Utudy

We have built the next step of learning evolution. Connecting students and instructors one-on-one through remote live training. Certifiable hours stored on blockchain. Everything else is just a video.

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One of the most basic traits of a human being is their ability to pass along knowledge. The Utudy team has developed a platform where anyone can now participate in the passing of knowledge with a one-on-one live training session to anyone from anyone about any subject. All of this can be done remotely and is recorded on blockchain with Utudy.

Through the Utudy platform, we can unlock the different learning and teaching styles of individuals by giving the world other options aside from pricey institutions and long-term curriculums, thereby liberating students and instructors. Now thanks to the Utudy platform and blockchain we can evolve learning into live one-on-one remote training and record our accomplishments on a blockchain for future validations.

The impact of social distancing in certain industries was a concern that the Utudy team wanted to tackle. We were looking to help industries such as: tutoring, fitness training and coaching, music teachers, inspiring gurus, homemakers, cooks, sports coaching, tour guides, mechanics, gamer, art instructors, and anyone who shared their time paid or unpaid to those who are willing to learn.

Inspiration

Utudy was inspired by the need for continuous learning, skill sharing and community growth. Utudy aimed to build a community-style platform that would bring some of the services that were interrupted during Covid-19 social distancing and stay at home orders. Of course, we did not want to build something that would only be used during pandemics. We set out to build a forward-thinking approach to e-learning and e-teaching.

Many industries were greatly affected by the pandemic but our freelance teachers, tutors, instructors, trainers, coaches, and others that relied on one-on-one social interaction to deliver their services as their primary source of income were heavily affected. We believe this can be prevented in the future with the Utudy platform.

Another inspiration was being able to cater e-learning to different learning styles. Today, we are seeing an influx of individuals with so many different learning styles that it has become difficult to place everyone into the same “boxed” learning. Utudy, we believe that everyone should have the opportunity to engage with instructors in a small group setting or one-on-one, where they can tailor their learning.

Traditional institutionalized schooling is not for everyone. Videos online that are catered to large audiences also do not meet the needs of every student.

With the Utudy peer-to-peer educational community anyone who wants to be a teacher can conduct a one-on-one live class; anyone who wants to be a student can learn from people with experience from anywhere. This creates a better learning environment and a better grasp of knowledge for everyone.

What it does

Utudy is a platform where people can connect to share their skills, knowledge, and experience as a freelance instructor. Utudy is beyond the simple video learning. It is done live in a one-on-one setting or in a small group. Where learning can truly be catered to individuals.

Utudy allows for any user on their platform to register as an instructor and post a class of their choosing as a paid or donation-based service. Utudy allows the instructor to post a schedule of their classes and have their student reserve the time and pay for the class all in one location.

Each class is given their own video session where instructors can conduct their class over video chats, with special tools and features all catered to control and optimize the classroom environment, emphasizing the focus on what the instructor wants the student to focus on.

How we built it

First, the idea struck us like lightning! Many of our friends are freelancers and because of Covid-19 they were all out of work.

We were looking for a way to help our community.

We started by talking to people who were working as freelancers as rideshare drivers, delivery drivers, or entertainment industry workers. There were some similarities in their descriptions of their services and we added those as the main feature of the platform. Here are the items:

  1. Being able to see their clients
  2. Remove distractions and allow them to focus
  3. Ability to share information
  4. Ability to take payment
  5. Publish an open and closed schedule
  6. And most importantly for all the people we talked to, they wanted to give people a good dedicated experience.

Second, we sought out to build something sustainable beyond Covid-19 social distancing and stay at home orders. This is when we added the calendar feature, the ability to post a public profile page and the ability to share their services through multiple social media channels that freelancers (Gig workers) could use Utudy as a new source of income.

Third, we wanted to make it user friendly. You will see Utudy has an easy to use system for setting up classes and booking a reservation with a Utudy Instructor.

Finally, blockchain elevates learning to the next level. Using blockchain and smart contracts gave us the ability to store the number of hours spent in a class in a trusted place, where it can be publicly accessed and verified.

Challenges we ran into

We had to decide how many students would be in a live class at once. We came to the conclusion that video is just not enough for some people and the many-to-many approach of e-learning is not for everyone. We became convinced that our platform should cater to the individual student and avoid a large classroom where we have 1 teacher for 30+ people. We decided to go with the one-on-one or small class approach allowing no more than 7 students currently to a group class.

Another challenge we faced was finding the number of instructors needed to teach everyone anything one-on-one. We decided the best way to get more instructors was to give everyone the opportunity to be an instructor themselves and get compensated for their time.

Now that we wanted to appeal to a larger audience of Gig Workers our next challenge was to create an interface that was easy to use and understand for adding classes and conducting the service.

We also felt it would be important to be able to store and verify the hours either being taught as an instructor or being learned as a student. This leaves the future of Utudy open to so many different variations of learning and completing courses in the future.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud of building a platform that can help people in so many ways including:

• Ability to connect people even when they cannot be connected or feel disconnected • Give teachers, coaches, instructors and tutors a way to earn more for their skills • Developing a way for individuals to learn anything of their choosing in an environment that is conducive to them and at a pace the student and instructor can agree on together • Giving students a way to learn the things that interest them in the manner in which they learn best

We are proud of the way our team brought their ideas and experiences together to build a platform that can help so many people today and beyond.

What we learned

We learned that there is a huge need for people to feel connected, even when they are forced to stay away. People connect in so many ways that are not always obvious. It was amazing to learn how simply not allowing people to meet had an incredible impact on a huge freelance industry, as well as individuals needing that connection.

What's next for Utudy

We want to share this platform with the public and start to promote the platform to those who want to be freelance instructors. We want to further advance the technology by providing a mobile application and expand on the instructor tools to be able to store class notes. We hope to extend the services to include closed communities used by education institutions for tutoring services, and health care for one-on-one in-person patient treatment.

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