For Frog portfolio company and Berlin-based digital education platform sofatutor, video is the new star of learning. Pre-pandemic, the leading learning platform was already churning out hundreds of instructional videos on the regular — a lot of them not more than five minutes long. Now, sofatutor has over half a million users and it isn’t showing signs of stopping.
In an article by German broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), sofatutor’s demand quadrupled during the school closings triggered by COVID-19. “When schools closed in March, families were inundated with video conferencing and instructional videos. Some teachers began to make their own clips, and Bavaria even asked its teachers to do so. This resulted in films that are mostly too long and shaky to captivate the Tiktok generation.”
What sets the platform apart from other Internet-born educators is their brief yet straightforward videos that don’t exceed eight minutes. If users have questions about the clips, the platform offers a chat feature where pupils can contact one out of 60 trained teachers that are available around the clock. sofatutor’s Worksheets, meanwhile, allow users to print and download exercises so they can study whenever and wherever they want. The PDF exercises are handy for study groups and can be collected to track the user’s progress. sofatutor now has over 11,000 instructional videos on their platform and is dubbed “the world’s largest collection of instructional videos of this quality.”
In Germany, sofatutor is being used to replace in-person schooling by giving all pupils and teachers access to their software via the free school license. In addition, Bremen is the first federal state to offer sofatutor across all of its schools. “The company has put together a didactic ensemble that could actually take over emergency teaching in times of the pandemic.”
Frog Senior Partner Jens Düing commented, “Over the past 10 years sofatutor has built a unique asset for school age children in Germany – a digital library of tens thousands of videos, exercises and worksheets. Furthermore, in recent months homeschooling accelerated the demand for digital solutions, both from parents and finally from schools. This puts the company on a very strong foundation to continue its profitable growth.”
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