EduEngage

Empowering efficient tertiary education through meaningful insights and connection.

Students are dropping courses and out of tertiary education altogether for various reasons: one being that courses are being delivered in a one-dimensional form not catering to individual student learning styles. Students learn in a wide variety of ways, and universities need a model equipped to identify these differences allowing for a more collaborative and targeted learning experience.

The solution:
We want to empower universities with the ability to take control of their classroom engagement one lecturer at a time. Our team strives to achieve this by giving lecturers valuable information presented in an easy to read, one-page document. This document becomes immediately useful as it provides relevant and implementable information specific to the lecturer’s individual class(es).

Why we have chosen this solution:
The relevant information would be collected through a survey embedded into the Learning Management System of the university/colledge - which is simply the online platform on which the university operates. This would effectively place our software into the IT ecosystem and subsequently control of the university.

Our Software As A Business solution fits outside various pain-points universities have when it comes to technology adoption.

• Since it is an integrated and interoperable software, its implementation and maintenance cost is extremely low.

• Our end-product’s ease of use for lecturers, ensures that no training is needed beyond a 45second video tutorial provided by us.
  

• The simpleness of our solution for our primary stakeholders (i.e., the university, lecturers, and students) looks to overcome resistance to change. From talking with these stakeholders, we have found that this is a consideration that hold a lot of value for them - having minimal interruptions.

• The security and privacy concerns of our primary stakeholders, are sufficiently addressed through our interoperable software solution. 
  

1. Students - enable their educators to better understand and tailor their education.

2. Lecturers - simplify their course curriculum planning, minimise gaps, increase attention and reduce attrition.

3. Universities - reduce attrition, increase student success.

4. Broader Society - unlock greater no. of minds.

We are well positioned to deliver this solution because we are students and have an intimate awareness of the learning experience through the lens as students. Additionally, we are diverse in culture and backgrounds, with an ever-growing relationship with educators across a multitude of institutions. We not only understand the struggles experienced by students but, we too are grossly aware of the burden placed on educators and in turn, aim that our solution would positively add to both sides of the education system.

We have three stakeholders we serve, these include the students, lecturers, and the educational institutions themselves. The dichotomy of these stakeholders existing in the same ecosystem whilst simultaneously holding starkly different interests has created a huge emphasis on understanding the nuances between them; this is done for the purpose of being able to serve better.

Universities

To understand universities, we have:

• Read through entire suites of policies and procedures relating to engagement and technology adoption. We did this with the aim of understanding the various standards and processes universities have when adopting technology. 

• Analysed matters of relevance to student attrition: 

  • Australian National Inquiry into high attrition rate; Australian National statistics into the attrition rate at universities.

    • We have used this, in particular, to generate accurate information to about the educational above.

  • Various government inquiries somewhat relate to student engagement. I.e. ‘ALRC Report 133’

• Students 

  • To understand what the experience is like for a diverse range of students:

    • We have spoken to a wide array of current and past university students. 

    • As founders going to a different university, we empathise with the issues raised by the students we have talked to.

    • We have analysed studies that reference the student experience.

• Lecturers

  • We have surveyed lecturers from universities all over Australia with questions aimed at understanding the opinion of lecturers on classroom engagement and the resources provided to them by their university.

    • This, in coherence with our research, helped us to understand that our gauge of the situation is at least not limited by geography - it is a nation-wide problem.

Our solution is innovative through the sum of its parts. Each part is logically deduced from well-established and indisputable facts. Our proposed solution has support as a step in the right direction from the students and lecturers we have talked to. Further, it meets the rigorous technological and practical prerequisites for seemly adoption.

We have three core impact goals for the coming year: 

1. Complete a questionnaire tailored to attaining the data sets necessary to attain desired key insights. The test educators should approve this.

2. Advance talks with select educators regarding accessing a test group of students as initial participants.

3. Solidify partnerships with organisations that have indicated shared interests to accelerate growth.

4. Continue collaboration with educators in refining the data sets and formulating an easy-to-use model for educators to access and evaluate the necessary data collected; it must be scalable.

The core technology of our solution will be Learning Management Systems (LMS) which are essentially the digital infrastructure upon which universities deliver their products and services to students. When universities worldwide adopt Software As A Service to offer their students, they simply ‘plug it in’ to their LMS for it to operate in conjunction with their other software that facilitates digital operations; for this to occur, the software must be compatible with the particular LMS. Our solution will focus on Blackboard and Moodle as they are the most popular - thus, allowing us to access the largest proportion of the market possible. 

The solution has not yet been launched. 

We anticipate that our solution will serve 200 people in a direct and meaningful way. 

The challenge we need to overcome is the high barrier of entry in conducting informal testing with volunteer educators. The educators are excited at the prospect of our solution; thus, the issue lies more in convincing attaining university support. We plan to do this through connections with key university stakeholders and external partnerships.

We anticipate that university participation will continue to be one of our most significant challenges. However, have developed plans to overcome this.

Through the identification of shared interests, we are in advanced talks to partner with the following organisations: 

1. Queensland Law Society: they are the official state-wide representative for the legal profession in Queensland. They currently have a strong interest in the disproportionately high attrition rate of Indigenous Australian students. They thus will be looking to make formal enquiries to universities as to their disengagement. 
2. The Legal Forecast: they are a national organisation with high-ranking personnel that have strong connections to a range of universities across Australia. They focus on legal technology and the future of law; this is where our interests meet.

Our business model is a Software As A Service (SAAS). We’d generate revenue by offering our solution as a subscription-based service to our clients - the universities. They’d pay a monthly or annual fee to access our software.

We would serve them by providing an attractive offer: a scalable, interoperable and secure solution that transmits real value to end users. 

This business model is only our plan for entering the market; we have a greater vision for our company. We anticipate that (via predictive models) we’ll be able to play a more active role in student retention at universities. We aim to be an enhancer for Student Success and Engagement Departments at universities.

In the absence of support from grants and the like. We have developed a plan to leverage the ready-to-implement solution (once proven through testing) for the attainment of services to build the final iteration of the software that will meet the technical standards required for adoption by a university.