the models lacked context. To be useful for learning, they needed to be part of a larger teaching narrative, including text explanations, videos, and quizzes to test retention.
In a way, that’s exactly what the latest generation of e-textbooks provide. Open a textbook created for Inkling or Apple’s iBooks platform, and you’ll find an interesting mix of text, video, and interactive demos. But to Freund, the problem with digital textbooks is that they don’t leave much room for the teacher’s contribution. A great teacher has usually built up a personal collection of handouts, workbooks, slides, tests, lesson plans, and the like that helps them engage students in a personal way on subjects like the periodic table or the history of the Roman empire. But “the online educational industry has been pretty adamant about cutting teachers out of their creative role,” Freund says. “They are now glorified TAs.”
So the first nine months at Versal were all about building an HTML5 courseware “engine” that could help teachers step into the shoes of software developers and product designers and build their own courseware. The engine provides a browser-based what-you-see-is-what-you-get canvas, where an author can assemble a complete course from bite-sized units or lessons. Each lesson can include any number of gadgets, from simple text gadgets to images, videos, quizzes, surveys, and customizable JavaScript apps. Once a course is finished and published, a teacher can direct students to the Versal pages via e-mail invitations, or embed a player that recreates the whole course within an external website or blog.
Versal’s team wrote the backend software in a scripting language called Scala that’s known for being elegant and lightweight. But Freund says two key technical goals complicated the work considerably. One was making the courses playable on any PC, laptop, or a mobile device, whether that meant a Chrome browser on an Android device, Safari on an iOS device, or Internet Explorer on a PC. The other was ensuring that the system retained personalized “state information” about what’s going on in the app at any given moment. That would give students the ability to pause a lesson and come back to it later without losing their work, or even switch devices in mid-course.
“The player stores the results of interactions; if there is an essay gadget, it stores the student’s progress on the essay,” he explains. But that’s not a function the creators of most JavaScript apps for education had ever had to think about. “Abstracting storage out of the learning gadgets was a huge challenge.”
Now that Versal has figured out how to integrate gadgets into its courses, Freund is looking forward to tapping into the wealth of existing JavaScript apps for education. “We actually can take lot of things that have been invented before and make them accessible to a much broader audience of students, authors, and professors,” he says. “It took us less than two hours to build a gadget that allows anybody to take a 3D model from Sketchlabs and put it into a course, so as a student you can do a 3D walkthrough of a house, or a microbe.”
So far, only a small group of gadgets can be dropped into a Versal course. For example, there’s a slide show gadget, a sine wave generator that lets math students play with the parameters that affect waveforms, and an anatomy gadget that authors can use to embed 3D models of skulls or other body parts. Freund knows that scavenging existing JavaScript apps will only take course authors so far—he says the next big step for Versal will be to publish specifications that will help programmers create purpose-built gadgets, ideally in collaboration with course authors.
“A fixed palette is not the solution,” says Freund. “What you want is an open platform that allows you to actually add new gadgets.”
And that’s just one of the changes that will be needed transform Versal from an experimental platform into a real ecosystem. Freund is only willing to talk about the company’s product road map in the vaguest terms. For example, it’s not clear how or when the company might create a centralized catalog of Versal courses—there are many more in existence than the five listed on Versal’s website, but they’re scattered across the Web, mostly embedded in the blogs of individual authors, according to Versal marketing executive Allison Wagda.
Versal also hasn’t said whether authors will be allowed to charge for access to their content—or, for that matter, how the company itself will make money.
But on that front, there are a few hints. Software companies like Neo Technology and Typesafe are already using Versal to build online training courses for developers. It would make sense to ask such enterprise users to pay a subscription fee.
Also, Freund says Versal is in conversations with the big MOOC companies, which are in need of more content to flesh out their offerings. “Eighty percent of online education these days is like YouTube—click a button and watch a video,” Freund says. “To me, that is not education per se. The computer is a relatively lousy TV screen. What it’s really good at is interactive stuff.”
But nobody in the MOOC business is focusing yet on tools for creating interactive content, he says. “For me, it’s almost inconceivable that you would start building education tools and not worry about how [content] is going to get built and how to make sure we have the best possible courses.” So there’s the prospect of partnerships between Versal and the likes of Udacity, Coursera, edX, and other private or university-based online education efforts.
But it’s all still TBD, while Versal’s engineers work to flesh out their creation platform. And that’s why Freund has been funding the 20-employee startup, so far, out of his own pocket.
“If you went to a VC today and said, ‘I am building this really cool engine that does all of these things, and I will tell you in a year and a half what it’s really good at,’ they would laugh you out of the room,” Freund says. “The startup ecosystem and the press are used to a much different model, which is saying, ‘Yeah, we are here to change the world,’ when what they really have is just the latest sales optimization app for the iPad. We are trying to be a little more subtle, and actually have a meaningful discussion with partners and teachers and professors.”
