2. The problem
Full of obstacles, frustrating
Cheating, plagiarism, lower
quality of written work
argument
references
structurerepetition
plagiarism
formattingword limit
Essay writing is hard!
critical
thinking
Research
skills
Creative
writing
3.
4. Solution
Software for
writing essays=
Teaches best practices in academia
Citation suggestion
Structure feedback
Word count adjustment
Plagiarism detection
Essay wizard & mind mapping
7. Business model
Money
Services
Universities
Free users
Premium users
Yearly subscription
Volume license
Full toolbox features
Branding
Free reference suggestion
Limited usage
Full toolbox features
Native client & plug-in
Subscription: month,
quarter, year
Conversion
8. Core Team
• Brian
• Computer Science (University of Edinburgh)
• Expert software engineer and cited
researcher, 8 years at BAE Systems
• Daniel
• BA Linguistics, experienced
programmer
• MSc in Natural Language Processing (Distinction),
University of Edinburgh
• PhD Natural Language Interfaces for Robots
• Pietro
• BA Social Anthropology , MA Documentary Films,
working as freelance filmmaker (Google)
• Experienced educator, teaching essay writing
Editor's Notes
There are over 25 million university students in the English speaking world. These students have to write a number of essays every year, together with dissertations and theses.
But academic writing is a craft that takes time and painful practice to acquire.
Think of finding the right references and organising them, structuring your argument, keeping paragraph structure, avoiding repetition, avoiding plagiarism, dealing with formatting and all of this while keeping to the word limit.
These are non-trivial yet tedious, mechanical jobs that stand in the way of creativity and critical thinking.
For the student, this means the process is full of obstacles, which leads to frustration. This in turn leads to problems for the universities: higher rates of cheating and plagiarism, together with a lower quality of written work.
To illustrate this, breaking news: here is an article from The Independent earlier this year. Some 16000 cases in 2011 alone, and mark the text I highlighted: students were caught paying private firms to write essays for them. If you go to Google and type “buy essay”, you will find tens if not hundreds of companies that make high profits from this activity.
Our solution to this is scholarly, which simply put is software to help students write essays. So what does Scholarly do? well first of all we have been developing a citation search technology which finds the most relevant and high quality references based on the actual text of the essay, essentially saving you hours of googling. Alongside this we are developing a number of tools to help students with each stage of the essay writing process, this includes feedback on essay structure based on similar essays, automatically adjusting word counts, to help students stay within the word limit, plagiarism detection and providing citation suggestions actually within the essays themselves. We see scholarly as a toolbox that not only helps simplify and improve the quality of essays but also teaches best practices in academic writing.
But do people actually want this? Well, we went out and asked.
These are the results of a survey we ran a while back, where we asked students what they found most difficult when writing an essay. This informed our choice of Minimum Viable Product.
But the most important source of knowledge about our users comes from individual interviews. We have spoken to more than 40 students by now and their response never fails to be enthusiastic. We always get the “wow moment”. Everyone wants to try our product and keeps enquiring about it afterwards.
"Can I try it? I have this massive essay coming up"
To which we say "Well, are you willing to pay for it?"
About a third of them say yes, and a further third say yes if it was for their dissertation of thesis.
And finally, what do universities think of this? We have had very promising contacts with the University of Plymouth. The people in the Learning Support and Learning Development department are very enthusiastic about trying out the software with students, and 2 lecturers have agreed to hosting in-class demonstrations and getting their students to try our software. Based on this and our previous contacts with the University of Edinburgh, it is clear our lead customer will be teaching universities like Plymouth.
So, to understand how scholarly fits into the existing educational market place, we performed a market analysis of tools that students currently use to write essays. Some of these are shown here, from conventional document writing software such as microsoft word through to specialised bibliography management tools like Mendeley. We then mapped our feature roadmap to the features provided by these tools. This first part shown here is our minimal viable product and as you can see although reference search is covered by a number of tools, providing suggestions and abstracts is unique to scholarly. As we then move down our development roadmap the additional features that we intend to develop which are unique are highlighted in green. These will essentially constitute our premium offering. So as you can see, by focusing on services directly related to academic writing, scholarly will provide a tailored experience in essay writing that not one competitor comes close to providing.
We are going to operate a dual business model:
For institutions, we have a licensing model, whereby universities, their schools and departments buy volume licenses for yearly subscriptions that give their students and researchers full premium access to all the features in our toolbox, and we will offer branding and customization.
For individuals we have a freemium model, where free users will have access to a restricted feature set, initially just reference suggestion, and limited usage.
Premium users will pay a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription and get access to the full feature set, including our native client.
