LurnQ – Making learning Social

In a time zone, where internet has become an archetype of online learning and information. Sites like Quora and Wikipedia have become the ultimate destination for gaining free access to any information.

With an aim to make online learning more social and clutter-free, here enters a Mumbai-based Startup LurnQ. This Indian startup works on the line of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), building a personalized learning management solution which can aggregate and curate content from the web. The key part of LurnQ is to replicate an experience that everyone is familiar with – using a user’s preferences to coalesce content from the web and display it, like a Facebook newsfeed. This is a smart strategy and takes advantage of the benefits of recognition.

The Need
With so many platforms like Quora, Udacity at our disposal, content consumption is sporadic and if learning is required to be focused it’s hard to keep an eye on subjects of your interest as such. That is where this application defines its true worth. What it does, is simply merge all the content on a particular topic in a lesson based form. Though on similar lines to Quora, it’s not question specific. Here, Users can sign up and select topics of interest and LurnQ keeps updating those topics with newer content generated on the web.

How it works
Once we log in to the LurnQ space, it asks us to select at least three interests from a group of topics such as Travel & Leisure, Books, Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Digital Marketing, and more. After this is done, it’s lets us choose from various sections mentioned below :-

1) Learn: This section allows us to explore lessons or opinions that various people have contributed. In short, it’s a crash course in learn about something of your interest and at the same time, gives a personal perspective to the reader.

2) Teach: This is essentially a user’s submission within the platform. Teach allows us to create a lesson on a particular topic with necessary references or write an opinion on that topic sharing your experience.

3) Library: This section is the store house of all the activities performed on the platform that could be related to lessons, opinions, resources, added URLs and topics.

The website’s user interface is really smooth and clutter-free. Their approach for a crowd sourced platform is an innovative one and can garner valuable content. But, LurnQ might face great competition from heavy weights like Quora or the organized learning platforms like Coursera and Khan Market. It desperately needs a lot more content and users for the network effect to kick in. Moderate gamification would help the cause.

Funded by Seedfund, this startup has recorded over 30,000 unique users – 32 percent from the U.S., 28 percent from India and 40 percent from the rest of the world.

The founders believe that their platform will finish user’s endless effort to try never ending options for open learning. With more and more young adults getting motivated to learn on their own and outside the purview of traditional education, LurnQ can surely hope to be one of the first few winners of the trend.

So, have a go at LurnQ. It’s interactive, community driven and absolute fun.