Australian education technology start-up Quizling is getting set to expand to the US, having scored a coveted spot in the SXSWedu Launch competition, which it hopes will help catapult it onto the world stage.
Founded by teachers Dion Oxley and Damien Trask in July 2014, the start-up was born out of a desire to create digital quizzes for their classes. They soon found there was no easy way to do it and track students' progress.
The company, which already counts a range of museums including the National Sports Museum and National Gallery of Australia as customers and has thousands of users in a range of countries such as Turkey, Portugal, the US, UK and France, will compete alongside nine other start-ups at SXSW, all of which are from the US.
"In Australia we have about 2500 museums, in the US there are around 35,000. They have more museums than Starbucks," Ms Oxley said. "So for us it's a great chance to get involved with some of the US museums and their collections and possibly schools."
The Quizling app lets museums create branded educational quizzes for a subscription fee and provides them with analytics around the engagement with the quizzes and content. Targeting museums in the outset has given Quizling exposure to many schools which regularly undertake field trips to museums.
In February the start-up is also expanding to schools, providing teachers with a way to digitise their classroom tests, providing students with automatic feedback and eliminating the need to mark multiple choice tests.
The app is free to download for teachers and students, but schools will pay a subscription fee to be able to monitor how their students are performing.
Immediate feedback
"Having been teachers ourselves we knew about being time poor. Quizzes are more fun and students get immediate feedback and we've noticed that students often take them two or three times to see their improvement," Ms Oxley said.
"Teachers can look onto the portal and see from the website who is doing what quizzes and what they're getting right and wrong. Some of the best learning also happens when kids teach themselves... so they can create their own true or false or multiple choice quizzes and then share them through the app or on social media."
To make it to the final 10 of the SXSWedu Launch competition Quizling had to demonstrate creativity, a different approach to education, innovation and how it was going to be an international product.
If it wins the competition, it gets a small sum of $US2500, but the start-ups aren't there for the money, they come for the exposure to the community of about 14,000 inventors, industry representatives and fellow entrepreneurs that attend the education component of the festival.
The company has already raised $300,000 from Sydney Angels, Canberra Angels and its sidecar fund. It's raising an additional $500,000, and the original investors have already committed to join this round as well.
Once it expands to the US, it also has plans to do a larger raise and attract foreign investors, before taking the app to other Western markets.
"Looking at past winners and finalists, they've been able to raise huge amounts of money on the back of being a part of SXSW," Ms Oxley said.
The biggest success story to emerge from SXSW has been Twitter, which took off after appearing at the festival in 2007. Location check-in app Foursquare also presented at the festival in its early days.
