Ivory Coast ed-tech startup has made its online e-learning course building platform publicly available, allowing users to build online educational pages in less than one minute.
Etudesk is a web application that helps academic institutions, organisations and companies to set up their online learning programmes easily and at low cost.
Customers can set up their own private or public learning platform in less than one minute, create full courses complete with video, quizzes and activities, and track the progress of their learners and talk to them through discussion channels.
Chief executive officer (CEO) Lamine Barro first started work on an ed-tech project in 2013, which allowed students to connect with each other and share courses and notes. It was a reasonable success, gaining 8,000 users, but never managed to find a sustainable business model.
After obtaining feedback, Barro realised universities and other learning institutions were lacking the technical skills to create online learning platforms. He started working on Etudesk in November 2015, with the company named winner of the Seedstars World competition in Abidjan last year.
“We’ve bootstrapped the company development and I have personally funded the whole MVP and the company incorporation,” he said. “We have also earned many in-kind prizes during our acceleration by The Founder Institute.”
Since it launched officially early last month, Etudesk has acquired 13 organisations representing more than 60,000 learners.
“We are in the LMS Market, which generated up to US$4 billion worldwide last year. We are focused on organisations in emerging markets, where only three per cent of them are using these new tools,” Barro said.
The startup’s revenue model is based on subscriptions, with Etudesk offering a 50 per cent discount to schools, universities, NGOs and associations.
