Why we’re building Doveline

A digital lecture should be more than just a video.

Some of the most meaningful moments in teaching happen when a student stops the lesson and says, “Wait—can we talk about that?” A question leads to another question. Someone offers a different way of seeing the problem. The lesson becomes a conversation, and the material begins to feel like something the student can take hold of for themselves.

Recorded lectures give students the freedom to learn at their own pace, and they give instructors access to invaluable tools for visualization. But too often, those advantages come at the cost of the interaction that makes a classroom feel alive. Students watch alone, questions get separated from the moment that prompted them, and a carefully prepared lecture can become a one-way experience.

We started building Doveline Academy because we don’t think the advantages of digital learning should come at the expense of active learning. We want a recorded lecture to leave room for curiosity, reflection, and the small exchanges that help people learn together. More than that, students should not merely be able to pause a lecture to reflect and engage. They should feel invited to do so. That’s why at the core of Doveline’s name and logo is the double vertical line: the universal symbol for pause.

Our goal with Doveline is to eliminate as much friction as we can between students and the interactive elements of the digital classroom. That means students see class discussions scrolling right next to the video, with questions appearing automatically at relevant moments just as they would in person. It means that asking your own question or taking a timestamped note doesn’t require navigating to some other tab or web page—or even leaving fullscreen mode.

The option to post anonymously encourages even the most reticent students with the most embarrassing questions to participate. And when there’s no one else around, engaging with a lesson is as easy as starting a conversation with Doveline’s AI assistant, whose responses are explicitly grounded in the authorized content of each course.

At the same time, instructors remain in control of their lecture environment. Instructors can set limits on video playback speed, decide whether anonymous participation is available, and configure the abilities of the AI assistant (including permissions to use general knowledge or search the web). Instructors can also customize “question categories” for their courses that invite students to ask a broad range of questions—including valuable questions like “Why is this important again?” that students too often feel are impolite or unwelcome.

Doveline also equips instructors with a variety of tools for adding interactive elements to the lecture, ranging from discussion prompts to polls and “Quick Check” questions that encourage reflection and engagement at key points throughout the video. Our hope with Doveline is that even after a lecture is recorded, instructors can continue refining it through embedded interactive features as they learn what helps each new group of students. The lecture does not have to be rebuilt from scratch, and it does not have to become static. It can keep getting better.

For instructors, Doveline’s AI assistant can help elevate lectures even further. We have configured instructor-specific AI tools for reviewing video content, suggesting chapter breaks to make videos more easily navigable, and proposing interactive video elements at useful moments. We won’t pretend that an AI will know how to design a lecture better than its own instructor—but it never hurts to have an extra pair of eyes.

Doveline is still young, and we are building it carefully. We want it to respect the judgment of instructors, the privacy of students, and the fact that there is an important dimension of good education that is fundamentally human. There is a great deal left to learn, and feedback from the people who teach and learn with Doveline will help to shape what it becomes.

Thank you for being a part of this new and exciting journey.