Digitally Replicating the Physical Classroom Experience

On this episode of Voices of eLearning, Host JW Marshall talked with Dr. Narine Hall, Founder, and CEO, InSpace, a video conferencing platform that mimics personal interactions between teachers and students in a virtual classroom. They talked about Hall’s career, InSpace, getting technology to work for educators, and their recent round of funding. Hall is a data science assistant professor and academic program director at Champlain College. She and her Co-founder, Haykanush Lputyan, a software, and video engineer, launched InSpace in 2020. They were frustrated that traditional virtual meeting classrooms limited student-teacher interactions. Hall was teaching a class at the time she thought would be easy to transition online. “We had our first zoom lesson, and I asked a question, and 25 students tried to answer at the same time,” Hall said, “and then there was a pause, and it was awkward the rest of the time.” The software disrupted the education process, so Hall and Lputyan set out to disrupt education software. It took years to sharpen her teaching skills, so she wanted software that could match how she taught and not have to make adjustments based on incongruent software. The human connection was the piece that was missing for Hall. “I wanted to make sure that my students get heard, they have a chance to talk, and it wasn’t just one person talks, and everybody listens” -Narine Hall InSpace recently went through a major round of funding, with a $2.6 million investment from venture capital firm Boston Seed Capital and $1.5 million each from Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital.