Educational startup Grockit is expanding its reach today from social learning to streaming video. The startup has launched Grockit TV, a set of live courses to supplement its SAT and GMAT test prep service.
The courses are streamed live and also available as archives, but to encourage students to watch the live stream together (where they can interact via chat), the live stream of the course is free. But if students want to download a course or re-stream it, students will get all 20 hours worth of test prep and college admissions videos for $99. Best of all, Grockit CEO Farb Nivi is one of the teachers (he is a former Princeton Reviews national teacher of the year). The first 50 readers to use the promotion code “techcrunchlove” will get a free Grockit TV video course plus its premium online adaptive test prep.
Grockit has been quietly testing a few GMAT courses, and plans to stream its first SAT session on October 10. Founder Farb Nivi is excited about the potential to bring in more new students to Grockit through social marketing. Students can log in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts and invite their friends on Facebook or Twitter to come join them (online study session!). In the tests so far, some students are “bringing in double digit numbers of people to Grockit per single share,” says Nivi.
Grockit has tiptoed into video last June when it began to include YouTube Edu videos into its courses, but this goes a step further. And it won’t stop with test and college admissions prep videos. “We’ve got plans for Grockit TV content beyond test prep” says Nivi, “including K12 academic classes and programming for parents and students and teachers.”
Grockit is on a roll. Yesterday, it became the first educational app on the Google Apps Marketplace. Nivi just hired a CEO from Google, and closed a $7 million B round last May.
