University undergraduate students have joined forces to launch their own online startup company, StudyCloud. The website is a free educational productivity application that is geared towards college students. By providing users with course-specific open forums, the StudyCloud founders hope to enhance and simplify the classroom experience.

“We make it easy for students to ask and answer each other’s questions and give feedback as to which answers are the best,” said Akash Agarwal, vice president of marketing and sophomore in Engineering. “We also make it easy for students and professors to share course material, like outside reading and notes among all the users in a course.”

In addition to students, the startup is also trying to appeal to University teaching assistants.

“TAs have a lot of face time with their students, and students email their TAs all the time,” said Ravi Pilla, CEO and junior in Engineering. “We think that, that is where TAs can get a lot of benefit because they will not have to answer a ton of emails, and the student will benefit because everything that the TA has will be in one place.”

StudyCloud has been online for less than a month and is currently in heavy developmental stages. Andrew Lee, CTO and junior in Engineering, said now is the time when users are highly influential in product design.

“It really depends on what we get from our customer feedback from this summer,” Lee said. “Right now, it’s just more of adding features, it’s not going to be versioned specifically — features will be added in the coming weeks.”

Instead of releasing a user survey, the company’s creators asked those close to the founders to join a special course on the website and act as “super users.”

“Their goal is to tell us what they like because otherwise you don’t get any gradient in the opinion of your product,” said Agarwal. “People will either really hate something or really love something — right now we can get the shades of gray in between (with surveys).”

The founders decided to create StudyCloud out of their dissatisfaction with University-endorsed programs like Blackboard and Moodle. Pilla said the University-endorsed learning tools don’t allow students to efficiently collaborate.

“If you look at something like UIUC open course groups on Facebook, you’ll see that every single course has some sort of Facebook group,” Pilla said. “The tools that are being mandated by the professors and higher-up administrators may not suffice the needs of the actual users: the students.”

StudyCloud currently offers only four features: chat, event, post, and question.

“You see what people really need by adding stuff, not just adding everything and then taking away what they don’t need,” said Agarwal. “That’s how you learn what they want.”

Although the version has been up and running for only about a month, StudyCloud is already adapting to unexpected feedback regarding user login through Facebook.

“We definitely want to wean off Facebook as soon as possible,” Lee said. “We figured that every college student pretty much has a Facebook so it would be easy for them to log in, but actually what we found was that users prefer to create an account.”

In the future, there will be an option for users to employ all StudyCloud social features by connecting to their Facebook accounts. 

The next major redesign of StudyCloud is scheduled for fall. 

Amaya can be reached at amadams4 @dailyillini.com.