In the past four weeks, the learning management system CampusKnot received 8,000 visitors to its website, with schools at all levels worldwide forced into distance learning by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
CampusKnot offers software that allows interaction between students and teachers.
Educational institutions from all across the world — from Italy to Ghana to the Philippines, to name a few — reached out to the Starkville-based company seeking to use their social media-like platform’s teaching tools. CampusKnot has been “hit up right and left” by professors across the country and works with them individually or with institutions as a whole, co-founder and CEO Rahul Gopal said.
“We’re operating in full gear, and we’re excited about the exposure and excited about serving all of these people,” he said.
Such fast growth and widespread reach was beyond imagination when Gopal and two other Mississippi State University students began forming the company in 2012, he said, or when they secured their first investors in 2015.
“There are two important things the pandemic has done for us: it’s definitely expedited our roadmap for (developing) the online side of things, and it’s given us some real exposure that we should be able to bank on moving forward,” Gopal said.
CampusKnot implements “feeds and discussions” like a social media outlet and is completely accessible via mobile devices, Gopal said. It’s designed to make course material easy to access and aid communication between students and their teachers or professors, whether the class is online, in-person or a hybrid of both.
The platform receives between 300 and 600 users daily, but not the same users every day, and currently has 5,000 active users, Gopal said. He anticipates an increase of “three to four times the current user base” for the summer and fall semesters, he said.
About 15 to 20 institutions, including the Mississippi University for Women and the University of Southern Mississippi, are using the platform now and plan to do so in the fall semester. Gopal predicts a total of between 20,000 and 30,000 active users by then, both institutions and individual professors.
Some of CampusKnot’s new customers, thanks to the pandemic, are vocational schools, ranging from cosmetology to insurance licensing, Gopal said. The platform is free for all users until July 31 so they can finish the spring and summer semesters.
Gopal said every feature and tool on CampusKnot is being used four times more now than they were before education went entirely virtual.
Bringing in new users is much easier at the beginning of a semester than in March or April, and most of the spike in use came from existing CampusKnot customers, Gopal said.
“The people we already had definitely used our platform a lot more than they would be using it on a normal day,” he said.
CampusKnot anticipates about a threefold increase in all three of its revenue streams: institutional licensing, professor and student subscriptions and app creation for local clients, Gopal said.
Useful during the transition
Gopal, Hiten Patel and Perceus Mody, all from India, launched CampusKnot through MSU’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the College of Business. The company was based in MSU’s business incubator building at the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park and now operates out of an office downtown and has an office in India.
West Point High School implemented CampusKnot in the fall as part of a statewide pilot program funded by the Legislature.
A few professors at MUW also started using CampusKnot as a pilot program, and Gopal said it was “extremely successful” and the software will most likely be used campuswide starting this fall.
MUW biology professor Ross Whitwam said CampusKnot made for a “really smooth transition” from in-person to online classes in March. He already used the poll function to quiz students in real time during lectures, he said.
“When I switched to online, I still wanted to do that, but I couldn’t just throw it in the middle of a lecture, so what I can do now is make the (questions) open for 36 hours,” Whitwam said.
MSU does not work with CampusKnot as an institution, but several individual faculty members use it, Gopal said. One of them, chemistry lab coordinator Teresa Brown, uses the poll function as well, but since classes went online she has used it mainly for student feedback, such as when would be the most convenient time to hold office hours, she said.
CampusKnot is integrated with the video conference tool Zoom and makes it easy for Brown to start her office hours and for students to access the video, she said.
The documents feature in CampusKnot “saved” Brown during the transition to online learning, she said, when she needed to upload a week’s worth of videos and PDFs for her 1,000 chemistry students, and MSU’s learning management system of Canvas was not working.
Brown has been using CampusKnot since the fall 2019 semester and “loved it from the introduction,” she said.
“It’s more like an educational social media platform, so students tend to be a little more relaxed when using it,” she said. “They’re more apt to jump on that first, and they know I check it first before I even check Canvas. It creates a little bit of a relaxing environment they’re used to using with their phones, apps, social media and things like that. It’s kind of a happy medium between casual life and academic life.”
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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