TigYog is a new kind of online course. Here’s the idea, and why you should consider TigYog.

Most online courses are glorified video playlists. One-way streams of lecturers at whiteboards, with the occasional ‘pause the video now and solve!’ If you do bother to pause, you then have to scrub back three minutes to figure out what the lecturer was asking.

TigYog is not video. TigYog is interactive articles. With TigYog, you’re not a classroom lecturer; you’re a private tutor. Your student participates in a one-to-one dialogue that you create. It’s a level of interactivity impossible with video. The hero of the session is your student, not you on your screen (sorry).

Humanity’s most powerful communication techology is text. Has been for 5000 years. And that’s why video courses are mostly slides of text and images anyway! TigYog takes that content and presents it how it was supposed to be: naturally searchable, SEO-optimized, and screen-reader friendly.

Besides, making good video is haaarrrd. With TigYog, you edit your content, not your chroma key settings. If you’ve written a blog post before, you already know how to write a lesson on TigYog.

Let’s say you’re sold on interactivity. There are many kinds of interaction, but TigYog’s main form is multiple-choice questions. Here’s why.

Multiple-choice might seem restrictive. “Buttons are so restrictive! I want learners to answer in free text! I want an AI-powered tutor to grade the submissions and respond with custom feedback!”

When reading a book, have you ever suddenly realized you have no memory of the last few pages? The text never prompted you to check your understanding! That’s the first role of a question on TigYog: “Yo, you listening?” You don’t need a free text answer to prove understanding; often a choice between two options is enough.

Your learner is reluctant to type out paragraphs. She’s using her mobile on the tube. She’s concentrating, but doesn’t have the dexterity or patience to type out a full answer to your question. Multiple-choice lets her prove her understanding without extra effort. A VR classroom for teaching woodworking sounds cool, but how many students does this limit you to?

Automatically grading free text is very error-prone. And it’s not just distinguishing ‘correct’ from ‘incorrect’. For a quality dialogue, you need to understand why the learner got the answer wrong. Multiple-choice lets you distinguish common misunderstandings by carefully proposing incorrect answers, and then lets you gently respond to each of them in turn.

We’re working on some other forms of interactivity, but multiple-choice is our mainstay. Try it out: you’ll be amazed how far you get with it!