I co-founded WeVu in 2016. We decided to shut it down in 2024. WeVu is still in use at UBC as the CLAS video system.
WeVu had nursing and music programs as customers. We had over 10,000 student users in total. But the marketing and sales are just too slow in higher education; it's too hard to get faculty and programs to adopt new tools, and just as hard to get someone to pay for them.
WeVu has roots at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. At UBC the WeVu technology is still called the Collaborative Learning Annotation System (CLAS). UBC has 12,000 student users of CLAS each year in Music, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Law, Arts and Sciences, Presentations, Teacher Training and more. CLAS was originally built for a research project in psychology on note-taking in lectures. With a UBC Teaching and Learning Enhancement fund grant from 2014-2016, CLAS was rebuilt as a general purpose video sharing and annotation platform for education.
WeVu flipped educational video upside down. We think video is much more valuable for education if learners are doing the recording and instructors, coaches, or managers are the ones who watch and give feedback. We understand that modern research on learning shows that learners must be doing the things they are learning and getting feedback and coaching as they do so.
A startup is a learning experience. Big time. I've learned about technology, content marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation, sales, accounting, corporate governance, legal issues, business strategy, meetings, nursing and music education, the overall educational technology business and market, and much more. It's hard to summarize all that learning because it's on-the-job stuff where you just do things and see if they work and as you do this you have to learn by teaching yourself, trial-and-error, asking for help, and reading a lot.
And then shutting down a startup is an difficult thing. It's emotional. And you have to tell investors that they're not getting their money back.