Akiraku : Building the curator in an educator
The picture below is that of a classroom from 1911
A hypothetical scenario where we could be teleported to that very classroom probably would not evoke any wistful reminiscence, as we would upon encountering a period piece. Rather what descends upon us is a feeling of deja vu. Whether it is an irony or tragedy, is for us to choose.
Education and more accurately its deliverance has seen very little change, probably amongst the least if we compare it with any other professional sectors. It is not that an effort hasn’t been made into innovating the classroom, its just that they have been arbitrary and incoherent with the actual needs of a classroom. The holistic truth about any innovation, has been its need to substitute any existing task and replace it with an alternate version that requires less effort and time.
Before Akiraku was born, we as its founders were an intrinsic part of classroom, as teachers of a well established school in Beijing, teaching computer science to high school students. In retrospect, probably the birth of Akiraku coincided as we taught through subsequent years. But this isn’t about our journey but more about the value we wanted to create.
A teacher’s lifecycle (as we personally experienced) is mostly centred around preparing and delivering lessons, evaluating students, and grading them. From our own observation it’s the last that takes the bulk of it. Between all these, teachers are hardly left with any time and scope to improvise their lesson plans, thereby hindering any chance to innovate curriculum delivery. As teachers ourselves, aiming at the very philosophy of “innovate by substitution”, we were keen on adopting technology from day one. We experimented with a lot of tools and while we met with some degrees of success, it presented itself with a new set of problems. A) The need for more than one tool. This is understandable, as given the breadth of tasks a teacher needs to perform, it’s folly to expect a single tool to cater to all. However it was quite a pain when for a simple sub task we had to look for alternatives. e.g. For programming tasks we loved REPL. But our evaluation needs were more than just programming which REPL didn’t meet. B) Scalability This was the bigger problem. Most products did not scale up well for prolonged usage. Simple questions like “How do I organise my digital resources and assessments year after year? How do I avoid redundancy?” were left weakly answered. It’s as though the people that built edu-tech tools didn’t have enough classroom experience.
The bedrock of Akiraku’s vision is an attempt to address these problems. The inspiration was to create an ecosystem of tools in lieu of a single tool to help teachers in their day to day activity. The tools would have a similar look and feel, have a single sign on process and would share data between themselves.
Some advantages are instant
- Unified application experience. The user experience doesn’t change when user navigates between applications. This helps both students and teachers alike.
- Single Sign On. No need for multiple user accounts.
- Reduce redundancy. To begin with, the applications share the classrooms you create. So once you create a classroom and add students, they are accessible within the other applications.
At its infancy we focus on two main activities where teachers spend time the most i.e. classroom interactions, content sharing and classroom assessments. Borne out of that vision are the two products
SCRUDU (https://scrudu.akiraku.com)
Hub takes on the idea of effective communication with students and sharing resources. The USP of the product is that it facilitates teachers with limited digital resources via simple sharing of cloud folders, as well as those sitting on a plethora of resources by a unique mechanism called course-books. As the name suggests it’s a book but for digital assets like videos, links, notes, categorised into chapters and sub-chapters.
Scrudu is Akiraku’s assessment tool. Scrudu aims at being the Swiss Army Knife for classroom evaluation. It focuses on a myriad of assessment settings that is often required in a classroom setup. It has a range of question types, and a solid support for auto-grading. We don’t forget that over the many months of teaching, a teacher would probably sit on a lot of assessments, and so to aid that we allow teachers to curate their own Question Banks. Handling low network connectivity during exams, or minimising unfair practices or for that matter performance analytics, the user experience of the application tries to meet them all.
In our next article we would go deeper into each of these tools, so as to give you a better glimpse of each. Meanwhile we encourage you to give a shot at our demo which you can find at https://akiraku.com.
