CogBooks raises $2.8M for more adaptive, individualized education

Ed tech business CogBooks has raised $2.8 million (£1.75 million) to bring adaptive learning to the masses.

The Edinburgh-based platform personalizes learning on a student-by-student basis in real time in order to improve learning outcomes and retention. It is mostly used by higher-education institutions and for corporate training.

The investment has been led by Nesta Impact Investments, DC Thomson Ventures and Scottish Investment Bank.

Next-generation learning

CogBooks describes itself as a “systematic data-driven approach” to online education.

The platform lets educators use their existing materials to build learning resources such as revision materials and tests.

It provides detailed data at every point of the learning process so that a profile can be built for each user and ultimately each user can be trained more effectively.

It is currently being used by Edinburgh University and OCR, one of the UK’s largest exam boards, among others.

CEO Jim Thompson believes the investment can help the company “provide improved learning experiences for more and more students”.

Throughout the world, we face the problem of how to make the highest quality education available to everyone.

We believe that a new generation of learning technologies, of which CogBooks is an example, can help to solve this problem.

DC Thomson Ventures and Nesta Impact Investments are the investment arms of Beano-publisher DC Thomson and the charity Nesta UK respectively.

The former is also one of the organizations behind IDEALondon, the Shoreditch-based innovation center.

This story originally appeared on Tech City News. Copyright 2014