Convertsation, an edtech platform that provides text-based, synchronous discourse to support online education, with post-session engagement analysis generated by artificial intelligence technology, announced successful completion of seed funding from F2P Ventures today.
Created by Carnegie Mellon University engineering students, and winner of the Project Olympus accelerator award, the platform is live in both K12 and college classrooms, where educators customize topic prompts and groups to enable online text-based discussion in real-time that can be analyzed around key metrics to help gauge engagement, topic grasp and sentiment to improve discourse skills and curriculum delivery.
“Watching discourse everywhere become toxic or unproductive, we wanted to use technology to both teach better, more informed debate skills online, and create more robust, open-minded discussions,” said Daniel Hack, Convertsation’s founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to announce F2P’s funding, which allows us to leverage last spring’s classroom trials to now further develop our technology and accelerate our efforts to meet heightened interest in the platform from educators looking to improve discourse, engagement and even corporate education efforts.”
The shift to online education has spurred demand for interactive tools that meet curriculum needs and provide engagement metrics. Despite broad use, students and educators have expressed frustration and fatigue with video platform’s limits. With F2P’s investment, the Convertsation team will continue to add functionality to the platform’s text-based format and accelerate the company’s commercialization efforts and users, which already includes colleges like Colgate University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, and numerous public and private high secondary schools, where student reaction has been highly favorable toward the text-based, live small group format.
“We were impressed by the team’s mission and the sophistication of the platform’s technology,” said F2P’s Catherine Frey. “With the online education market short of real-time interactive offerings, the Convertsation platform’s positive response from both educators and students suggest high interest. We are excited about the growth opportunity.”