Virtual Nerd (acqured by Pearson in 2013) offers web-based lessons and tools to help over-worked teachers provide instruction and remediation tailored to students’ individual needs.

Students use Virtual Nerd’s patent-pending Dynamic Whiteboard instructional platform to hone in on the topics where they need extra help, learning at their own pace and testing their understanding with practice problems.

Teachers can extend their impact both inside and outside of the classroom with Virtual Nerd, using our playlist-creation and progress-monitoring toolkit to build and assign lessons and assessments and track student learning.

Backstory
In early 2008 in St. Louis an expert tutor and a designer began exploring how to help confused math students online using interactive video. As an expert private tutor helping students one-on-one for over a decade, Leo Shmuylovich worked with many students from different schools who had different teachers and were using different textbooks, and yet he noticed many of the same questions kept coming up.

Leo thought he might be able to help more students if he recorded video explanations of these common trouble topics and uploaded them to YouTube. In the Spring of 2008, Leo shared this idea with his friend Josh Salcman, and the two began to discuss ways to use technology to mirror the process of a teacher or tutor working one-on-one with a confused student.

Early in their conversations, Leo and Josh reached agreement on a few key points which would come to define Virtual Nerd’s instructional platform and content library:

Learning is not a linear process, so we must support non-linear exploration.
Students are often unable to identify the source of their confusion, so we must help them find what they need without forcing them to know what it is ahead of time.
A solid foundation is critical for progression to more advanced topics, and when students find themselves struggling, it’s often due to weakness in underlying concepts, so we must provide immediate and direct access to pre-requisite topics.
Quality matters in every aspect of every experience, so we must not cut corners.
When students are confused, they need to be able to focus on resolving their confusion, so we must not distract them with extraneous stimuli or with too much esthetic variation.
Virtual Nerd was acquired by Pearson in 2013 and is in use in over 40 school districts and hundreds of schools across the United States and Canada.