The Value of Student Feedback: Lessons Learned from an EdTech Startup
Innovator: “a person or an organization who is one of the first to introduce into reality something better than before”.
Teachers are innovators. They have the opportunity to test out new ideas with their students and adjust accordingly based on student feedback. When edtech companies build products for teachers and students to use, shouldn’t it be just as integral that these companies are ensuring that they receive feedback from teachers and students as they develop the product?
According to recent research done on edtech pilots in schools, receiving quality student feedback has been lacking. Instead of companies receiving direct feedback from students about their products, the feedback from pilots usually tends to go from students to teachers, teachers to principals, and from principals finally to the edtech companies themselves. This is an inefficient process, and if edtech companies really want to build tools that students value, they need to really think through this process better.
“Student voice is vital to consider throughout a pilot process, as they are the true end-users.” — Sean Cavanagh
The Comprendio team wanted to do things differently. We wanted to put students FIRST as we designed our platform. Below, I’ve outlined three of our biggest lessons we’ve learned as we strive to put students first while we continue to iterate:
LESSON LEARNED: Maintain constant communication with your end-users. Listen to them.
Any time we’ve added in a new feature, or even tweaked something on the platform, we ask for feedback from our pilot cohort user base. We don’t just ask students whether or not they like certain features that we’ve added in (although that’s great feedback, too), we also ask students to share their OWN ideas about how they think Comprendio could be improved.
Real example:
Question: Do you have any ideas to improve Comprendio?
Anonymous student’s response: “I feel like maybe the way students can know whether they right or wrong should be changed. I feel like students should know right away if what they wrote it correct not until the teachers do a check.”
So what did we do? We agreed with the student’s feedback and started developing mockups right away! Here are two of our mockups that we created:
After a lot of deliberative thought, we came to a team decision and our fabulous developers were able to produce this:
This feature-add was huge for our platform, and we couldn’t have done it without the quality feedback that we received from our student pilot users.
LESSON LEARNED: Minimize the feedback delay from your end-users.
Timing. It’s hugely important for teachers — they only have a certain amount of time with their students every day to ensure that their students will be prepared to move on to the next grade level, start life in the real world, or go on to college. When teachers receive feedback from their students quickly, it allows teachers to act on the feedback and adjust instruction accordingly to meet the needs of all of their learners most effectively and efficiently. Quite similarly, timing is just as CRUCIAL for startups. We really don’t have any time to waste as we are working tirelessly to make our product the best that it can be for our ultimate end-users. We can’t waste time thinking up and adding in features to our platform that the students MIGHT like, or else we may stumble into the dark territory of complexity avoidance. We need real feedback from students to understand how they feel and listen to what they need.
Compared to the delayed student feedback process that appears to currently exist for many edtech pilots (student — teacher — principal — edtech company), our simple process (student — company) streamlines student feedback so that we’re truly able to adjust the platform as soon as students share their thoughts with us!
Our student pilot users have become an integral component of our product development team, and this is largely because the feedback delay between them (our end-users) and our company is gone.
LESSON LEARNED: Hire those who are your end-users.
Why would it ever make sense for an edtech company to exclude teachers and students from the company? The answer is, it would never make sense, yet we all know that a plethora of edtech startups are lacking teachers and students. Comprendio is a small team — but of our four team members, three of us were classroom teachers! Our ability as a team to EMPATHIZE with our end-users is made that much easier due to the fact that we were our end-users not too long ago.
Since students are also our end-users, we’re making sure to include students in the company, too. We currently have Melia Okura interning with us as a Junior Q/A Developer. Melia is a senior at Waimea High School. She’s interested in computer programming and cybersecurity. In fact, she even programmed her own password cracker at her school’s science fair this year! We’ll be sharing more about her and our other student intern (Liam Clive) in our next piece.
I see these three lessons [1) maintain constant communication with your end-users, 2) minimize the feedback delay from your end-users, and 3) hire those who are your end-users] being applicable to edtech startups and startups in general. The startup journey is full of ups and downs, surprises and stress, but most of all, learning. Working for Comprendio has been such an enormous learning opportunity for me so far, and I look forward to continuing to learn from others in (and out) of the industry.
If you’re interested in connecting with Comprendio, please contact us at info@comprend.io. We’d love to connect and learn together! You can also find us on here on Twitter.
Lizzy Schiller is the author and serves as Comprendio’s Director of Community Operations.
