Transforming Education with Class

Class Technologies Inc. adds teaching and learning tools to Zoom and makes the virtual classroom feel like a real classroom. It helps teachers take attendance, hand out assignments, give a quiz or test, grade work, proctor exams, talk one-on-one with students and more.

In COVID, millions of academic and professional students struggled online and we can agree, education has been changed forever. Class Technologies founded Class to build a connected hybrid environment to maximize student engagement in the classroom, create enhanced learning opportunities for students and families, and transform the workplace with empowered training to boost employee engagement and learning.

Opportunity

In 2020, nobody knew the challenges we would face when the Coronavirus pandemic forced us to switch from face-to-face interaction to an almost exclusive online experience. One of the most affected domains was education, where the existing tools for online interactions were not entirely serving the needs of teachers and students. Class Technologies saw the need to develop a new learning and collaboration tool – bringing the physical learning experience to the digital space across multiple platforms.

Solution

With a very limited timeline, 3Pillar partnered with Class Technologies to build a new tool for virtual teaching and learning based on the Zoom Software Development Kit. 3Pillar quickly assembled globally distributed teams to contribute to four different workstreams including MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS. This new technology would allow teachers to create a connected virtual or hybrid environment to maximize student engagement in the classroom.

While the Windows, Android and iOS teams were just laying the foundation of their respective product variants, the MacOS product was the flagship of Class Technologies. The MacOs Product was rapidly beta-released, helping its partners speed up their processes and ensuring its end-customers that the product would serve their needs for a trusted, stable, and powerful online education tool.

Outcome

In less than 7 months of working together, with team members globally distributed, 3Pillar helped Class partners reach beta phases for the variants for Windows, iOS and Android (including support for ChromeBooks), and general availability for the MacOS Product. In two more months, all work streams were generally available for all targeted operating systems, with an unmatched feature set in the e-learning market. 3Pillar helped Class build a product that served new and existing customers and that they could confidently show to investors to gain integral investor support.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has sped up the adoption of online learning by approximately 5-10 years, and pushed almost every K-12 and higher-ed institution to now use and rely on synchronous online learning. We had a great idea, but needed a partner to get us off the ground, and quickly. With 3Pillar, we drove from idea to beta launch in only 7 weeks and GA launch in 4 months, helping us get our product into the hands of educators who so desperately needed it to inspire and teach their students in this new virtual environment.”

Michael Chasen
CEO
Class Technologies