Every school night, high school students in the US spend millions of hours completing their math homework. They often get stuck, and have few resources to turn to. Their parents struggle to help them with the newest “new math,” their textbooks further confound them, and online resources are often difficult to find and just plain confusing. What these students lack is a friendly, knowledgeable teacher who can explain math concepts 24/7. Brightstorm, the leading provider of online learning services to high school students, has launched just such a solution—Free Math Help.
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“The whole purpose of this is for that student who goes home, is working on their homework assignment, and for some reason they’re just not getting it,” says Brian McCall, Brightstorm’
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Brightstorm focuses heavily on content quality, to ensure that every user has a positive learning experience. Quality includes both video production values and great teaching. Brightstorm films its videos in high-definition, and uses a video player to automatically adjust the quality of the video to the user’s bandwidth. Brightstorm picked its initial math help teachers after an extensive interview process that identified teachers who both know their subjects deeply, and are especially engaging on camera. The result—four great teachers covering every topic from Algebra 1 through Precalculus (Calculus will be launched during the school year).
“Before this program was started, it would have been hard to find a site that was reasonably priced on which you could find everything that you needed. Now, with Brightstorm’
Brightstorm also focused on comprehensiveness. With over 1,800 free math help videos, the offering is designed to meet the needs of every one of those millions of students completing their homework each school night.
“Brightstorm math help really covers everything from Algebra to Precalculus,”
With such a large library of free math help topics, user-friendly search functionality becomes critical to a positive customer experience. Brightstorm uses cutting-edge search functionality to display the most relevant search results, and allow users to preview math topics from the search interface itself, so that users can quickly find the video that meets their needs.
“Creating great math videos is only half the battle,” says Mr. Marshall. “Content is only good if the learner can find it quickly, so user-friendly search and browse have been a major focus for Brightstorm math help.”
All this adds up to a solution designed to be ultra-convenient for the user who needs just-in-time math help—the exact explanation they need, when and where they need it.
“It’s kind of like your back-pocket math teacher, who can explain those difficult concepts to you.” says Alissa Fong, Brightstorm’
Brightstorm also helps students help each other. If a student has questions about a video, she can enter the question in Brightstorm Answers, and members of the Brightstorm community can respond. And, of course, students can easily share the free math help videos with links to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and email.
“Learning with our great teacher videos is only the beginning,” says Mr. Marshall. “Ultimately, Brightstorm’
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