About Us
The university has changed little since the days of Gutenberg. Students, however, have! The Internet has become an integral part of our lives. Today, we share ideas online. We socialise online. We learn online. Everyday, everywhere – except in the classroom. There, the laws of Gutenberg's Galaxy still prevail. Our universities are still working with "blackboards". It is time for a digital revolution on campus.
Let us bring the campus experience online!
It is sadly ironic that the transformative potential of the Internet remains under-utilized by the very institution that spawned it. As we move further into the digital age, it is becoming clear that the walled-in software solutions universities use today are glaringly outdated. Against this grain, we have built an online workspace for faculty and students that demonstrates how digital infrastructure improves teaching and learning. Since our inception as a university spin-off, 11,000 faculty members and students have used the beta-version of iversity. We officially launched the site last fall.
iversity allows faculty...- to easily set up a course website, to upload teaching materials and engage their students;
- to share links, references and general observations in research groups without the hassle of setting up a content management system or starting and promoting a blog;
- to announce conferences, guest lectures or calls for papers.
- to interact with course materials right where they already spend most of their time: online;
- to work together with classmates on assignments (e.g. social reading, collaborative writing);
- to build an archive of learning materials and problem-related discussions in the cloud.
Our aim is not to replace the university or the academics that work there. Our aim is to empower them.
What’s different?
Our aspiration is to become the course management platform of choice for instructors and students around the globe. But of course, iversity’s cutting-edge infrastructure can also be deployed for international research projects.
Work is something you do rather than somewhere you go. With this maxim in mind, iversity has designed a cloud-based service that fosters limitless collaboration among academics worldwide. Faculty are no longer forced to work with the outdated software in use at their institution. Instead, they can sign up on an individual basis. Oh, and the best part: it’s free.
Who are we?
iversity is developed by an interdisciplinary and international team of 20 young graduates (iversity.org/pages/team). Members of the team have studied at universities such as Cambridge, Columbia, Duke, Humboldt, Princeton, the Sorbonne, the Freie Universität Berlin and the National University of Singapore. Together they want to build a learning infrastructure for the digital age.
Following an EXIST-Founder Scholarship from the German Federal Ministry of Science and Technology, iversity received more than 1 million Euros in funding from the BFB Frühphasenfonds Brandenburg (EU 75% / Brandenburg 25%) and bmp media investors in July 2011.