As a software company, we specialize in projects for training agencies or tutoring institutes. This gives us insight into the tricks you can use to differentiate yourself from others in the education industry. In this blog, we discuss the five ways to work smarter!
1. Start with the user: Who is your target audience?
This is an important one. It matters a lot whether you provide learning modules to children or courses to professionals. If you teach children, you would want to do it in a playful way. And that relates to the communication method of the platform. At the same time, you might also want to take into consideration the parents— who like to look over their child’s shoulder. They also have interests in the process. Professionals, on the other hand, are a completely different kind of target group with very different interests and wishes. These are the things that you have to take into account. Professionals like to learn as quickly as possible, in as little time as possible. This does not apply to children. Children can spend hours of their time on a puzzle, as long as it is fun enough. With professionals, it is often clearer at what level they are. And because those courses are often focused on a very specific topic, you also go more in-depth. Then you also want to be able to insert things such as PDFs and PowerPoint presentations. With children, you want to keep it entertaining. What you should also think about is: To what extent should the parents be able to gain insight into the progress of the learning process? You could refer to parents as “hidden users”. That’s an aspect you shouldn’t forget about.
2. Determine what your work structure looks like
Think in advance. How do I make sure my students learn things in a logical order? It is important to determine what the journey will be for your students. Setting up some sort of curriculum would be a good idea. Something along the lines of: During this period they get subject X, and during that period they get that subject Y. They learn to multiply first, before they learn to divide and so on. Also as a teacher, you would want to know how your student is doing. But how do you gain insight into their learning process? Are you going to have them take a test? Do you do that online or offline? How do you organize the homework assignments? Those are things you want to think about in advance.
3. Make sure you keep track of the level of your students
Don’t make it too easy for the students who learn faster than others. With a fixed curriculum, every student goes through the same steps. But suppose a student has long mastered those pluses and minuses, while the rest of his class is still slaving away at it. He could actually move on to multiplication. It is important to see this so that a student does not get bored. Make sure that the students can move on to the next phase at their appropriate individual speed. So you don’t keep teaching them something they already can do. That is wasted energy for both parties.
4. Make it a system
When you digitize, you make customization more possible. A program keeps track of how well a student completes assignments and that means that he can be transferred to a higher level more quickly. Automating the curriculum also makes it less labor-intensive for the teacher to teach. The more you automate, the less labor-intensive the work is, and the more students you can handle. How nice would it be if you, as a teacher, can give even more students the good education they deserve? The main benefit here is that a program offers prompt insight into the interested parties. You can easily make parents some sort of printout of the students’ results.
5. Take advantage of gamification
I’ve said this before, for professionals you want to make it a lot less playful than for children. But there is an achiever in each of us, and that includes professionals. Every research shows that something like a score bar, or level-ups on achievements, makes people want to keep continuing. This can be done in several ways. In its simplest form, you show what level someone is on, and how much he has before getting a level-up. But you can also create a score bar, for example, that becomes increasingly full for every section that gets completed. You can apply any of these things to any kind of course. To make it possible, it is useful to automate (see point 4). Automation opens doors. A good example of a project we have worked on is War Child: Can’t wait to learn which enabled children in Jordan and Lebanon to complete a full curriculum in lieu of primary education. There was a handwriting recognition feature, children learned to read and write. But the fun part: this was all wrapped up in one game. In that game you played a child in a village who was going to do all kinds of chores for the neighbors. This game was created from a kid’s need to help people. And they learned important lessons while playing.
My last point is that of course you don’t have to apply all these learnings at the same time. They are ways to set yourself apart from the rest. It is up to you to see which way of teaching suits you.