Brainly - an Edtech phenomenon straight from Krakow

Marcin Gnat

In a pretty short period of time Brainly has become one of the most successful startup-ups not only from Krakow, but Poland in general. This crowd learning platform has grown up to reach over 25 million unique users monthly and has expanded from native Poland to countries like Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, India, France, Spain, The United States and more.

Brainly was created in 2009 by Michał Borkowski, Tomasz Kraus and Łukasz Haluch, while they were still university students. They saw that studying and learning is severely compromised when students’ only resources consist of the textbooks and teachers’ lectures. The co-founders are young entrepreneurs and privately good friends, who earlier founded SEO, educational and programming companies but not just another group of geeks starting up in the region. Only this story goes more exciting.

“Homework struggles are a universal problem, and social learning is just emerging as a universal solution. Every student has different needs and a one-size-fits-all approach is simply never 100% effective. We’ve learned that the types of problems students are faced with vary from one country to another, but students are all faced with the same after-school issue of getting through their toughest problems alone”. - wrote Michał Borkowski CEO of Brainly.com at Insights.wired.com.

So what is the concept of Brainly all about? This social network attracts tons of students, tutors and other lovers of wisdom, who can improve their total amount of knowledge working on it together. Basically, crowdsourcing the knowledge and skills. It’s all about the valuable content being thrown into an active community and made available to all for free. All that based on a simple Q&A (Questions and Answers) system with a tinge of gamification. More is in plans.

Of course, there is a lot of Q&A sites across the web, where students look for help from their peers, but as always, in the quickly-developing world of internet, this idea went one step further. Brainly.com helps students to learn and understand and share their talents in specific branches of knowledge, which they are the best in. The word “understand” is the key factor there as Brainly tries to emphasize the quality and the reliability of the answer. All  thanks to over 400 qualified moderators, who are frequently teachers and professors. 

What is more, users earn points for sharing the correct and creative answers, which help them to be ranked high in the website's „Hall Of Fame” and gives the whole platform an attractive aspect of gamification.

Naturally, this idea of collaborative learning has raised some controversy among the teacher staff. Many adults have concerns about the lack of control over the content shared by the students. This is one of the reasons why Brainly has put a lot of pressure on ensuring strong and thorough moderation.

After five years online, Brainly has become the unquestionable leader of the social studying websites in Poland (Zadane.pl), and in Russia (Znanija.com) and is expanding rapidly on huge markets like Indonesia, Turkey or Brazil, managed by native administrators from those parts of the world.

One of the biggest upcoming challenges for Brainly for the next couple of months is to become an important and useful tool for people at the most challenging market so far, the United States. Up until now, this Polish platform has gained over 100k users there.

The company is also constantly growing their team of specialists to work with them. If you feel you are the right person to work at Brainly, don’t hesitate to visit this “Job offers” website and find out more information.

Marcin is a Media specialist at Brainly

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