Virtuosity

Inspiration:

We always want to learn something at some point of time that may not be related to our academics. However, the best teachers are not always available, and the courses are not very affordable. So, you can teach a skill you know to learn a skill you want.

What it does

The app enables people to teach a skill to earn credits that they can use to learn a skill. And it would connect a teacher to a student automatically, rather than sending manual connection requests which becomes intensive and discouraging.

REQUEST: Request the skill or service you need
MATCHING: The app will identify the “teachers” according to the skill and automatically informed those “teachers” immediately.
PAIRING: When one of the “teachers” responses, the request is close and deal forms.
LEARNING: Meet online/offline to learn the skills
RATING AND CREDITING: “Teacher” will get credit and rating after teaching session.

How we built it

We haven't build the application yet, but have created a prototype, and have come up with an algorithm to rate people, and an idea of how we would be matching people automatically.

Challenges we ran into

Already existing applications in the market. There are quite a few places where we differ, for example transitive learning rather than just paired learning and automatic matching. How to build a large users base: one thought based on mature social network to find users? How to avoid offline fraud ? How to make this teaching cycle more efficient that everyone can get immediate teaching?

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We created a prototype and came up with an algorithm to generate initial ratings for people to encourage experts to join, and are focusing on the idea of allowing people learning new skills for free.

What we learned:

People want to learn new skills from people, but are discouraged by the lack of responses, or too many spam requests. There are quite a few skill exchanging websites available, but they focus on paired learning, that is, two people connecting to exchange their skills with each other.