One Page Summary

Teachat starts with the aim of making studying for effective and enjoyable through technologies and new ways of communicate used nowadays by students all around the world. With Teachat we want to offer a new and alternative teaching paradigm, far from old-style private lessons. The value of this kind of service lie in the possibility of interaction between students in troubles with “tutor students” (those who have best performances); tutor s will then receive rewards depending on the amount of time spent in the platform and the feedback received. All these interactions will be done inside a mobile app, using a chat with all of the features of messaging platforms (messages, audio, photo, video, attachments, etc.).
Another important Teachat strength point is response speed: every time a student is in trouble during homeworks can easily login and ask for help using a text message, a photo or an audio message. The system, leveraging a proprietary matching algorithm, will do a selection of the ideal tutor (a teacher or another student) according to different parameters like rating, tutor availability or expertise on request specific topic; then it will create a private chat room between tutor a student to start the lesson.
In this way, the student as a tutor can make himself/herself available for other students with problems, leveraging his/her skills and know-how, creating a positive rating and climbing the ranking of the best Teachat tutors, that will be rewarded by the school or receive a fee. The main advantage for tutors is that tutoring can be done in every available moment, directly from mobile app or laptop and with no need of moving, arrange an appointment and meet the student in person. On the other hand, student in trouble has the possibility to interact with a schoolmate or a teacher in every moment, and receive the right training about unclear topics. This kind of asynchronous interaction will be a further motivation for the student.
With Teachat the concept of canonical on-hour private lesson is overcome in favor of the micro-training-on-demand concept: through this new paradigm we want to give students a real solution that can guarantee real support even for small doubts.
To keep the whole system under control, teachers will be able to monitor all the lessons and confirm the feedback given to students: this king of supervision is important to avoid that the platform is used in the wrong way and to ensure an effective educational purpose.
The aim at first is create a model that stimulates learning and improvement of school performance through an enjoyable and innovative system of instant training, focused on interactions between students and students or between students and teachers. Very important is also the gamification system that will be implemented to stimulate the most deserving students to use the platform.
Teachat can also be monetized: it is possible to put qualified external tutors into the system and make students pay for lessons with those tutors. This approach has been already tested in Italy and the first feedbacks are very positive: 85% of students say they have solved their doubts following the chat lessons.
After a market analysis about private lessons sector, we can assert that in Europe there are several platforms that facilitate meeting between supply and demand but in most cases the lessons are then held with the traditional approach, through the personal meeting with the tutor or video call. Teachat distinguishes itself from these competitors, as it relies on a communication channel that today students know very well and with whom they are already accustomed to study. In addition we give deserving students the opportunity to get involved and to help other students by receiving compensation for the time they dedicate to this activity. The conscious use of new technologies aimed at school education is another important goal to which we want to aim.