On Schoolhouse.world, education and connection go hand in hand. Tech makes it possible.

When in-person learning moved online for much of the world in 2020, Sal Khan noted that the popularity of his free learning platform, Khan Academy, jumped. But teachers and students couldn’t connect live. This gap prompted him to wonder: “What if we could connect people to each other, to help each other, to form communities?” 

The answer became the basis for a new tutoring platform, one that would redefine how learners of all ages access high-quality tutoring online. Sal partnered with Coda co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra, Mariah Olson, and Drew Bent to build Schoolhouse.world, which, five years later, has grown to a community of over 25,000 tutors and 164,000 learners from 180 countries. 

“The secret sauce of Schoolhouse.world is this human connection element. What we’re able to do is facilitate connection between students in this safe and authentic way,” said Matt Wu, president and chief operating officer of Schoolhouse.world.

How it works

From its initial offering of one-to-one tutoring sessions, Schoolhouse.world has grown in scope and scale. Its programs now include SAT Bootcamps and College Admissions Workshops, making these once-exclusive resources more accessible to students from all backgrounds. 

One student improved her SAT scores by 240 points, and another learned so much from her SAT prep sessions that she began tutoring as a way to give back to the community that helped her.

The organization’s newest program, Dialogues, provides a global forum for students to practice civil discourse and productive disagreement on a variety of topics. 

In thousands of connections happening on Schoolhouse.world, Zoom plays an essential role. 

The Zoom API helped the team create a customized and seamlessly integrated experience that was easy for everyone involved. Tutors can create sessions, and the Zoom API schedules the Zoom meeting and adds learners as registrants to the meeting automatically. Participants join their session directly from the Schoolhouse.world website. 

To support safety, privacy, and quality in education, meetings are recorded and automatically deleted after 30 days. Additional safety features include waiting rooms and the ability to eject a learner if they become disruptive. 

After the session ends, learners get sent back to the website, where they can rate their tutor based on the interaction and vice versa. Zoom’s transcript and chat data help Schoolhouse.world measure the quality of the sessions and how tutors can improve going forward.

In recent months, Schoolhouse.world has also introduced Zoom Phone across the organization. This enables the fully remote team to stay connected and provide greater support to parents and students who prefer to pick up the phone rather than go through a digital help desk.

AI enables human connection

As the organization has evolved, so has the world around it. Schoolhouse.world has embraced AI, knowing that it’s transforming education at a rapid clip and that students need to be equipped with the skills to use it effectively.

“With Zoom AI Companion, we recognized that this was a tool that we wanted to be much more integrated into the educational experience. So we asked ourselves, what would it look like to let tutors and learners be able to use it directly in their tutoring sessions? That was certainly a first,” Matt said.

Currently, AI Companion is available for learners and tutors to engage with in sessions. They can prompt it to “Catch me up” if they join a session late or ask questions about the session and have AI Companion respond in real time. Tutors also use AI Companion in sessions for ideas to make the experience more engaging and to access general tutoring tips. 

According to Matt, participants are asking AI Companion questions in over a hundred sessions a month on average. The organization also generates about 25,000 smart recordings per month, which use AI to break the session into easy-to-navigate chapters, identify key points from the discussion, and list action items for attendees.

Listening to tutors’ feedback is important to the Schoolhouse.world team, and Matt says they’ve been closely monitoring the rollout of AI features to measure comfort levels and impact.

“When we rolled out AI Companion, we did some custom announcements explaining what it was, how it could be used. But we also put together a focus group of tutors who were interested in trying to leverage it throughout their sessions, and we use that as an ongoing pulse of how they are getting the most out of AI Companion, where they are seeing the most opportunities and the most benefits.”

Matt hopes to explore how his team can continue supporting tutors by providing more training on how to use AI Companion in their sessions. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity to help us get higher utilization and efficacy from it.”

A social network for good

Schoolhouse.world’s impact has been broad, spanning continents and cultures. Participating students report that they’ve improved their SAT scores, gained confidence in subjects they once struggled with, and learned to listen and share their ideas through the Dialogues program.

Perhaps most importantly, Schoolhouse.world continues to grow and succeed as learners become tutors themselves. It’s these human connections that Matt believes makes Schoolhouse.world unique, and that he wants to continue to foster.

“In this age of AI, information is everywhere, so the most important thing that we’re getting out of education is these human connections — whether it’s the encouragement of a tutor, the recognition of mastery, or the belonging that folks feel as they’re part of this broader community,” he said.

And they’ll keep building on Zoom. According to Matt, several Zoom features are in the works that will help them better facilitate courses and bring people together in a more safe and secure way, such as recording in breakout rooms and advanced chat moderation capabilities. 

“The idea that if you have a phone and an internet connection, that you can get free tutoring, is just an incredibly powerful thing that Zoom is helping to enable,” he said.

Disclosure: While Schoolhouse.world receives product donations from Zoom Cares, those donations are not connected to, nor provided in exchange for this story. Read more about our donations to Schoolhouse.world on our Zoom Cares webpage.