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NoRedInk Is Growing At Mach Speed, 10% Of The US School System Using

This article is more than 10 years old.

Jeff Scheur taught high school English in Chicago for eight years. After grading 15,000 English papers he saw a major problem with the feedback loop in education. This led Jeff to build NoRedInk to help students improve their grammar and writing skills, empowering students to become strong and confident writers.

Spend any time with Jeff and you’ll quickly see he embodies a founder passionate about the problem he/she is trying to solve. Jeff gets giddy over subordinating conjunctions, semicolons, subject-verb agreement, and other common mistakes students make on papers. Realizing that the main problem was that students generally find grammar boring because the content doesn’t relate to them,  NoRedInk generates questions from each student’s favorite celebrities, hobbies, TV shows, and friends. It’s no surprise that engagement is off-the-charts.

Last year was a big year for NoRedInk and Jeff: they won NBC's $75,000 Innovation Challenge in September 2012. Then in 2013 NoRedInk raised a round of funding led by Google Ventures and other top-tier investors while at the same time spreading to 10% of the US school system using them. The mission remains the same, eliminate the “red ink” on students’ papers.

I had a chance to catch up with Jeff recently to hear more about what he has going on, how he got to 10% of the US School System using him, and what 2014 looks like.

Alexander Taub: You started NoRedInk because you saw a major problem in the school system. How did it all start out for you?

Jeff Scheur: I taught high school English for 8 years, and my 3rd year, I had close to 170 students. Even if I spent only 15 minutes per paper, I had more than 42 hours of grading to do every time I gave an assignment. And then, when I passed students’ papers back, I realized that they had no idea what to do with the feedback. Many would just stare at the red marks, feel guilty for a few minutes, and then throw the paper out, or lose it.

I realized that if I was going to help students become stronger writers, I needed to create a better feedback loop. I started making copies of every paper I’d graded and creating a taxonomy that addressed each of the misconceptions that were giving my students trouble. “13.4c” explained how to introduce quotes with a colon instead of a comma. “14.6b” spelled out how to use the present tense when writing about literature. Even after I made a writing manual for students that contained thousands of these rules, I was still manually circling every single comma error, and I was grading rewrites at 2 am every weekend. I thought I could create software to help students practice their specific errors and make the process more manageable.

During my 7th year teaching, I posted an ad on Craigslist and hired an engineer to help me start building something I could use with my students. My class picked the name “NoRedInk” for the program. It beat out “Grammar Ninja” and “Writing Beast.”

Taub: When did you know you had something?

Scheur: Last February, I finished building the first version and shared it with 50 teachers at a local conference. In 4 weeks, I saw there were 1,500 users on the site. In 9 weeks, there were 15,000 users. Hundreds of schools started reaching out to me, asking me to build more categories. That’s when I knew that I wasn’t the only teacher who had this problem.

Taub: How did you get around the technical parts of building a company at an early stage?

Scheur: I’d always been fascinated by computers, and I knew enough to start mocking up how a program could create funny sentences using kids’ interests, and how to deliver automated feedback to students based on their mistakes. While I was teaching, I was paying a contractor to program 10 to 15 hours a week, and once a lot of investors became interested, I raised $2 million and then started hiring a team. I’ve been lucky to meet some amazing and tremendously talented engineers who wanted to make a big difference in the world. And I think it helped that I had a really good sense of the problem I was trying to solve.

Taub: 10% of the U.S. school system is huge. How'd you get there?

Scheur: When teachers discover something that helps their students learn, they’re incredible about sharing it with everyone they know. NoRedInk has grown just by word of mouth. Teachers tell others in their departments. They give presentations about how to use the site. Principals share it at conferences. They Tweet about it. It’s inspiring. I think the main key for me is that I was never focused on growth; I just wanted to solve this problem and build a product that would help my students.

Taub: What do teachers say is the reason they love using NoRedInk?

Scheur: The number one thing is that their students love using it. Teaching grammar, usage, and mechanics normally drives teachers crazy because their kids find it so dreadfully boring. NoRedInk creates different content for every student using his favorite celebrities, the names of his friends, his personal interests — all the things that keep students engaged and excited. Just a few hours ago, a teacher tweeted that she overheard one of her 7th graders saying, “Apostrophes are fun!” while using the site. That may sound corny, but every educator knows that motivation is central to learning.

The other things teachers say they love are the instant feedback and unlimited practice. When students make a mistake, we give them help right away, and the system generates additional practice exercises to help students master a concept without a teacher needing to circle 1,000 apostrophe errors. The site creates color-coded heat maps for teachers telling them where their students need more help, and that’s a big time saver.

Taub: What will 2014 bring?

Scheur: We’re very excited about the next six months. We’re going to start releasing lots more categories that schools have been dying for: modifying quotes for clarity, figuring out which verb tense to use, identifying parts of speech. We’re also working on some new features that are going to have a massive impact on schools across the country. There’s so much important work to do.

Taub: How can teachers and schools start using the site?

Scheur: Teachers can just go to NoRedInk.com and create a free account. Then we give them a class code to share with their students. Schools can also apply on our site if they want to do more expansive pilots.