Cramster.com offers online tutoring to help students with homework or prepare for exams.
"Think of it as a study community," said Rob Angarita, co-founder and president of Cramster. "We try to replicate getting together with friends and classmates in a study group environment. Normally you would discuss your homework, prepare for an exam or try to get a burning question answered. That's what we do on Cramster."
If a student gets stuck on the a problem, he/she can go on the Web site to get help at any time.
"If they are stuck on a problem, they can go to a Cramster study group that's available," Angarita said. "Whether it's late at night or you don't have access to a study group or you can't make it physically, you can just get to your computer and go on-line and understand how to tackle a problem."
Students can answer other student's questions, earning Karma points. Students can redeem these points for gifts like an iPod, Xbox or a gift certificate.
"It's like a reward system that we use in a sense, we provide an additional privilege to students who help other students," Angarita said. "Lets say in our community, you happen to know an easy problem that you see that needs help by another student. If you take the time to answer that kid's question, we give you karma points. It's a self-rewarding system."
Cramster.com also has subject matter experts to make sure the question gets answered.
"SME, is just a teacher or an educator who has either a master or a Ph.D. in that particular domain," Angarita said. "They kind of act as moderators. They're there to answer questions that don't get answered. Questions that don't get answered by the community."
Cramster has two different membership options: freemium and premium. Freemium is free, but users have limited access on the Web site, while premium cost $9.95 a month or $39.95 for an annual membership.
"In a freemium access, some of our context related to a textbook, we only give you half of it," Angarita said. "We'll give you free access to all the odds, but you have to be a premium access to see all the evens. The other aspect in our community when you want to ask questions, we give our premium access more priority. The message is routed in our back end and our logic works where a premium question is more likely to get answered first."
Cramster focuses on math, science and engineering; however, Cramster plans to expand to business subjects by August.
"We're very strong in physics," Angarita said. "We're very strong in all the undergraduate mathematics. We're growing in other areas, like chemistry and biology."
Will Toman can be reached at toman.7@osu.edu.
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