- [Anjali] So, I wake up at around 7:30am
and I try to be on my laptop by 8:00am.
- [Harsh] I have a class very early in the morning,
so I have to wake up for it.
I attend it and then I sleep again.
- [Darian] Get up.
- [Luke] Eat breakfast
- [Bill] Brush my teeth.
- [Darian] Go to the computer.
- [Anjali] I have like four classes in the morning
and then I have lunch break.
- [Darian] Get your homework done.
- [Bill] Log into my computer.
And I just have to sit there waiting for other people.
- [Luke] Eating lunch in the afternoon.
- [Juan] And then I read.
Read books.
- [Bill] Throughout the day I have 10 minute breaks.
- [Harsh] And I can walk on the roof terrace in my garden.
- [Anjali] I also enjoy playing the piano.
- [Juan] I work out.
- [Luke] I spend two hours biking every day.
- [Juan] I navigate through social networks.
- [Luke] Playing basketball in the backyard.
- [Bill] If there was a virtual club
I'll do the virtual club.
- And have dinner.
- [Harsh] And then I have another class in the evening time.
- [Bill] And then just hang around and do nothing,
which is not really my lifestyle.
- [Harsh] And then I sleep.
(wheels turning on pavement)
(slow rock music)
- [Dr. Werner Vogels] Our planets and our civilizations
are changing faster than ever before.
Join me as I've travel the globe,
talking to startup founders
using technology to make our world more interesting,
accessible, and livable.
These are the entrepreneurs that are creating the future
we will live in.
This is Now Go Build.
(tribal drumbeat)
For the last couple of years
my team and I has been quite fortunate.
We've been traveling the world, meeting new people
and learning about surprising new ways
that people are using technology to improve our world.
Well, in March, this season's filming came to an abrupt halt
with the rest of the world.
We were in Asia
when COVID-19 came racing down onto the stage.
By the time we left home,
the world was on lockdown.
Suddenly, we're all facing the challenges of isolation,
shifting expectations in opportunities,
in both our personal and professional lives.
Meeting new people seems like a daunting endeavor.
Going to work
has a completely new meaning
as huge office spaces stand empty
and we learn to work from home.
Video conferencing has created a new communication style
and work culture, virtually overnight.
Restaurants, music venues, theaters,
all standing empty as people who create
look to new ways to carry on creating.
But what about our students?
How do young people around the world keep moving forward
not only with their studies
but also in connecting to peers?
If we learned anything in our travels,
it is that humans are tenacious problem-solvers.
The innovators at Brainly are no exception.
From their hometown in Kraków
and from mine in Amsterdam,
we got together to talk about
how they are solving this problem
for students around the world.
- Hey, Michał. - Hey.
- [Werner] Hey, Bill. - Hey, Werner,
nice to meet you.
- [Werner] Hey, good to meet you.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.
- Thank you for the invitation.
- Tell me first what Brainly does.
- So, the inspiration for Brainly was
a study group between students.
So, imagine that there is a test coming
and there is someone who forgot
how to solve a specific equation
or to answer a question in biology.
And that person asks a question,
then friends gather together to like solve it
and to help that person understand.
And that was our initial inspiration for the product.
And from there, what we've built is
an online learning community for students and parents,
where they can get help from their peers or our experts.
- So, you have students and you have your experts,
how can you be sure that your experts
are giving the right answers?
- So, in fact, it's a peer-to-peer interaction.
So, we try to engage students to also help others.
So, the idea is that you would give help in topics
that you are really good at,
and that you are going to receive help
in topics where you struggle with.
And what we do on top of that
is that we add expert verification of content.
And when there are the most popular
and most difficult questions,
experts answer questions as well.
All of that is aimed at
the asker understanding how to solve this question
next time on their own.
(speaking in foreign language)
- We're limited to how much social interaction
we can do with the world around us.
And that's just really difficult.
- Many of my extracurricular activities,
such as basketball, tennis, piano, math,
that all went either gone temporarily,
or it was moved completely online.
- Really makes me appreciate things that,
how they were before those little things,
being able to go to school
being able to get ice cream with your friends.
- It's hard to stay motivated
to even do something.
It's weird.
