You can imagine how unique a situation it is to be in a place where you can sit down, give a talk for five minutes, and when you’re done 30 of your peers have given feedback.
Rewind to your college days. No, not the part where you debated between smoking weed and going to class, decided on both, then smoked too much weed and forgot you had class. Let’s rewind to the days of being required to take a public speaking course, where you hopefully scratched and clawed your way to a semi-respectable grade. Now, the process of grading presenters has always been time-consuming and difficult: you give a speech, everybody fills out forms on how good or bad you were, the teacher receives these forms and then relays the feedback to you. It’s not the worst way to run a class, but in this vast and limitless age of technology, it definitely isn’t the best.
So what is? A platform that uses interactive software for online video assessment, where users can leave real-time feedback on each presentation as it’s happening. It’s easy, affordable, and most importantly, accelerates the learning process of users everywhere.
“GoReact is an online video tool where students can record themselves or be recorded in class, then teachers and peers can give time-coded feedback,” Chad Jardine, Head of Marketing at GoReact, said. “The video really gives them awareness of what they look like objectively and the feedback gives that mentoring and coaching, helping their skill development go a lot faster.”
Designed to give users a more complete and modern experience, GoReact was originally created specifically for the above scenario: students presenting in class, being graded by teachers and peers. As is sometimes the case in life, time and circumstance have helped alter GoReact into what it is today.
“We started in education technology, but we’re getting a lot of demand from professional development people, sales training people, one of our clients is Virgin America, they use GoReact to train their flight attendants,” Jardine said. “We’ve also kind of branched out in terms of our discipline. So where we started out in communication and public speaking, probably our biggest category is language training, especially sign language training.”
No worrying about uploading videos to YouTube, or praying to the heavens that you remembered to transfer your video presentation file onto a flash drive. All users are required to do is sign into GoReact’s cloud-based platform and start recording with a webcam. Video is stored online and peers are allowed to place time-coded comments within the video — when you re-watch the presentation, comments pop up at the exact time they were written.
“You can imagine how unique a situation it is to be in a place where you can sit down, give a talk for five minutes, and when you’re done 30 of your peers have given feedback,” Jardine said.” It really helps students advance. Once they get into it and get feedback, the students really recognize how it catapults their learning.”
Based in Orem, GoReact is entering their third year of life on the shoulders of 17 employees. What started as a platform strictly for student/teacher presentations has now broadened to encompass sales training, performing arts, and law enforcement, with plans to grow things even further down the road.
“We’ve been moving along at about 400 percent year-over-year growth for the three years we’ve been going,” Jardine said. “We service about 130 universities, we have over 4,500 students who have submitted videos on the system, and combined there is about a half million videos that students have uploaded.”
The beauty of technology is in the process of creation. You set out to create one thing and because technology offers so many unforeseen options, rarely end up in the place you originally set out to conquer. GoReact was created for students, continues to serve students, but also recognizes the need for easy online video presentation platform extends beyond students.
At their core, GoReact remains a tech company, and that means the creation process never stops.
“That’s one of the advantages of technology,” Jardine said. “Technology should be making education cheaper, solving problems, and make it easier and less expensive for students.”
Published 5/27/2015
