Twilio > Case Studies > Remind: Bridging the Communication Gap in Education with IoT

Remind: Bridging the Communication Gap in Education with IoT

Technology Category

Networks & Connectivity - Gateways
Robots - Wheeled Robots

Applicable Industries

Education
Telecommunications

Use Cases

Time Sensitive Networking

About The Customer

Remind's customers are primarily teachers, students, and parents. The company was founded with the aim of helping students like Brett, one of the co-founders, who had ADD and dyslexia and found it hard to stay on top of his coursework. The service is designed to help students stay organized and parents stay informed about their children's academic responsibilities. Teachers use the service to communicate important information about assignments and due dates. The service is used by millions of teachers, students, and parents across the United States.

The Challenge

Remind, a web and mobile application, was faced with the challenge of facilitating clearer and more consistent communication between teachers, students, and parents. The founders, David and Brett Kopf, had a vision to create a simple way for educators to connect with their students and parents using technology and facilities available to the widest audience. The challenge was to keep students and parents updated about assignments, due dates, and quizzes. The founders realized that students can sometimes be unreliable when it comes to educational discipline and parents often feel in the dark when students fail to deliver notes from teachers and big assignments come as a surprise to them.

The Solution

Remind's solution was to develop a group messaging service that allows teachers to easily share upcoming due dates, assignments, and announcements. Teachers sign up at Remind's website or on its iOS/Android mobile app by entering their name, email address, and password. For each teacher, Remind assigns a local phone number from Twilio, which the teacher uses to communicate with students and parents. Teachers can also create classes for which Remind assigns an easy-to-remember code. When students or their parents wish to sign up for notifications for that class, they send the class code as an SMS message to the teacher's assigned phone number. Teachers can then send one-way text messages to the entire class list, or a subset of the class, using the Remind website or the mobile app.

Operational Impact

The operational results of Remind's solution have been impressive. The growth of Remind has been remarkable, with a large increase in the volume of messages sent each new school year. For instance, during August and September 2013, total users went from 2 million to 10 million, and messages per day went from 600,000 to 2.5 million. Most of these messages are sent between 2:30PM and 5:30PM in each local time zone across the US as students head home for the day. This demonstrates the scalability of Twilio's infrastructure, which Remind uses for its service. Furthermore, a Remind-sponsored survey of K-8 teachers who used Remind found that 78% said parent involvement had increased, 38% found that homework turn-in rates had increased, and 26% reported greater classroom participation.

Quantitative Benefit