For my A3, I sought to create a tool myself that could help build on my existing experience using AI and adaptive assessment platforms to create a system that could not only provide students with immediate personalized feedback and teachers with individual assessment data but also provide parents with recommendations for local learning resources and tutors in the area that could help students consolidate their foundational skills or extend their learning beyond the confines of the school curriculum. I called this resource “The Tech Tutor”, and build a minimum viable product using a Google Forms and a custom python script meant for scraping google for local tutor recommendations. This resource can be found at the link below:
https://sites.google.com/view/etec522a3-techtutor/home
To make this an attractive venture for potential investors, I used the “Venture Capital” method of pre-revenue evaluation and planned for investors to receive a tenfold return upon the completion of a 5-year investment time horizon or a 25% equity share in the venture if a long-term partnership is preferable; while this a substantial return and/or percentage of the venture to risk, a strategic partnership such as those discussed in my pitch (machine learning specialists and those familiar with the K-12 humanities curriculum as my experience is limited to math and science) will be essential to the venture’s success, as these are weaknesses I cannot adequately fulfill with my expertise.
I hope you enjoy exploring my venture idea! Please feel free to offer feedback in the comments below, and thank you for your time and consideration!
FEEDBACK: Great idea, Brendan! I think a product like this would address the problem you outlined. I like how the python script would automate suggestions for parents. What is the mechanism/quality assurance if the script is making poor recommendations? For me to invest, I would recommend more work on the data visualization back-end side (maybe pair with per-data! Ally’s pitch). I would need a dashboard to easily track students and visualize trends. Would that be part of it? As for the actual presentation of your information, I appreciate how you explain each chunk of text throughout the website with a video. I would also recommend editing your Elevator Pitch. Although humourous, 2 min is too long (It’s tough though! I managed to get mine down to 1:10min after multiple tries…). Thanks!
FEEDBACK
I really enjoyed your elevator pitch video! You had me hooked! I think you are addressing a huge issue in education, that being the lag time between taking an assessment and getting feedback. Student (and parents) want everything immediately, so waiting days or even weeks for feedback is akin to not providing it at all. Another part of your venture I like is that it provides clear benefits for students, parents, and teachers; when you are helping this many people, the product is sure to gain traction. It would be interesting to see a partnership with a tutoring platform such as Skooli, for example (I did my analyst report on them). You could build your script to connect the student with the right tutor, which would take it a level deeper. Of course, this assumes that Skooli (or whoever you partner with) has a vast library of talented tutors suited for all the possible needs you may have. This may not be possible since learners run into almost unlimited variations of need. I wonder if you have a system for vetting the services that are recommended to the student or perhaps a rating system so that the students and parents can provide feedback to your algorithm as to which services were helpful and which were not (forgive me if this was mentioned; I may have missed it). Overall, I would be interested in investing in The Tech Tutor!
FEEDBACK: Your elevator pitch is great! Thanks for sharing. The Tech Tutor is a fantastic and much needed idea! Timely feedback is so important. I like how you provided a few demos of your product. Linking to local tutors is wonderful, however, I wonder if there might be some push back from parents or students that they shouldn’t need to be directed to a tutor, instead, the teacher should be helping them?
FEEDBACK: Hi Brendan. You have an interesting idea here. There is definitely a need for this type of service. Providing timely feedback is great. I also think that it is important to involve the parents. You mentioned that right now parents would need to input their children’s scores. Is there a plan to make this automated? I am wondering how you plan to market this to teachers and parents, to get them both on board with using your application.
REVIEW: Great work on your venture pitch! I dont work as a K-12 educator but I definitely see a lot of value in this idea and would be interested in investing! I think the component of connecting students with local tutors is a great idea, and provides a lot of opportunity for future growth. What I really like about your venture and elevator pitch was how clear and concise it was laid out. As a education venture analyst, I felt like i understood the problem, your solution, the product and also exactly what you are looking for in terms of investment. The only things I would have like to explore a little further as a potential investor would be the target market (Is it students or parents or teachers or all three?) and how you would market this product to this target market! Great work building out a really cool idea!
Hi Folks! Thank you for your feedback!
Marie-Eve, I appreciate your suggestion to include more data visualization; the Google Form portion of the MVP does automatically create data representations for both individuals and the group of participants as a whole; perhaps I could create fake users to illustrate this! I also realize the pitch was a tad too long; I wanted to do my elevator pitch without visual aids as discussed in week 3, but I took the artistic liberty of not counting the initial “small talk” as part of my pitch time. Nevertheless, your point is appreciated!
Nathan, thanks for sharing a brilliant idea regarding rating systems! Yes, I could envision enhancing the script to store recommendations in a CSV spreadsheet file, and creating a supplemental form for users to rate the tutors they had been recommended!
Mstr, I appreciate your thoughts! I can indeed imagine such a circumstance where parents and students do not appreciate the recommendation, particularly if students perceive themselves as being of a different ability level than the Tech Tutor suggested. Nevertheless, I think Teachers could navigate these concerns by reminding parents that these services are recommendations if students and their families are interested in supplemental supports, and they are not prescriptive in nature, but rather diagnostic.
Terri-Lynn, yes I had planned to incorporate automatic copying of data from the Google Form results to the Python script I created, however, I could not get this function working in time, so I opted to create a manual reporting option for now. Thanks also for such a great question regarding marketing; I think initially I would aspire to use my own personal and professional connections to get some initial users, and the platform would be free to use during that time. If the initial minimum viable product were successfully tested, we would then proceed to a subscription (for teachers) and transactional fee income model where tutoring services direct a percentage of their income made from our recommendations back into the platform; perhaps this would occur once we set up a rating system for users as described above.
Great question Rpbyn. I think the target market is for teachers; once it was time to prepare a business model (outside the bounds of this course), we would charge teachers an annual subscription fee for them to use the service, and we would charge tutoring services a percentage transactional fee for each parent recommendation they received for their services. Nevertheless, the teacher is the target user, and they ebenfit by getting student assessment data, automated feedback for students and additional resource recommendations for parents so that they can save the many hours they typically spend on those aspects of the job to focus more on the critical interpersonal connections they make with students.
Thanks again to you all; you helped me see even greater potential in the Tech Tutor than I’d seen myself!
Cheers!