Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EDURIO (Edurio – a revolutionary web platform for school networks to improve the quality of education through deep analytics of stakeholder feedback)

Teaser

Managing the quality of education in a school network has till now depended more on guesswork than evidence due to the difficulties in collecting and interpreting quality assurance data across schools. In a time of fundamental shifts in the education industry and broadening...

Summary

Managing the quality of education in a school network has till now depended more on guesswork than evidence due to the difficulties in collecting and interpreting quality assurance data across schools. In a time of fundamental shifts in the education industry and broadening technology access this is no longer acceptable.

Across Europe and beyond governments are focusing on continuously improving the quality of education. Improving the scores in PISA, the OECD’s test for student achievement, is a core part of education policy for most countries. Therefore governments are initiating major curriculum transformations and implementing improvement programmes in their school networks.

The basic aim of education is shifting globally to a competency-based model where student grades are no longer the only reliable indicator of success. This is seen across Europe and globally as the workplace no longer requires students to just master information but increasingly requires them to develop competencies and mind-sets. Currently these changes are implemented without being able to monitor what is working and what isn’t.

Stakeholder feedback is a critical part of evaluating quality and assessing impact of change but the current manual feedback practices give very little useful information to school network leaders and are a hassle to manage for everybody involved.

Edurio is developing the first web platform to help school networks (governments, municipalities or private) continuously improve the quality of education by collecting and analysing feedback from students, parents and teachers in an easy to use and insightful way. The project covers advanced prototyping, scale-up and market validation activities and will bring us to a wide market uptake across the EU and beyond. It will help us implement the full functionality for school network leaders and embed our deep analytics capability into the system.

Work performed

During this project extensive work has been carried out on enhancing the Edurio platform technological and analytical capabilities, as well as on working with our pilot partners which has helped to deepen our understanding of the education market. Insights and feedback from our pilot partners also served as the core driver of improving the platform.

For example, to be able to support the onboarding of large international pilot partners the internal system of the platform has been refactored. Together with leading experts in education from University College London Institute of Education (UCL IoE) we have developed the analytical capabilities of the platform. Features such as comparison over time and data matrix allow to quickly gather and analyse meaningful insights from survey results that can lead to action.
The recently published Edurio Handbook and Framework for Effective Education (available here: https://www.edurio.com/schoolimprovement) have had a great impact on Edurio’s work with pilot partners, as well as has helped schools and school networks get the most out of using Edurio.

We have also completed a legal review in preparation for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and implemented the necessary improvements. This review has ensured our further conformity with legal requirements of target markets. We have also secured necessary intellectual property rights in the respective markets.

Extensive communication and promotion has also taken place during this project period through our participation in international education and education technology events such as the BETT Show in London, UK, SXSWedu in Austin, USA and others.

Overall we have concluded this project period with a highly improved platform, having completed both functional and analytical improvements. We have also secured a number of international school network pilot partners with whom work continues on testing the whole platform and separate features. Moreover, the communication and dissemination activities have helped us reach a wide audience and many potential customers, setting the foundations to reaching commercial readiness in the following part of the project.

Final results

In this part of the project, the Edurio platform has been developed to best fit school network requirements. This has included a number of technical innovations pushing it far ahead of the current state-of-art technologies available for the network leaders. Our system architecture uniquely enables multi-level distribution of insights (network leaders, school leaders, teachers) and automatic analytics that help non-data experts interpret the data without using additional analytics tools. These include flexible data matrices, time period comparison and filtering/benchmarking, never until now available in an integrated system for schools and school networks. We have also laid the groundwork for further analytic approaches by developing a reliability filter, custom respondent tagging and started work on improved methodologies for feedback collection.

The rest of the project will build on these foundations and implement the validated features and methodologies into the wider system offering. We will expand on our pilot activities, focusing on preparing Edurio for commercial readiness. The impact from this project has already been material for improving education within Europe and beyond with over 1000 schools being able to learn from their students, parents and teachers, and improve the quality of education they provide.

Website & more info

More info: https://edurio.com/.