TeachPitch

TeachPitch was founded in 2014 with the goal of building a platform for teachers and schools to find, post, and share lesson plans, course materials, teaching strategies, and more. TeachPitch has a curated, searchable collection of high-quality, open-source materials from sources such as Khan Academy, UK Open Learning, English Up, and Yale University. Teachers and schools can build their own virtual library of resources tailored to their own needs.

The inspiration for TeachPitch came from the founder’s own experience of teaching English, Dutch, and Economics to high school students with special needs. Like all teachers, Aldo de Pape was stretched for time and became frustrated by the experience of sifting through hundreds of links on the Internet to find the high-quality resources he knew could improve his teaching. (A search for “high school economics lesson plans” brings up 1.6 million page results.)

Materials that used to be locked inside expensive textbooks and databases are increasingly available for free. The explosion in popularity of MOOCs (massive online open courses) and other internet-based educational tools means that there are more high-quality resources out there than ever before. How do teachers and schools find these resources? Many teachers turn to platforms such as Pinterest or Twitter to connect with fellow teachers and share ideas and inspiration. But these platforms weren’t built with teachers’ needs in mind. TeachPitch, on the other hand, provides a platform that allows teachers and schools to quickly find the materials they need, and to build their own personal library of ideas and resources.

Tractions so far

TeachPitch was deliberately conceived as a global community, inspired by the founder’s years of working with teachers across the world through the education charity AsWeGrow. Despite their cultural differences, we discovered that teachers around the world shared common goals and had common needs. By building a global community, TeachPitch can provide fresh insights and a broader perspective to all of its users.

Teachers and entrepreneurs share many similarities, a perspective that has shaped TeachPitch and continues to inform Aldo de Pape’s work as leader of the TeachPitch community. Like entrepreneurs, teachers are innovators, constantly striving to find better ways to serve their students and schools; seeing their ideas and work make an impact also inspires both teachers and entrepreneurs. TeachPitch allows teachers to spread their successful ideas and methods beyond their own students and schools.

Currently the platform has around 10,000 teachers registered from over 100 countries.

TeachPitch works with a great variety of publishers and schools that are using our repository technology to share and save the best online learning resources. The technology allows a growing amount of customers to structurally work with the most relevant material, whether these are created by educational product makers, found on the Web and/or generated by educators in the school.

In the near future the project aims to work with as many partners as possible to make sure that all teachers have the ability to easily find and use the best of learning.

The WISE Accelerator opened a lot of doors for our company. Highlights of our growth through its support was the attention from big media platforms such as The Financial Times, Forbes & People.cn as well as gaining recognition for our products in South-East Asia. Currently we are working with a rapidly growing amount of institutional customers from all over the world. We proud ourselves to be working with some of the very best schools in the United Kingdom and China up to being a key educational technology for an entire nation in East-Africa. In April 2016, TeachPitch successfully raised over £300,000 in seed funding through CrowdCube. The TeachPitch team today consists of 16 people and has recently opened its third office in Beijing in collaboration with Tusstar, the incubator of Tsinghua University. Thanks to the vital support of the team at WISE, TeachPitch continues to fly and is able to help many teachers from all over the world to learn more and teach better.