The Center for Data Innovation spoke with Eveline Debora Nuță, founder and CEO of Kollabrix, a Norway-based startup that offers an online platform that helps university professors design and implement engaging course materials. Nuță discussed what makes Kollabrix unique and how the platform can help teachers in low- and middle-income countries improve learning outcomes.
Martin Makaryan: What is Kollabrix?
Eveline Debora Nuță: Kollabrix is a software-as-a-service platform that universities purchase for professors, who can access it through their university emails. Professors input key information about their curriculum, including course details, collaborators, learning objectives, and parameters like lecture duration. Based on this input, Kollabrix generates a custom dashboard for each course with templates that professors can use to organize and design each class. The dashboard serves as a central repository for all the data related to the course, such as readings, examples of exams, and course grades. Professors can use the software to generate presentations, charts, and other visualizations based on existing general templates and using the materials they have uploaded. Professors can use the software to adapt general templates to create custom presentations, charts, and other visualizations based on their unique course material. They can also enhance their work through Kollabrix’s AI features, such as generating images or creating course summaries faster and more efficiently.
Makaryan: How does Kollabrix make professors more efficient?
Nuță: The idea of Kollabrix came from insights I gathered in Romania, my home country, during and after COVID-19, when many teachers had to digitize their courses. When it comes to using new technologies and digital tools in the education sector, there is a disconnect between low- and middle-income countries and more developed countries like the United States or Norway, where I live. We started researching the problem more in depth in Romania, where we discovered that professors were often lacking the tools and resources they need to work efficiently, often spending more time than their counterparts in Western countries to perform simple tasks like creating syllabi because they were not using digital technologies. I wanted to create a centralized platform that can leverage new technologies and AI to make teaching more efficient, make better use of data to help professors improve their courses, and make the course materials more engaging and fun for students.
Kollabrix assists teachers by cutting down manual work, helping them create data visualizations, adding interactive elements to class materials, and making presentations more engaging through features like quizzes and discussions. I want to emphasize that our platform does not replace the teacher, but rather acts as a supplemental tool to improve the learning process for both students and teachers.
Makaryan: What makes Kollabrix unique?
Nuță: A key feature of Kollabrix that sets it apart is the ability to gather student feedback for each class, providing educators with impact data throughout the semester to see what works well and what does not. An issue I experienced growing up, was that my professors had a general aversion to changing teaching practices or methods, and skepticism towards new technologies. This skepticism often prevents improvements in education because educators tend to assume that the existing practices are the best. However, we live in a digital age, and students expect more innovative courses. The student feedback is a critical piece of data that can lead to better learning outcomes, and Kollabrix seeks to leverage it. In our research, we found that many teachers receive vague, infrequent feedback, usually at the end of the academic year, that is not particularly useful to improve their teaching methods or curriculum. After our focus groups with many professors, we have designed Kollabrix to help professors make data-driven decisions about what, when, and how to deliver to their students to achieve their objectives.
Makaryan: What is your vision for Kollabrix?
Nuță: Our vision is to help professors, particularly in low and middle-income countries, focus on what they do best—teaching—without the burden of doing trivial, tedious tasks. We want to raise the quality of education for all by making it easier for passionate professors to deliver engaging learning experiences. In many countries, educators struggle with leveraging the digital infrastructure in place to effectively benefit students. In formerly socialist countries like Romania, for example, the legacy of the previous educational system is one of the reasons. We want to bridge that gap, supporting professors in their transition from mere knowledge providers to inspiring mentors who foster curiosity and engagement.
By providing tools that help them innovate, modernize, and digitalize their teaching methods, we hope to change this perception and make the experience professors and students alike go through a more rewarding one. Ultimately, we want students to become more motivated to attend lectures and see more value in their educational experiences.
Makaryan: How does Kollabrix integrate AI?
Nuță: We are optimistic about the potential of AI to assist teachers, both in schools and in higher education. Currently, we are using OpenAI’s ChatGPT model to integrate generative AI features like text summarization into the platform. Kollabrix’s generative AI features also allow professors to create images based on text queries and other visuals. We are still assessing what other functionalities will be most useful to our target customer base at this time. I believe that with more advancements in AI, possibilities will only become more numerous and more accessible, and we will be working to leverage them to the best of our ability to meet user needs.
