Holiday season stats

Hypocampus is a site powered by Cortexio.

Last Christmas, 2018, Hypocampus had recently added a paywall with subscription model. The team had done some calculations on monthly usage to estimate how many people would be converted to paying customers. But there were still uncertainties.

The outcome was far better than expected and by Christmas it was clear that the number of users and time spent studying wasn’t greatly affected.

At Christmas eve, 24th of December, which is when it’s celebrated in Sweden, 385 medical students logged in to study. Here is a chart from Google Analytics describing when people logged on:

Hypocampus usage statistics from Christmas eve 2018.

Reimagine Education Conference & Awards 19

Last week Cortexio attended the Reimagine Education conference in London, UK. After three days of meetings, workshops and presentations we are exhausted and even more confident in our product.

Hampus Ivert watching intently

As part of the AWS Edstart program Hampus Ivert and Petter Sjöstrand from Cortexio were invited to the Reimagine Education conference 8-10 december 2019.

Were there any presentation that stood out?

Petter: I really liked the D-notation presentation (https://dnotation.com/). Apart from that the panel debate on securing funding provided valuable insights.

…both investors and future partners were impressed with our product

Petter Sjöstrand, Partner Account Manager

What did people think of Cortexio?

Petter: Before attending the conference we knew the value that Cortexio can bring to customers. Our main concern was getting the message across. But we must have done something right, since both investors and future partners seemed impressed with our product. 🙂

What do you take with you from the conference?

Petter: A ton of new contacts/partners and that Cortexio is very well positioned in B2C and B2B market.


Petter, Reimagining the muffin, 2019

Thanks to all attending and the organisers Wharton-QS for a great event!

Failing 15% is the best way to learn

In a new study by Wilson, R.C., Shenhav, A., Straccia, M. et al.  they have found a sweet spot, where the learning is neither too easy nor too difficult. This sweet spot is when the student fails about 15% at the time.

It also ties in to a book we’ve read recently at Cortexio, Hooked by Nir Eyal, where the Hooked model explains how modern software is built to increase user interaction. By giving the user (or student) a variable reward the chances of the user returning to the application is much greater. (This is also why gambling can be such an addiction).

As a teacher it can seem like a daunting job to create individual learning paths for all students where they all have a 85% success rate.

This is why adaptive learning systems like Cortexio are so powerful. Cortexio creates an unique learning path for each student based on their performance where we aim at a 85% success rate.

More about our adaptive learning algorithms will be described in coming posts.

Wilson, R.C., Shenhav, A., Straccia, M. et al. The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning. Nat Commun 10, 4646 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41467-019-12552-4

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12552-4