CASE STUDY: SOFTWARE / MARKETPLACE
Nearpod
VSC helps Nearpod bring virtual reality education experiences to America’s schools.
The Story
How VSC Rebranded an existing product into ‘Nearpod VR’ for the classroom
Hundreds of startups are vying to reinvent education, competing with tech titans such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft in order to win the $12 billion K-12 U.S. education market.
Nearpod enables K-12 teachers to create, find and distribute lesson plans to students on any digital device and our goal was to build awareness in schools and differentiate Nearpod from the competition.
Strategy and Tactics
VSC determined the edtech company should focus on the VR component to their curriculum. This would give them an opportunity to capitalize on the heightened attention paid to virtual reality at the time and push the edtech conversation in a new direction.
To ensure Nearpod’s VR education story was more substance than fantasy, VSC relaunched the VR product along with VR education grants, gifting more than $100,000 worth of content, headsets, training and other resources to 50 schools. We also developed messaging around the power of virtual reality to energize education with powerful software and low-cost hardware.
Nearpod sourced low-cost VR viewers in order to emphasize the accessibility of the product to any school, as compared to other cost-prohibitive solutions such as Oculus Rift.
The Results
As the first classroom-ready virtual reality curriculum, enabling mainstream VR by putting it in America’s classrooms, we are now in the hands of over 9M students. Nearpod has expanded to 1 in 10 U.S. schools and raised $30M from key investors.
$30M
Fundraise
9M
Students
1 in 10
U.S. Schools
10+
Features
Wall Street Journal
Students already use tablets and netbooks in the classroom, to share text, record and watch videos, and conduct research. Virtual reality – the technology that lets people experience immersive, 360-degree images – would take technology in the classroom to the next level.
-Georgia Wells
Fortune
Timothy Fung, instructional technology resource at Gordon J. Lau Elementary in San Francisco, says Nearpod VR facilitates collaboration among teacher and students, giving real-time feedback with slides and instant surveys before students do game-play activities.
-John Gaudiosi
Engadget
Despite the end of the Great Recession, budgets are still tight in California schools — something not likely to change, if Gov. Jerry Brown's recent budget proposal is anything to go by — but Gyore applied for a grant from Nearpod, bringing a cost of what could have been hundreds or thousands of dollars down to nearly free.