The Financial Times reviews SmartUp, a London-based technology venture, backed by some of the UK’s most successful digital start-up founders, whose stated aim is “disruption” of the business education market.
SmartUp’s business plan is compared to a “BuzzFeed for learning.”
“Another key to SmartUp’s business plan is the idea that playing games is a better way of teaching than forcing students to learn MBA case studies by rote. This ‘gamification’ of activities is already widely used by companies in marketing campaigns to increase customer engagement, as well as in the education market more generally.”
“Business schools have also been trying to reorganize the way they deliver their course material, most widely through the use of massive open online courses (Moocs), which enable seminars and case studies to be accessed on an iPad. Creation of such courses is a growth industry among business schools and universities, seeing the potential to reach a much greater audience than those who study on a campus.”
Google’s recent launch of an app-based gamification teaching service, Primer, aimed at teaching start-ups the fundamentals of marketing is seen as a competitor to SmartUp.