You're bored,
you want to do something
but then you don't have the motivation to do it.
- [Werner] So, you guys started off in Poland?
- [Michał] Yes.
- Quite successfully, rather quickly was it?
- Yeah, in fact it was,
the initial launch we were struggling a bit.
You know, I think back then almost no one believed
that students are going to help others.
On the first day when we've seen that students ask
and help each other,
we were like, "Oh, wow! It's really working."
That it's this peer-to-peer community of people
helping each other.
And the path was crazy.
From 1 million users after about a year since launch
to like 250 million monthly users right now.
- [Werner] Wow.
So, what's an American doing in Kraków?
(laughing)
- That's the most common question I get asked.
Hopefully, the answer is making a difference.
- Have you seen changes that you,
as a technologist, needed to adapt to
that were different, let's say in the past five, six months?
- Absolutely.
You know, in 2019 we were doing 150 million
monthly unique users.
It scaled up to 250 million in, by May of [2020].
You know, at 150 million
you pretty much have the scale problems worked out.
There's a few things that you need to pay attention to
but you're feeling pretty comfortable.
What happened for us was not that we couldn't scale,
it was the speed at which we had to scale.
And usually we would have
three to four weeks to see it coming.
We were literally seeing three to four hours of warning
before systems were hitting failure points,
in these particular areas
where we made the conscious decision
not to try to auto-scale them.
- And of course, what I would call the important other side
of how auto-scaling is scaling you down.
Yeah, because if you can scale stuff down,
anything that you don't pay helps you.
- Yeah, absolutely.
(slow hip hop music)
(speaking in foreign language)
(slow guitar music)
- Learning from home is not going to be
what you get from learning at school.
- If you're taking AP classes,
honors classes, accelerated classes, any high level classes
you know that virtual school is going to be more difficult.
For instance, here, our class time is actually cut.
So, we almost have an hour cut off
from the normal school day.
And it just gives us less time to learn the material,
less time to ask questions to the teacher.
- If I wanted personal help during remote learning,
I would have to email my teacher
and it would still be very hard for them to help me
because they can't interact with me in person.
I think a lot of us have made it work
but there's still a lot of students out there
who need that in-person learning.
- One of the biggest deals of the lockdown has been,
of course, kids not coming to school.
And next to the social part of that
and the development part
definitely couldn't ask anyone around school
anymore about answers.
- Yes. So, we try to support students and parents
in this transition specifically.
On parents' side, what happens is that
parents became both teachers and students
and they didn't really sign up for that.
It was just the circumstances that pushed them to do that.
So then, when you look at that situation
where they need to take care of their kids,
they need to educate their kids
and then, they have to maintain their jobs,
it's a lot of stress being put on parents.
- And what actually do teachers think of all of this?
- Teachers use us in two ways.
One way is to help others
because at school they can teach 30, 60 kids
but when they come to Brainly,
they can see, okay,
their content was reviewed 10,000 times.
So, they feel like, "Okay, I just helped 10,000 students."
And the second use case is that they come to Brainly
to check what questions are being asked
so they can see what students are struggling with.
So then, they can adjust their teaching at school
based on their research on Brainly.
- So, it is really supplemental
to sort of the traditional learning
that they may be doing in school.
- Correct.
And in fact, I think what this situation showed
is how important is that core education
that you get at school,
that you build this face-to-face interactions
with your peers.
In fact, there is a number of research
that is being created right now that
in fact, lack of this human-to-human interaction
is not good for development of teenagers.
But what I think the online education is great at doing
is that you can help to personalize the experience,
like, "Okay, I really like mathematics," let's say,
"and I want to advance faster than my class."
but for example somebody can be struggling with math
and they need to catch up,
but you know, teachers may not have
enough time to help them,
parents may not have time.
So then, they can have online education services
that will help them to catch up.
So, what I think is happening
and the change that is being accelerated
by the crisis that we see right now,
that this access to high quality education
is going to equalize
because of the spread of online educational products.
(slow instrumental music)
(speaking in foreign language)
- Human is a social animal
and we cannot survive alone
so it feels good to be among your peers
who have common interest
and you can discuss about things,
really fills up that space for me.
