Kudu

About the offering

Growing college enrollments, rising textbook prices, and demand for modern teaching methods create an investment opportunity for affordable digital textbook-replacement products. By 2025, college enrollments are expected to rise by 15% as compared to year 2014.i Textbook prices have risen four times the rate of inflation over the past ten years. Supplemental resources have also increased in price drastically with the use of expensive, single-use “access codes.”ii Furthermore, the cost of distance courses can be more expensive than traditional on-campus courses due to added fees.iii The market for low-cost learning materials is likely to remain strong even if the economy slows down, because, in times of recession, college enrollments increase,iv while falling incomes increase the demand for cost-cutting solutions. Higher education, an industry that has traditionally used physical tools to enrich learning, has struggled to integrate interactive online resources in a cost-effective way. Many university instructors have not yet adopted active e-learning alternatives to traditional teaching techniques. A 2017 survey conducted by EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research found that a majority of professors believe that they could improve efficacy by incorporating digital technologies into courses, but almost half of those surveyed were “unaware or unconvinced” that online learning was superior to traditional methods.v A possible explanation for this discrepancy and a lack of adoption of progressive teaching techniques may be that university professors at research universities, who gain promotion and tenure based more on research than teaching success,vi are not sufficiently incentivized to deploy e-learning tools. Kudu, a California-based education technology company, has built a customizable higher education platform to help professors save time and resources by virtualizing many traditional course aspects, while utilizing existing technology, such as mobile devices and video sharing, to help engage students with various compelling modes of learning. The company is also developing a library of pre-built course content that aims to replace textbooks and other commonly used learning tools. Kudu believes the weakness of many existing e-learning supplements is in their lack of flexibility, low effectiveness, and in the heavy investment of time that they require from an instructor. Kudu creates its own content and integrates it in the platform that users find effective and easy to use.

FAQ