The app is helping to transform the edtech industry.
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As co-founder of the app TeachFX, Berk Çoker is helping to transform the edtech industry, and was recognized for his work by making the Forbes 30 under 30 list. TeachFX incorporates AI technology to help teachers learn and grow in their profession by promoting frequent reflections. The app allows teachers to record their lessons so that the learning dynamics in the class, such as diversity of participation or open-ended questions, can be identified by the app.
Çoker likens TeachFX to an instructional coach sitting in class and providing feedback to the teacher privately: “Research shows that objective feedback and regular coaching help teachers improve, but are often out of reach. Our solution to this challenge is to provide teachers with frequent, job-embedded feedback using artificial intelligence, and give teachers a space for reflection, so they can lead their own learning. Teachers know their students the best and are the biggest leverage points in the system, and we could be leveraging teachers' knowledge and expertise much more than we currently do.”
Çoker met his co-founder at a mixer he himself was organizing for the Social Innovation Club at Stanford. His co-founder had taught for two years at the high school level and had a lot of entrepreneurial ideas about the teacher development space: “The final version of the idea for TeachFX came about when we started working together. Next thing you know, we had joined an incubator and had raised our seed round funding.”
The results are amazing thus far: “This year, we’ve been working with over 100 schools and districts across the US and have a few state-wide partnerships. Teachers who use TeachFX increase the amount of student talk in their classroom by about 40%. We recently also had a research group out of Stanford, Harvard and the University of Maryland do a large-scale randomized control trial on one of the insights that's in our app. The findings show that not only did the teachers increase their use of pedagogical uptake of building on student contributions by 24%, but students rated the course higher, they turned in more assignments and had higher academic achievement. We were awarded a grant from Gates Foundation to promote more research on our work, and also had a new investment round, including investments from Reach Capital and Pearson.”
Çoker states working on TeachFX for the past five years has given him a different lens and a whole other level of appreciation for the hard work that all the teachers at Robert College put in: “I’d like to give a huge thank you to Ms. Şamlı, who took me under her wings when I joined the theater company my prep year, and allowed me to learn and grow throughout high school in ways that I only understand today, challenging me as an actor with wide range of roles in plays, and of course in her brilliant Modern Drama class. Who could have known that years later when I met Jamie, my co-founder, that we would connect over drama.”
Published January 2023
