I chose to analyze Skooli because my own school went through this process roughly one year ago. I played the roll of an Educational Venture Analyst (EVA) and ultimately decided to move forward with this investment. Our school signed on to provide access to both Skooli Unlimited and Skooli.com (depending on the course they were in) for all students. We are servicing roughly 5000 students each year, thus this was a significant investment in the range of $200-300,000.

As an asynchronous online school, my understanding for the past few years was that students needed additional support to what we were offering them. While our courses provided a 24-hour response time from teachers, this was not enough. Students were (and still are) becoming more and more accustomed to having instant access to essentially everything, so we had to provide this in the form of teacher support. My wife is a teacher in a traditional brick-and-mortar school and I noticed the same need for her students as well (this is not a problem exclusive to online learning). As such, I am convinced that the market for an on-demand tutoring service is massive.

In our search for a service, we had only one other provider that we spoke to at length, Paper (formerly GradeSlam). While their offering was attractive, they could not guarantee the quality of their tutors (they were often based overseas). Anecdotal evidence from some websites and peers in the same field shared that the tutor quality was quite poor. Paper was also not willing to provide flexible terms; they required us to purchase licenses for all of our students or none at all. We ultimately did go this route with Skooli, but not initially. Skooli provided us with the option of purchasing 1000 licenses, for example, and increasing this or decreasing it as we needed.

I have a lot of faith in the Skooli team based on my interactions with them. The CEO, Dave Frey, was very accommodating and willing to find a way to make the solution work for us. We were even able to change the terms of the contract twice during our implementation. In working with the technical teams, they were very knowledgeable and integrated with our LMS (Brightspace) flawlessly. They helped us build out a custom solution for controlling which students could and could not see the tutoring access buttons in our courses with no additional cost. They have also been very helpful with providing important usage metrics as well as tips (and marketing assets) on how to increase usage and engagement with the platform. After one year of use, our organization is extremely happy with the service provided by Skooli. Our students are equally satisfied.