Digital transformation
Maplesoft spinoff DigitalEd has edge teaching math online
Maplesoft spinoff tackling $1-billion market
WATERLOO — There is a new player in the growing market for online education, and it has hundreds of customers around the world just months after it launched.
DigitalEd was recently spun out of Maplesoft, a company founded in 1988 by two University of Waterloo math professors. At the core of Maplesoft’s software is a computational engine that does symbolic math for engineers, scientists and other researchers. The company, founded as Waterloo Maple, also developed software for teaching math and assessing the progress of students.
Essentially, the company was serving two markets — one for professionals and one for education, said chief executive officer Jim Cooper.
Maplesoft is owned by Cybernet Systems Co. Ltd. of Japan. Two years ago, Cybernet asked Cooper to see if he could find investors to support a spinoff company with a single focus — teaching math online. Cooper lined up three investors and became aware of a $1 billion market for students attending their first year of college or university. When high schools and grad schools are included, the market is even larger.
DigitalEd, with a focus on science, technology, engineering and math, wants to improve math education online for students around the world, and reduce the cost of education, says Cooper.
“How can we produce better tools to have better online education?” he asks.
Maplesoft, which will incubate the new company during its first year, believes the answer is to use the symbolic computation engine that is at the core of Maplesoft’s platform.
“The use of the symbolic math engine makes it unique,” says Cooper. “The symbolic math engine that Waterloo Maple spent 30 years developing is our unique competitive advantage.”
Within months of launching, DigitalEd had 287 schools signed up. Most are in North America and Europe. Schools in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia also are using the software.
The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology uses the software to teach calculus to biologists and machine builders. The software can be changed to fit different applications.
“Their use of digital assets is off the charts,” says Cooper.
The University of Waterloo is a large user of the software.
“They have developed material in the platform they share for free with high schools across the country,” says Cooper.
DigitalEd’s software is called Mobius. It randomly changes the numbers in questions so every student has to do the work. It marks the work right away so students know how they are doing. It generates huge amounts of data and analytics, creating opportunities to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to online education for math, says Cooper.
“It will be a very interesting and exciting time to see where this will go,” he says.
Not all students learn in the same ways. Some are more visual, others need lots of repetition and others need easier questions at first to build up their confidence. Mobius will differentiate among the learning styles and change its questions accordingly. If a lot of students are struggling with a section of the curriculum, the instructor will know almost in real time and can focus on that particular area.
There are three parts to the platform. Mobius Assessment is for quizzes and assignments; Mobius Courseware provides more methods for teaching online; and Mobius Placement assesses all the students in a new class, finds their weaknesses and tailors curriculum to help them improve in those areas.
Maplesoft employed about 120 people prior to the launch of DigitalEd. When DigitalEd was launched, 45 went with the new company, and 10 more have been hired since, including a chief operating officer. It has a separate board of directors from Maplesoft.
The DigitalEd team is housed in a separate offices in the Maplesoft building on Kumpf Drive. By year’s end Cooper, CEO for both companies, wants DigitalEd housed in a separate building.
This week, he is in China for meetings with education officials.
“Our goal is to massively expand the customer base, and to make it almost inconceivable to have online math courses that do not use Mobius,” he says.
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