Echo360 Buys Startup ThinkBinder to Bring Social Learning to Higher Education

On Tuesday, the Dulles, Va.-based education technology company, Echo360, announced plans to buy New York-based startup, ThinkBinder. The company intends to integrate peer-to-peer communications tools with its service.

Research indicates that the use of social media tools like Twitter (News - Alert) outside the classroom can positively influence student learning outcomes. ThinkBinder allows educators to take advantage of today’s social media environment to improve the learning experience. Students and instructors form invitation-only online study groups for courses.

They can collaborate and complete group projects with familiar social tools like discussion feeds, collaborative whiteboards, file management, and text/video chat in a private cloud solution, added Echo360.

In a statement, Echo360 CEO Fred Singer said, “ThinkBinder’s social collaboration tools offered [us] an opportunity to compliment a modern student’s 24/7 digitally connected lifestyle. By empowering students to engage, share and solve problems in an on-demand environment, we’re able to stretch learning beyond traditional classes and improve academic outcomes by encouraging peer to peer interaction at all hours.”

Since launching about a year ago, ThinkBinder has been in beta. During that time, however, cofounder Greg Golkin said it was able to attract tens of thousands of users with a simple Web app that enables students to organize and conduct group work online.

Students can sign up for free and then easily invite peers via e-mail and Facebook (News - Alert) to share a group calendar, exchange files and multimedia content, organize tasks and chat.

Commenting on this acquisition, Golkin noted, “We think of engagement outside the classroom as this next frontier in education. Historically, you interact with teachers and students in the classroom and then the day ends and you go off and do your own thing.”

Golkin will continue as Echo360’s head of platform innovation.

Last November, the company acquired Lecture Tools, a startup founded by a University of Michigan professor that solicits real-time feedback from students and increases in-classroom engagement.