LurnQ.com – Makes Online Learning more Social and Interactive

When you hear about a new online learning platform, you may think, what’s different? there are many out there!

But LurnQ is not your usual online learning platform, you’ll feel the difference, there are real people talking with real experience. Its not your usual monotonous classroom or an online lecture.

If you are an avid reader or are truly interested in learning something where you want actually feel an experienced person talking then try out LurnQ.

And no other platform gives you the option to add your own opinion. At LurnQ you can post your opinion and also read other learners opinions, which actually makes things more interactive and interesting.

We had an opportunity to quiz Tarun Mitra, Founder, to learn more about LurnQ.

Online education is a very tight niche, but you still managed to come up with this innovative USP, what all researches did you do and went through before coming up with this USP?

In the last decade, commerce, music and social interactions were moving fast in the online space. On the other hand, likes of Wikipedia, Khan Academy and the open courseware initiatives from leading US universities were creating an open learning eco system, where it is possible to learn anything. We saw an opportunity in combining the social web with the open learning resources to simplify and organize learning online. This is how LurnQ was conceived.

In March 2013 LurnQ recorded 30,000 users that include not only the users from India but also users across the globe; you are one of the fastest growing startups with a 100% growth every month. How has the entrepreneur journey been till now? And what is your future plans for LurnQ?

The journey has been as exciting as it could be; three initial iterations to prototype, coming together with a great team, raising seed round of venture funding followed by a successful alpha launch.

We are fairly encouraged to see the very positive initial response. The recent rapid developments in the EdTech space validate our take on the future of learning. We now want to make LurnQ a product that has life long utility from grade school to higher education and beyond. We are focused one thing; “Simplify learning in digital context and make it one of our favorite activities online”. We are not there yet; but we are taking our baby steps.

Albert Einstein once said, It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. LurnQ team passionately believes that technology has a promise to make it a reality.

Our target is to reach over 100 million worldwide users in the next five years and become the most preferred online learning and teaching tool. The team is continuously building on bettering its product and we aspire to develop LurnQ as the core learning utility that learners use every day ubiquitously on all devices to learn and manage their learning. We want to create a unified and personalized learning experience for our users in an increasingly overwhelming digital learning environment.

What were the initial obstacles that you faced when starting LurnQ and how did you overcome those obstacles?

As a technology company the biggest challenge is to build, maintain and grow an A+ engineering team. Initially the funding team network helped us to expand the team from IIT Bombay. Now we run a continuous super intern program at IIT Bombay and BITS to maintain a required supply of great engineering talent.

If you were asked to give 3 growth hack tips for the new entrepreneurs who have just started their journey what would it be?

1. In the consumer web product space the most important growth hack is the user experience. We created a simple product with a familiar UI and the users loved it.
2. The branding is very important. In an early stage a well known partnership can be of a great help. We tied up with TiE Mumbai as their knowledge partner, which gave us good credibility and visibility.
3. LurnQ is a platform, which is a double-sided business. To have large number of learners we need good numbers of teachers to be present and vice-versa. One way to address this challenge is to build some single user features. Our OER search and library feature are single user utilities that helped us attract the initial set of users.

You mentioned in of your interview, going forward you plan to integrate Google hangouts and various other modern web technologies on a single platform, customized for learning and teaching. This is something exciting, could you tell us something more about this integration idea and how soon can we expect this?

The current version of LurnQ does not allow any live interaction among users or between the teachers and the learner. Integration of technologies like Google hangout will enable this vital live interaction and make learning more engaging.

LurnQ will soon be launching a new feature, which will enable anyone to teach and take a course online.  Over the past few years, online education has grown in the form of massive open online courses (MOOCs). With the advent of multiple online course platforms, it has become difficult to keep up with multiple courses and connecting with peers of similar learning interests. Also, for someone who wants to teach online courses, there is no platform for creating and building followership of learners as such. We thought of solving this problem by bringing a whole new experience to taking online courses. This will create a course marketplace, which allows anyone to teach a free or paid course on any topic of your choice and/or expertise.

What do we think of LurnQ?

There are many online learning websites which are popular and doing good but if you are an avid reader like me you’ll soon realize, that it gets monotonous and you tend to loose concentration. Here is a platform with human touch and you have the option to create your own library which which will be your life-time reference guide and also post your opinions and at LurnQ opinions do matter, so be really active when you learn. I recommend, give it a try and let us know your opinion about it.