As fathers and grandfathers of junior high- and high school-aged children, Michael Levy and Avishai Erell saw first-hand the challenges their children encountered in completing difficult homework tasks. They also noticed how the teenagers used technology such as instant messaging, to work together and find solutions to the tasks they were given.
Levy and Erell decided to find a way to help their own children, and students around Israel, do this more efficiently – and Tiktek was born.
Connecting an education community
Launched in March 2015, Tiktek operates as an NGO and is an online education community that enables students from grades seven to 12 participate, contribute and interact with their peers, parents, teachers and volunteers, across a broad range of subjects. Students simply need to search the website by subject, textbook, page and question number to find a list of solutions to almost any homework task or assignment. When there is no suitable solution, they can ask for more specific assistance, which is crowdsourced and uploaded to the website within hours, for all students to access. They can also rate and comment on the solutions.
“Tiktek changes the way students cope with their learning tasks, generating mind sharing, exchange of knowledge and openness to new ideas,” says Levy. “It has become the ultimate learning companion. Over 500,000 students now use the platform, free of charge, every month.”
This illustrates the power of technology to enable the process of education by bridging the social and economic gap created when students don’t have equal access to education resources. Now, an increasing number of students in Israel have the opportunity to interact with mentors who can help them gain the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed.
The technology behind the solution
Erell credits Microsoft’s support for getting the idea for Tiktek off the ground and helping scale the platform to service the 500, 000 students who now depend on it for assistance with their schoolwork. “Microsoft has been behind us since day one,” he says. “Thanks to an initial grant from BizSpark, as well as the additional $50 000 we received as part of the Modern NGO campaign, we have been able to make use Microsoft Azure’s open, flexible, enterprise-grade cloud computing platform to better run our organisation. This has proven to be the best software tool for building and deploying large scale user-based applications. It wouldn’t have been possible without the ongoing support Microsoft has offered us.”
The Tiktek team makes use of Azure to host its front end and database servers, which perform the interactions and services provided to the student community. “The robustness and reliability of Azure enables us to achieve 99.999% up time. This is a major issue when dealing with millennial students who are used to technology that works, and also often have assignment deadlines to meet,” comments Erell.
Tiktek plans to increase the reliance of the technological infrastructure on Azure by gradually adopting additional features such as backup, sendgrid, storage, data mining and advanced data analysis platforms.
Expanding across borders and cultures
This goes hand-in-hand with Tiktek’s plans to grow. Levy explains, “We plan to start expanding our educational content and services in order to fulfil an increasing demand by elementary school students. We are also looking to broaden the scope of Tiktek’s services for more Arabic speaking students in Israel.”
Notably, Arab students, which make up 20% of the student population in the country, are already well-represented in the Tiktek community, with approximately 400 of the 2000 textbooks available on the website appearing in Arabic.
Simultaneously, spurred by Tiktek’s immense contribution to the student community in Israel, the team is also looking at opportunities to expand to other parts of the world and further use technology to democratise education across borders.
“Microsoft is the ideal partner and investor for driving this move towards the global market,” comments Erell.
The numbers speak for themselves
Tiktek is unlikely to have any problems in attracting more interest as it expands its scope. In the two years since launching, the team has relied solely on word-of-mouth to drive students to the website. Teachers also endorse it and use the platform to upload sample solutions that their students and the broader community can learn from.
And the numbers speak for themselves – the user base is expected to cross the 600,000 mark by the end of the coming school year, representing over 80% of the junior high school students in Israel. The number of solutions and explanations available will also soon surpass 100,000.
“Education frameworks are typically based on learning from textbooks containing questions that students need to cope with as part of their ongoing learning assignments,” says Levy. “Students all over the world need help with these questions. We believe that matching this need with their penchant for technology and the power of crowdsourcing is the best way for us to democratise education and do something good for society.”
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