Background
The basic aim of education is shifting globally to a competency-based model where student grades are no longer a reliable indicator of success. Changes are being implemented without being able to monitor efficiently what is working and what isn’t. Managing the quality of education in a school network has always been a challenge, often relying more on guesswork than evidence due to the difficulties in collecting and interpreting quality assurance data across a number of schools. In a time of fundamental shifts in education and broadening technology access, this is no longer acceptable.
However, the collection and analysis of large amounts of feedback using traditional methods is extremely time-consuming, and given that many educators identify heavy workloads as the biggest obstacle in being more effective, there needs to be a faster, more efficient option.
Edurio aims to solve this problem with one simple product that not only enables a smoother survey process, but completely takes the burden of data analysis off of school leadership and government education officials.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 SME programme for open and disruptive innovation.
Challenge
Edurio is developing a one-of-a-kind web platform to help school networks — governments, municipalities or private —continuously improve the quality of education by collecting and analysing feedback from students, families and teachers in an easy and insightful way. While Edurio already offers a user-friendly survey system with simple, interactive result visualisations, there is still a long way to go to achieve the product they want to deliver.
In order to deliver a product that truly has a positive impact on education, Edurio must establish a proven framework for what makes quality education. Furthermore, the product must help government representatives and education leaders save time and reduce workloads, not add another task to their to-do list — especially one as complex as data analysis. Edurio needs to find a solution that immediately delivers important insights to decision-makers.
The goal of this consultancy project is to advance Edurio's analytic capacity by developing a clear research-based education framework, implementing the customer requirements for data analysis identified during pilot projects and validating the improved features through further international pilot projects. This will enable the company to bring to market a disruptive solution to manage quality of education in schools.
Solution
UCL Institute of Education started work with Edurio in January 2017 and will be advising them during this collaboration which will last until approximately August 2018. With the support of the IOE, Edurio will be able to:
- Create a clear research-based framework for what makes a quality education.
- Allow school network leaders to centrally manage and assign surveys to all assurance schools across their network at no incremental effort, allowing continuous and consistent stakeholder feedback analysis.
- Develop analytic algorithms which will identify improvement areas by schools and across improvement areas the network, highlighting priorities and recommendations. These insights enable school networks to prioritise areas for improvement and better allocate resources.
- Provide evidence for policy decisions ranging from curriculum design, attainment and employability, to continuously tracking pilot programs and education reform through Edurio’s big data analytic approaches.
- Provide automatic diagnostic algorithms and post-survey recommendations to ensure that the data gives actionable insights.
Impact
This research project is ongoing, still in its initial phase. During this project, we will also be working with fellow leaders in education such as Oxford University Press, as well as school networks in the UK, Northern Europe and South Africa. Edurio is currently being piloted in over 300 schools with 50,000 students and 5,500 teachers.
Ultimately, improvements made to Edurio with the help of the IOE will enable the company to bring to market a disruptive solution to manage quality of education in schools through deep analytics and improve learning outcomes for over 15m students globally in 5 years’ time.
(facebook button)(google+ button)(tweet button)Key facts
- Project dates: January 2017 - August 2018
- Partner: Edurio
- Department: Culture, Communication and Media
- Centre: UCL Knowledge Lab
- Team members: Prof Rose Luckin, Dr Manolis Mavrikis, Dr Mutlu Cukurova (UCL Knowledge Lab)
Links
Contact us
ioe.enterprise@ucl.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 7612 6644