Sophia Does The Math, Buys Guaranteach To Boost Its Social Education Platform

Sophia, which operates a free online social teaching and learning platform, this morning announced that it has acquired Guaranteach, a Web-based service that provides tens of thousands of short-form tutorials along with assessment tools to students, teachers, colleges and schools.

Guaranteach offers nearly 23,000 short-form videos on math topics ranging from counting to calculus, developed by nearly 200 teachers and math experts. Guaranteach also offers more than 60,000 quiz questions, as well as assessment tools that match tutorials to the learning style of the learner and provide student progress reports.

Sophia will soon start offering the Guaranteach portfolio of math tutorials – previously available on a pay-per-use basis to schools – to individual learners around the world at no cost.

Notably, Sophia also plans to use the Guaranteach model to develop and offer a range of English and science tutorials in addition to math.

The deal will also help Sophia enhance its social learning solution, which is currently available for licensed use by K-12 districts and higher education institutions.

In public beta since March 2011, Sophia offers a crowd-sourced platform where academic information is organized in learning packets and can be created by anyone, anywhere using text, images, presentations, video, audio and more. The site is free and packets are rated for quality and evaluated for academic soundness by users and experts within the community.

Guaranteach was founded by Innosight Ventures, the venture arm of Innosight. Last year, Guaranteach received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with the purpose of enriching teaching and determining whether and how the use of short-form instructional videos will increase engagement and student achievement.

NewSchools Venture Fund was also an investor.