Meet the “next level” study app both instructors and students can trust

“By the time we get to the comprehensive final,” Dr. LaKisha Barrett says, “students are freaking out.” Barrett, associate professor of microbiology and biology at Austin Community College, laughs. “’Oh my gosh,’” her students tell her, “’we learned chapter one, you know, four months ago.’” Her response? “Get on your Sharpen app.”

_{Dr. LaKisha Barrett}

_{Dr. LaKisha Barrett}

Barrett is a big fan of Sharpen, the mobile study app released by McGraw Hill in October 2022. “I wanted to put something in my students' hands that I feel would help them.” Since then, she’s exposed “probably 200 students” to the app made by the 135-year-old global education company. “And I’m continuing to tell all of my fellow faculty members and instructors everywhere about this really neat tool because it’s next level.”

HOW THE APP SUPPORTS STUDENT SUCCESS

Empowering learners has become more important as students have undergone significant transformation in their study habits and content consumption preferences.

A recent survey conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of McGraw Hill reveals a majority of students (55 percent) felt "unprepared for a new class" last semester. And 20 percent said learning loss due to the pandemic had a negative impact on their education.

To bridge the gap between their course requirements and their preferred learning methods, students appear to be drawn to study aids matching the engagement and convenience they’re used to experiencing on social media. That same Morning Consult survey highlights how four out of five students (81 percent) tried a social media platform or ChatGPT for help with their coursework.

“Students are hungry,” Barrett says. “They want this information. They want it quickly. And they want to be able to see it in, you know, two minutes, 30 seconds, something that is very, very short.”

A STUDENT’S STORY WITH SHARPEN

Earlier this year, Alicia Gumbs, a first-year dental hygienist major at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had heard microbiology “was going to be a very hard class.” Being a mother of two and working full-time, she’s busy with a capital B.

At first, she struggled. Despite watching YouTube videos she thought would help her, and trying out a popular study tool, she earned Cs, once even getting a C-minus on an exam.

It wasn’t until a fellow student told Gumbs about Sharpen that her study skills improved. “I was able to go on the app,” Gumbs says, “and if I wanted clarification of a word, you know, a virus or something, I was able to get that little bit of information.”

Indeed the easy-to-consume tidbits of academic information students see in their personalized feed is a large part of Sharpen’s appeal. Thousands of online flashcards, practice quizzes, and short videos are all experienced like a caring mentor talking to a protégé. Barrett says her students tell her, “It’s like a teacher in my hand.”

Sharpen “brought it to life,” Gumbs adds, “it” being her learning materials. Because the information the app showed her matched what she saw in those materials, Gumbs felt like she wasn’t going “to two different places” when studying.

Gumbs says using Sharpen “made a big difference” in her academic performance. How big a difference? “I bumped my grade up to a B-plus,” she says, smiling.

LEARNERS FEEL WELCOME

Another thing Barrett and Gumbs appreciate about Sharpen is how it creates a feeling of inclusion and belonging. Many of the videos the app uses feature presenters of color.

“It's a strong solution,” Barrett says, “because it's so today. Students don't have to feel some kind of imposter syndrome when they get into the app.”

“I would say it was very inclusive,” Gumbs says of Sharpen, adding that such inclusivity “made it even better.”

Chief Transformation Officer Justin Singh, whose team at McGraw Hill developed Sharpen, says, “We just wanted something that reflects the broader population. That was something that was very deliberate.”

He goes further. “I think we forget there are a lot of students that are first generation. They're the first ones going to college. They come from different backgrounds. It can be intimidating for them to talk to their professors.”

BUT AREN’T SOME STUDY APPS, LIKE, CHEATING?

Yes, unfortunately some are, but Sharpen is different. McGraw Hill’s Singh declares, “We don't give answers. We're trying to finally give an avenue for instructors to move students away from the cheating websites they know are prevalent in their classroom.”

Professor Barrett says Sharpen “is a space where students are learning about themselves. It's called self-agency.”

Gumbs’s experience matches data from Morning Consult. Four in five students said they trust the information in their assigned materials, which Sharpen is built upon, more than learning content they find on social media.

“I think it was helping me,” Gumbs says of the app. Sometimes she would wake up at night stressing over her grades. With Sharpen, she was able to look at “little diagrams” of specific viruses that corresponded to the content in her class materials. “I was able to bring everything full circle.”

And she wasn’t alone. “I can speak for most of my classmates. They also used it.” Ten of her 15 classmates, she says, two-thirds, relied upon virtual learning in the app.

ADDRESSING INSTRUCTOR PAIN POINTS

Academic integrity, baseline knowledge, and engagement. According to a recent survey conducted by Vivaldi Group for McGraw Hill, these are the top three issues on the minds of college educators as the 2027 cohort arrives for this back to school.

“Cheating is rife,” Singh says, “and academic integrity as a whole is under serious threat from particular cheating websites.” Plus, the study app is a closed-loop experience. Students don’t jump away from the app to search online where they can be exposed to bad actors.

When students start college without enough baseline knowledge, it creates difficulty for instructors. According to Oxford University research, students lost out on 35 percent of a normal year’s learning during the pandemic. As a result, many students feel overwhelmed by their college assignments.

It’s this foundational knowledge that Sharpen was designed to provide. “To this point,” Singh adds, “the app has been for students to get up to speed really, really fast.”

Barrett uses Sharpen in her introductory courses in just this way. “My job as an instructor,” she says, “is to make sure from Day One that we have all the tools to help students with their success. So I really start to push the Sharpen app and then even use it for flipped learning.”

According to the Morning Consult survey, three-quarters of students say they would study “better” and “more” if materials were more like social media and combined with the trustworthy content from their assigned materials. Thus the challenge of student engagement is solved, Singh says, via “bite-sized learning and delivering content in a way that we all consume content today.”

Pointing to how most of us interact with apps, like Duolingo for learning languages and Amazon for shopping, Singh asks, “Why should education be any different?”

Barrett agrees, citing the “gamification” built into the app. “All consumers want to know their progress,” she says.” Think of fitness and diet apps. “We wanna know our progress.” How many calories did I eat today? How many steps did I get in? “Students love it.”

WHAT’S NEW THIS BACK TO SCHOOL

“We are launching across all major disciplines and devices, including web,” Singh says. While hundreds of thousands of students have downloaded and used the app so far, the number of textbooks reflected in the app was limited. “This back to school,” Singh adds, “we have more than enough.” So students will now be able to use the app for multiple courses.

In addition, students want to “explore between titles,” Singh says. So Sharpen has added Explore, a new feature providing “everything students need on all core disciplines whether they’re using a McGraw Hill text or not.”

HOW WILL SHARPEN CONTINUE TO EVOLVE?

Essentially by becoming a one-stop shop for all students and educators. “The overwhelming feedback we got,” says Singh, “was more, more, more.” Which is why McGraw Hill is responding by tripling the number of videos and quadrupling the number of questions, particularly more high-level questions, those that students can expect to find on exams.

“We are going to continue to support the instructor, the institution, and the student,” Singh adds. “That’s where we feel we have a special place in the overall higher education ecosystem.”

Sharpen is free and available for download in the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and on Google Play for Android devices.

Michael Jortner is a writer living in Phoenix. His work has appeared in Inside Higher Ed, USA TODAY Network titles such as The Desert Sun and Desert Outlook, Los Angeles Business Journal, Bay Area Reporter, Phoenix Home & Garden and JazzTimes.

This custom content is sponsored by McGraw Hill and developed by Inside Higher Ed's sponsored content team. The editorial staff of Inside Higher Ed had no role in its creation.