Teachable.net
Simplicity provided strategic development consultancy to Web start-up Teachable, which helps teachers to share high-quality classroom resources on the internet.
www.teachable.net
Our challenge
With teachers in the UK facing increasingly heavy classroom schedules, entrepreneurs Edward Upton and Ranjeet Guptara decided to harness the power of the Web to help them share ideas and resources more easily.
As Edward, MD of Teachable, explains:
"Teachable.net was inspired by some of our friends who work in education. We realised that many teachers are producing first-class resources but, whilst there is a burgeoning cottage industry of individual teachers publishing their work online, there wasn't one central platform for them."
As a fast-growing enterprise, Teachable was looking for a Web partner that would be flexible about changes to its business model and that could add value to its proposition in the long-term. Following initial discussions with a number of companies, Teachable briefed Simplicity in May 2007 to produce a transactional website with a simple look and feel, intuitive functionality, and a scalable database.
What we did
The Teachable.net solution works in the following way:
- Teachers choose to upload resources they have prepared - anything from a successful lesson plan to a Powerpoint presentation
- Teachable editors help to format and tag the resources, so that visitors get quality assurance and can search the database by subject, National Curriculum stream and age / ability
- Teachers who need extra materials for their lessons can search for and preview documents, before downloading what they need for a small payment (from 90p per download)
- The resource contributors are rewarded with half the subscriber's payment for each document that is downloaded
"We need to be able to easily update the functionality and features on the website, so we were looking for a development team that could add strategic and technical value to Teachable.net over time," comments Edward.
"Simplicity's consultants take a pragmatic approach, assessing potential site features in terms of their impact on both the user experience and on our bottom line, and coming up with cost-effective solutions. For instance, for the 'see-before-you-buy' option, the website automatically adds a watermark to the free PDF resources so that we don't have to do this manually. It's great to be working with such a knowledgeable and enthusiastic team."
We are also advising Teachable on ways to market the website through Search Engine Optimisation, Pay-Per-Click and link-building programmes.
The results
Teachable.net has already gained a lot of interest from the teaching community in the UK and has a number of very exciting strategic partnerships in the pipeline.
Since launch, Teachable.net has received thousands of unique visitors and hundreds of high quality resources have been uploaded.
With general agreement that the marketplace for teaching materials is only in the very early days of exploiting the Internet, the future looks bright for Teachable.net.
Simplicity client case studies