On Tuesday we hosted our round table. 12 educators, students, administrators, and parents came to the SurveyGizmo office to take a look at what we’ve done so far and to participate in a discussion about the product. The response was overwhelmingly positive. It was so fun to hear about the various challenges in education our customers are hoping we’ll overcome.
There was a lot of discussion about high school aged students and how to make it easiest for them to get involved. Text messaging and Facebook came up a lot, as did gamification. If you’re not familiar with gamification it basically means making every day things more game like in order to involve people and make learning new skills easier. It’s something we talk a lot about in SurveyGizmo and it’s also prevalent in education right now. If you’re interested check out Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken.
The awesome thing is that we’ve already implemented tons of the suggestions. Our plagiarism checker is live and working awesome. One click and our system will break the assignment down in to parts and let you know if we think it may be plagiarized. It’s pretty cool.
Several parents expressed concern with making it as easy as possible for their students to update their assignments in case the professor hasn’t uploaded them. One suggestion was to somehow allow students to add assignments and to dos using text messaging. I’m pleased to say this is now possible. By texting to 720-606-2763 you can update your to do list, add homework, or if you’re a professor add an announcement. We’re also working on expanding the ability of users to set up specific notifications and reminders tailored to their needs. Being all about choice simplicity it’s important to us that you receive your reminders in a way that’s most convenient for you, whether that be text, e-mail, or a mobile app.
This is the beauty of agile development, we can literally build out features in minutes. One feature was requested on facebook and we were literally able to have it working in the application within 10 minutes!
This process has been so exciting and I really do believe that we’re onto something awesome. We already have a Learning Management System, which serves the users, and with your help and feedback we’ll continue to make it better and better. I think the round table guests confirmed my suspicions that this is something long awaited and really exciting. You’ll notice we now have feedback tabs pretty much everywhere on the site, which will allow you to give us your thoughts and suggestions. So keep that feedback coming!
