Original post by Tyler on May 27, 2019
Åsmund Furuseth is C.E.O. and a co-founder of Kahoot!, the e-learning platform that allows educators to design multiple choice quizzes for their students. The responses to the questions are then tabulated in real time by the software and a running tally is shown on the screen after every question. The students get engaged right away – and in my experience, there’s total buy-in, no matter the age group. I’ve personally used it extensively in classes I’ve taught.
Mr. Furuseth hails from Norway where the Kahoot! offices are located and outside of his role as Chief Executive Officer he fills his time working to secure investment funding and as an advisor for various start up ventures. Previously he founded a wind turbine company called ChapDrive and he holds a Master of Science degree in physics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
He and his co-founders developed Kahoot! off of a platform that was begun by one of Kahoot!’s co-founders, Morten Versvik, who’d created a quiz game to bring audiences together while at the cinema in advance of the film. They quickly realized the educational potential and launched a beta version in March of 2013; before going live in August of that same year. The platform spread virally among teachers in the U.S. and now reaches students in over 200 countries worldwide.
With a background in physics, experience in the green energy sector, and a continued interest in supporting new ventures, I’d suspect that Åsmund Furuseth’s principal contribution to Kahoot! was capital – this is of course in no way meant to diminish such a role as we wouldn’t likely have access to Kahoot! without that contribution.
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https://kahoot.com/leadership/asmund-furuseth
https://business.nasdaq.com/marketinsite/2018/Corp/Faces-Of-Entrepreneurship-Asmund-Furuseth.html
I chose to share this post because I believe Kahoot! has been a valuable tool for many educators and I wanted to continue the discussion in the reviews on the old blog (https://virtual.educ.ubc.ca/wp/etec522/2019/05/27/asmund-furuseth-and-kahoot/).
There seemed to be disagreement on Åsmund Furuseth’s merit as an “entrepreneur” due to the claim that he appears to have been motivated to start Kahoot! by capital. I would first like to point out that this is merely speculation on the part of the original poster and reviewers, they do not know Åsmund Furuseth’s motivations for founding the company. Secondly, there is no moral imperative for entrepreneurial innovation to be motivated by anything other than the possibility of financial gain anyway. Regardless of Furuseth’s motivations, it makes him no less entrepreneurial that he hoped to profit from his venture. I would argue that most founders probably do hope for this kind of success.
Contrarily, I think Åsmund Furuseth is an excellent example of an entrepreneurial founder. In fact, he sounds like a very typical entrepreneurial personality type. He appears to have broad interests, recognizes opportunities, and teams up with people to collaboratively create successful ventures.
I also find it amusing that Åsmund Furuseth would be criticized for being motivated by capital. A business’s success is defined by its ability to make money, why should we expect a founder to think otherwise? Quite frankly, if I were an investor, I would be much more interested in investing in a startup run by a screwed businessman looking to make money than an idealist wanting social change.
My students often use Kahoot! in their presentations. They enjoyed the interactive nature of this e-learning game-faced platform. Åsmund Furuseth’s explains “entrepreneurship as improving or building a new business upon a pre-existing process or technology. The difficult part is often not the starting point, but the follow-through of continuously enhancing the process and technology and, thus, the business”. He built a platform that helped learners create their own content which is very powerful. I have yet had a class that was not engaged by Kahoot! He inspires future creators to break away from traditional formative assessment.
Reference
https://thecenter.nasdaq.org/faces-of-entrepreneurship-asmund-furuseth-kahoot/
The great thing about Kahoot is that it can be applied to so many different educational situations. I have used it in my own classrooms with ESL adults ranging from 20-70years of age from those with absolute 0 knowledge of English to those who have at least a passable comprehension. Every time I use it, the whole class is engaged, they are learning, reviewing and having an amazing time. I have also used it in my own training sessions with the teachers I work with and again the same scenario, full engagement. It is such an amazing tool for educators, trainers and students.
I think Kahoot is great because the design layout is simple, and very eye-pleasing. It’s simple for teachers to use, and it allows for multiple ways of interaction such as multiple choice, true or false…, and it allows the teachers to personalize via adding pictures too. A co-worker of mine mentioned that her son’s school used it in a parent-teacher meeting where they got the parents to answer questions. It was fun and interactive for the parents too!
Kahoot is such a wonderful tool in my teaching arsenal that made my life so much easier when trying to engage students. The best part is that pretty much all the functionalities I would require are totally free. It’s interesting how its founder is not really in the educational field, but either way, he is doing something right by continually working on and providing such a great tool.
I used Kahoot quite often for my Mandarin classes while I was working in an international school previously. Unlike many other educational applications, Kahoot allowed input in different languages and is easy to use, so even my grade 5-7 students could make their own Kahoot and play and share it with the whole class. Kahoot is truly a brilliant innovation and it helps that it is free to access though I wish there were fewer ads. As a teacher, I would love to see more and more of this kind of educational application to find a place in the marketplace.