June 25, 2009

An innovator in the business of learning

A fourth-year medical student, drawing on his experience as a software engineer at Microsoft, creates a collaborative study application and has a plan to bring it to market.

Elliot James Rapp, whose "LiKiRi Knowledge" won the Yale IDEA Competition's prize for best business plan in April.

Elliot James Rapp does not have a photographic memory—a quality that might have come in handy in 2006, his first year as a Yale medical student. That's when he was looking for ways to learn the difference between the "pons" and the "medulla oblongata" and thousands of other medical facts. But what Rapp does have is a skill for programming.

To help him master the details of medical science, the former Microsoft software engineer developed an interactive program that enables students to work collaboratively and to test their progress. In April, Rapp's concept was recognized as best business plan in the Yale IDEA (Innovation in Digital Environments Award) Competition, a contest that supports new talent and new digital projects within the Yale community.

Rapp, 30, began his professional life at an enterprise software company in Austin, Texas and later went to work for Microsoft, where he helped develop their advanced Web services platform. Then he decided to go to medical school. While he loved most aspects of the Yale System, the medical school's educational philosophy that emphasizes student research and gives students latitude to explore their interests, Rapp was frustrated by what he saw as inefficiencies in the learning process and a lack or collaborative studying.

In 2007, he developed a desktop application called LiKiRi (Learn It, Know It, Recall It—the three stages in the learning process) Knowledge. The program allows students to take notes in a format that enables them to test their own progress. It also identifies areas where they are weak and encourages collaboration and sharing among classmates.

How does it work? Students form study groups and divide among themselves the material that has to be covered. They each create LiKiRi notes on their assigned area and then present the information to the rest of the group using the application. At the end, each student has easy access to all the information that must be learned. LiKiRi Knowledge also allows them to test retention of the information and identify weak areas.

The program also has a companion Web application called LiKiRi Commons, which enables users to access their LiKiRi Knowledge notes from any location at any time.

In between his medical school training and developing software programs, Rapp has plans to bring the LiKiRi Learning System to other schools. He believes the tool could be helpful to students in all disciplines, not just medicine. "Ten years from now I see LiKiRi Learning as a platform that provides students one place to store and access their knowledge no matter if the content is self-generated or provided by teachers, classmates, or publishing companies," Rapp said. "They will be able to create, modify, and review this knowledge much more efficiently than is possible with today's tools."

"Having seen the current version of LiKiRi, we were immediately struck by the opportunity to scale the platform," said James G. Boyle, director of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, a university-operated agency dedicated to helping students create their own businesses. "I'd go as far as saying that it could be a disruptive technology [i.e., an unexpected technological innovation] for the education sector."

—Bill Hathaway

Photo by Michael Marsland

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