New Essay Contest: Preply.com Pays $2000 for 500 Words!

    KYIV, UKRAINE, September 10, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Aiming to raise awareness about online education among young people, Preply announces the start of the second essay contest "The impact of IT-innovations on Educational Process." The competition addressed to students of high schools, universities, and PhDs takes place from September 1st till October 25th, 2016.

The winner of the contest receives a scholarship of $2000. The participants who take 2nd and 3rd places are awarded the amount of $1000 and $500 respectively. The winners are selected through open voting on the website of educational platform Preply as well as judged by a panel of five top-ranked Preply.com tutors.

Kirill Bigai, Co-Founder and CEO of Preply.com:
"Future technologies influence our lifestyle, social patterns, work goals, and aspirations. The way we educate ourselves is the key to a better adaptation towards a continuously changing work environment. The time has come to acquire knowledge faster, the skills broader and the experience more variable. Tell us, how new IT technologies impact your educational process?"

Submission procedure:
1. All participants have to submit their essays at https://preply.com/en/scholarships. Each participant can add only one essay.
2. The essay must be written in English and contain no more than 500 words. The participant has to specify in the essay his/her name and the name of the educational institution, where he/she studies.
3. The content of the essay must be logically related to the following topics: "online education", "impact of innovations" and "online tutoring."
4. All written works will be available for open voting at https://preply.com/en/scholarships from September 1 to October 25, 2016, inclusive.
5. Three participants receiving the highest number of votes on the website and highest judges score, will be declared as winners.

Voting procedure:
1. The participant has to create an account at Preply.com via Facebook registration button (registration is FREE).
2. The vote for the essay can be made either by pressing the "Upvote" button or by pressing the "Vote & Share" button (the vote and the essay will be posted to Facebook on behalf of the voter).
3. Votes are counted at the https://preply.com/en/scholarships website only. Only one vote is allowed per one essay. Users can vote for unlimited number of essays.
4. After the deadline, the top 20 most voted essays will be judged by a panel of five top ranked Preply.com tutors. The judges will vote for each essay by granting each of them a score from 1 to 10. The top 3 essays with the highest scores will become the winners of the competition. The judging criteria: expression, creativity, originality.

The list of the winners will be posted on Preply.com website on October 26, 2016.

Detailed rules and more information about the contest can be found here:
https://preply.com/en/scholarships

Press kit: https://goo.gl/4x9HLm

About Preply Essay Competitions:

Preply Essay Competitions aim to support students of high schools, universities, and PhDs with $3500. The first essay competition "Education of the Future" took place from May 1 to June 14, 2016, and gathered participants from more than 20 countries. Articles submitted on Preply platform got more than 26 000 votes.

About Preply:

Kyiv-based Preply is a global marketplace for tutoring, a service that helps people find online and local tutors of foreign languages, science, humanities, and various hobbies and provides services in the educational sector for teachers from all over the world. Preply was created on April 2013 and operates in six markets: Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey and is about to launch in Germany, UK, and Spain. In June 2016 Preply (Techstars'15), raised $1,3 million in a Series Seed round led by angel investors Mariusz Gralewski (DocPlanner, Poland), Przemyslaw Gacek (Grupa Pracuj, Poland), Arthur Kosten (Booking.com, 2003-2012), and Hedgehog Fund (Poland) with the participation of international venture companies RTAVentures VC, Xevin Investments (Poland), Digital Future (Ukraine), SMRK (Ukraine), Techstars (USA/Germany) and other angel investors. Early on, Preply was personally funded by angel investor Semyon Dukach (Techstars Boston).

25 000 Preply tutors offer their services to more than 70 000 students: 27 world languages classes, 13 school subjects lessons, as well as acting, music, and art lessons. 10 000 hours of classes are held each month with the help of Preply.com.

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