- [Luke] Everyone starts out at a low number of points.
It gives you enough to ask or two questions.
If you need to ask more questions
there's a whole front page where you can answer questions.
You can get 10, 15 points per question, sometimes even more.
And then, with those points
you can ask questions of your own.
It's like a video game,
but for learning.
And I really think that's a great part about it.
- And because we use that gamification system
like students, in fact,
can advance within the system to become kind of
superstars within the product.
And because the baseline of Brainly is that
We build community where smart is cool.
In fact, you know, the kids who are helping the most
then become like superstars of the community,
which then helps them to build all of the social skills.
Right now they can interact with many students.
They receive "Thank Yous" from students that they helped
and that helps them to build their confidence.
- Yeah. Suddenly the nerds are cool.
- Yeah.
Yeah. On Brainly definitely.
- Darn!
Darn, I wish I had this when I grew up.
(laughing)
(slow instrumental music)
You must be sitting there,
on a trove of data
that both teachers as well as textbook writers
must be extremely interested in
because they need to know
where students really have challenges with.
- Yes. In fact, we started looking into these connections
with data to understand, okay,
if the student struggles with this topic right now
we can predict that this student is going to struggle
with this other topic later on.
So, how we can proactively help them right now
to make sure that they avoid these problems in the future.
- [Bill] When we start to layer on top of that
an understanding of what types of things
a learner may be challenged with
we can start to identify hotspots in educational gaps
for example, we can do this with an overlay
of subject, age, region,
country of origin.
There's many ways to slice and dice it.
And that's a really interesting perspective.
- It's changes in education,
driven by facts,
not by what people believe.
- Yeah. That's a great way to put it.
- It's a new initiative for us.
We started taking our first steps there
but I agree with you.
It's this mine of opportunities that we can dig.
- Absolutely.
- It's quite crazy.
- Yeah. I'd like to spend a week looking at your data,
see what we can get out of that.
It's very exciting.
(speaking in foreign language)
- This whole situation of being at home
has really put to the test on
how well you can manage your own time.
- I know so many students that have said like,
"Oh I wish we could be at school right now."
when a year or two ago, they just want school to get out.
I just hope we have that desire to be in class
now that we've learned the alternative.
(speaking in foreign language)
- Something I would like to keep in mind
when the pandemic is over,
is not to stress about such little things like school,
like getting a bad grade here or there.
Seeing how this unexpected pandemic
just completely changed the world
and completely put everything at a halt.
It just shows me
how I often just get so stressed out
about such insignificant things.
- So Bill you've been in educational technology
for quite a while now,
where do you see this going?
Are there big revolutions around the corner?
- So, I think that the revolutions
have been a long time coming.
This is now an obvious problem
to more than just the insiders.
There are real gaps in terms of education
and technology's role in education
that people are now focused on solving.
I think we're gonna move beyond
just Personalized Learning,
which is the hot topic and sort of the buzz word in Ed Tech.
I think we're gonna move beyond personalized learning
to teacher enhancement ed tech products
where technology is a partner for the teacher
in many ways that it's a partner today
for more traditional online businesses.
We have a whole language and a whole way of working
that's all around data that informs us what's important.
And we don't have those same tools in education.
I sort of dream about these tools
like intervention recommendation systems.
We have content recommenders to help you,
buy a new widget or
buy an add-on for the widget that you're buying.
But thinking about moving that sort of technology
into the classroom and having a struggling learner
who would benefit from a tool that their teacher has
to say, "Hey, we're identifying a potential problem.
Here's some recommendations
on how to move forward with this."
- Yeah, I think most, especially those kids
that are failing or that are having a hard time
they don't get noticed until they have a hard time.
- Exactly.
(slow instrumental music)
- [Werner Vogels] It is undeniable
that we're in the middle of a transition.
The world we thought we knew before 2020
will never look that way again.
There's an opportunity in the midst of this challenge
to shape the way things will look in the future,
to shape the way we connect,
the way we see each other
and the way we spend our time,
in ways that are better than the way they were before.
But for now, we do what we must.
Take care of each other
in even the simplest ways.
We put our brains together to innovate
to reach a better, new normal.
(slow instrumental music)