Scholarly - Dotforge 2013 Spring
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The document discusses the challenges of essay writing and proposes a software solution to help with the process. It outlines obstacles students face like plagiarism, structure, and formatting. The proposed software would provide tools like citation suggestions, structure feedback, plagiarism detection, and mind mapping to teach best practices and make writing easier. It compares the solution to existing competitors and describes a business model of free and premium subscriptions to universities and individuals. In the end, it introduces the core team developing the software.
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Scholarly - Dotforge 2013 Spring
- 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
- 4. Solution Software for writing essays= Teaches best practices in academia Citation suggestion Structure feedback Word count adjustment Plagiarism detection Essay wizard & mind mapping
- 6. Competitors Scholarly Grammarly Mendeley,endNote GoogleScholar MicrosoftAcademic MicrosoftWord GoogleDocs Scrivener Inspiration9& Rationale Reference search Reference suggestion Shows abstracts for results Reference management Contextual citation suggestion Essay wizard & guide Word length adjustment Word plug-in Structure checking Plagiarism check Mind mapping Grammar checking dotforge v
- 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.