Synap: an innovative online education platform that uses insights from neuroscience to enhance the way students learn

Synap is an innovative online education platform that uses insights from neuroscience to enhance the way students learn.

We encourage students to achieve a better understanding of their course by writing their own multiple choice quizzes (MCQs), and use intelligent algorithms to monitor their progress and suggest the optimum time to re-visit a particular topic.

Synap is an evolution of our existing platform MyCQs, which has already proved popular with users across the World. 

The Problem We’re Addressing

Whether for our course, our careers or our hobbies, people today are expected to learn and retain vast quantities of information. Unfortunately, we’ve learnt that the overwhelming majority of students and professionals do not know how to learn effectively.

In our experience educational establishments stick to bombarding their students with information using ineffective, passive teaching methods. An abundance of research has been produced on how the brain learns – why has this research been disregarded?

The Research

Research coming from fields such as educational neuroscience and cognitive psychology shows that in order to acquire meaningful knowledge, learning needs to be active, challenging and require effort.. Researchers in this field suggest a number of strategies that should be adopted in order to learn more effectively.¹ These strategies are as follows.

• Active Interrogation: Studying course content in an active way rather than passively absorbing it. Active interrogation achieves deeper levels of understanding when compared to the process of memorisation.         
• Spaced Repetition: Reviewing information at certain time intervals to promote long-term retention of knowledge.          
• Self-Assessment: Testing yourself objectively in order to accurately gauge your performance in different areas, whilst in the process, ascertaining which areas need improvement.  

Unfortunately, we believe these techniques are unknown to the vast majority of students. Their complexity means that they are not likely to be adopted – even by those who are aware of them.

For example, setting up a spaced repetition service would require students to manually track pieces of information, as well as plan the times it should be practiced. To ask this of students is unrealistic.

The Solution: Synap

Synap is an online platform that enhances studying, aiming to allow students and professionals to learn more in less time.

Synap does this by encouraging users to create their own multiple choice quizzes (MCQs), practice them regularly and share them with their friends, colleagues and other members of the Synap community.

This method is incredibly simple, but potentially very powerful. Synap teaches using the aforementioned concepts brought to light by research in neuroscience and psychology.

• Active Interrogation – Through the creation of multiple-choice questions, students must curate prompts that will lead to the selection of the correct answer; not only this but students must create incorrect, but not unrealistic answers to accompany the correct choice – Synap forces students to think around content leading to higher retention rates.  
• Spaced Repetition – Synap’s intelligent algorithms identify when students have last studied particular content. Synap then assess the student’s performance on particular content and calculates when the content is likely to be forgotten. Students can then be prompted to practice topics at the perfect time. Research shows us that we forget 67% of what we learn after just one day – Synap doesn’t let this happen. The more you use Synap, the better it teaches you and the more you learn.  
• Self-Assessment – Synap tracks your studies. The home screen acts as a personal dashboard allowing students to identify weak areas and pick them up where they left off. As a set of scales can tell you how much you weigh, Synap tells you how much of a particular subject you have learnt. It also tells you what to focus on next.  

Education experts have been recommending these techniques for years. Synap does all the hard work and facilitates an environment in which students can excel.

You already know how to use Synap…the platform is very simple and intuitive to use, with elements such as searching for friends, publishing content and following people taking cues from established interfaces on other social networks.