‘giving the answer’, students can use Recap to practice presentation skills, build confidence through using their own voice, (Soft Skills). Teachers and students can garner further information through body language, voice inflection and confidence speaking that can not easily be assessed through traditional teaching methods.
The Initial Idea
Recap enables teachers to prompt questions either through text or video, send the questions to students via mobile devices like iPad's and computers. In the near future, plans include moving the functionality onto mobile phone platforms as well. Completed student videos are uploaded to Recap's cloud storage service for access and assessing by the teacher.
Adjusting To Meet Customers Needs
With most ventures that come to market, ongoing changes are required to constantly meets the needs of the end user. Recap has been active in listening to feedback provided by its users.
For Recap to continue to grow in the education market place it needs to adapt and introduce additional features that uses find useful. Krysta outlines some of the features that Recap plans for future short term release.
The Business Of Recap
Recap is a part of the company Swivl, a robotic platform which can be used for recording presentations or class lectures. Users of the Swivl product can connect a smartphone or tablet, and use the free Swivl app to record video. The robot arm will follow the wireless tracker worn around the presenters neck to track the motion of the presenter while the video is recorded. Recap is an app within the Swivl brand.
About Swivl
Swivl was founded in 2010 by Brian Lamb and Vladimir Tetelbaum. We were one of the first startups to ever successfully use crowdfunding, and have been developing and launching education-focused solutions ever since. Today, there solutions are used in over 20,000 schools around the world. They have offices in Silicon Valley, Kiev, Ukraine and Hong Kong. They are backed by a world-class team of investors including IdeaBulb Ventures, Grishin Robotics, Newbury Ventures, Kima Ventures, Zhen Fund, Fresco Capital Advisors, StartCaps and more. http://www.swivl.com.
Cost of Recap
Currently the Recap app is a free service, but future features that may be developed could include a fee for specific premium features.
Possible Competitors In The Market
Although there are other apps that leverage the use of video in their products, none allow for the students and teachers to create and share video responses to ask and answer questions.
With recap, teachers can...
Create questions that are typed or voice-recorded. choose how students will sign in: 7-digit alphabetical PIN or e-mail.
Address/password. add up to 10 questions in a single assignment {and, as of the newest update on April 12, teachers can now give more than one assignment to students at a time}.
Give an assignment to the whole class or only certain students. set a max response time to make grading faster and students' answers more precise. Set a due date for assignments.
Add a poll at the end of an assignment that asks students how well they think they understood the material.
View individual student information or the entire class's responses as a whole.
Grab the link to an individual video to share with others (e.g. parents, admin, your co-teacher, and/or social media).
Leave written feedback/commentary on student videos