When I was a junior at East Carolina University, I enrolled in an English Grammar course. Honestly, I had always considered myself a good writer but not a technical one, so I knew I would struggle. And struggle, I did. From the first week, I fell further and further behind. By the end of the semester, I performed so poorly on the final I did not even finish it. I just turned it in, informed my professor I would make an appointment with him, and walked out. Luckily, my professor took me under his wing and helped me navigate the course over the summer, and he awarded my hard work with a C in the class.
I earned that C because my professor knew I was working hard, but English grammar is progressive. Like math, if you fall behind, you will be forever behind. I tried to hire a tutor and went to the academic support office, but neither offered support for English grammar. So I was left to my own devices to make this happen, which was a recipe for disaster. If only there were a marketplace where I could find and work with a tutor who could help me with my English grammar needs. In 1994, this was relegated to a corkboard with 3×5 note cards or taking an ad out in the school paper. It could have been more efficient.
I am a fan of the idea of Disruptive Innovation. Most good ideas start as a reaction and challenge to norms in well-developed industries that aim to shake up the status quo. As higher education professionals, we often resist Disruptive Innovation. We love tradition and time-worn processes and techniques that work. And we love our tutoring centers. For the most part, all tutoring centers are the same. A team of professional staff hires student experts in a specific subject to serve as content experts in several courses. That sounds like a great idea. Well, for some students but not all.
The traditional tutoring model requires the student to meet the tutor’s needs. The time of the sessions, the location, and the subjects are vital parts of this work. Some of these barriers have been reduced in the modern tutoring environment, for example, more online tutoring sessions and some improvements in one-on-one and group tutoring, but the traditional presentation of these services remains. You go to a center, sit with a tutor at an appointed time, and hope it works.
A few years ago, I read a few articles on this company out of Florida practicing Disruptive Innovation. The company’s name is Knack, and they provide peer-connected tutoring for just about any course you can think of. Knack CEO Samyr Qureshi began the company with some of his college buddies in 2016, and I learned about them in 2018 from this article in EdSurge. They started the company because they saw a gap in the tutoring market as college students at Florida Universities like UF and UCF. And it’s worked. Today, Knack is thriving and helping universities increase the number of students served, the subjects covered, and the populations of traditionally underserved students.
What was interesting was their commitment to career development for the student tutors who worked for Knack. Through an excellent peer rating system, tutors can level their employability skills and receive certifications for commonly sought-after skills like interpersonal relations and critical thinking. The guys and gals at Knack are disrupting the tutoring market by taking the learning straight to the market. You can book a tutoring session if you know how to hail and Uber. And the sessions themselves are affordable; tutors set their rates, but typically, a session is $20.
And this is the kind of disruption higher education needs. By harnessing the power of our students, we can create a winning formula for everyone. If I had Knack in 1994, I might not fall behind in English Grammar, and I would be a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, but it is a case of all that ends well. Now, if we can only get higher education to embrace these disruptive innovators . . . . .
Considering Outloud 