VOA - dashboard
social-emotional data to better inform educators
VOA educação is an Edtech focused on socioemotional assessment and learning for k12 students, supporting educators with a dashboard of their student's skills, like communication, curiosity and empathy. We raised more than R$ 1MM with VC and impacted over 10k students in more than 15 schools.
As a co-founder (and the only designer for most of the time) I had multiple roles in the early stage of the company, being responsible not only for naming, branding, and marketing but also for research, discovery, planning, prototyping and designing digital solutions. The company then merged with Vivadí in 2021 due to our complimentary products and backgrounds, increasing our client base and product offer, but this part is not covered by this study.
Why?
When talking to professionals in the field of education, with the goal of creating an Edtech, we noticed that the subject of social-emotional education is a commonly mentioned topic, and it is an area that still has many challenges to be solved. As strategists, we positioned our company as a B2B targeting k-12 private schools in Brazil.
Discovery
Before deciding what product to build, we invested countless hours of desk and qualitative researches, school visits, and conversations with teachers, coordinators, and managers to better understand our client´s problems. I gained intimacy with some educators and got access to some class councils, an event that happens 4 times a year for teachers to evaluate every single student, talking about their academic performances (hard skills) and social-emotional progress. A few observations that caught our attention were:
Outdated. Methods for keeping track of social-emotional skills were much more primitive and not as standardized as the ones for evaluating academic performance.
Enough meetings? Four times a year might seem a lot, but waiting weeks or months to dig deeper into a student's problem might be too long.
Poor history tracking. Teachers´ recent memories (good or bad) of students contaminated their evaluation.
Opinions not considered. Not all teachers were able to participate in the class council.
Invisible students. Teachers have a hard time evaluating students who are not at the top or have poor performance.
Hypothesis:
What if we could make these meetings
happen alive, at any time, asynchronously,
by using technology?
The Product
Our goal was to better inform the coordinator with a social-emotional map, of what happens at school in real-time. We learned that the technology that is part of school life in many aspects lacked in supporting educators with a 360 view on social-emotional development.
We planned to assess teachers and students to feed a dashboard with their social-emotional records and better inform educators on their class councils meetings, families' one-on-one feedback, school reports, and pedagogical planning. The dashboard could also display grades in attempting to become the go-to tool for any pedagogical information about students and classes. Another benefit is having these pieces of information available at any time, not being necessary to wait weeks or months for a new group meeting.
Features included:
- teachers´ observations
- competences assessment (teacher´s and self-evaluation)
- written text report for families
- positive-behavioral certificates for students
- API integration for setup and grades
- teachers´ observations
- competences assessment (teacher´s and self-evaluation)
- written text report for families
- positive-behavioral certificates for students
- API integration for setup and grades
Considering we had a single product squad to support all tech-related tasks, we planned to quickly deliver the most value with the least effort, test with real-life clients, and iterate based on user feedback. Since day one, I worked closely with the engineers to collectively come up with the most appropriate solutions, considering our strengths and limitations and constantly iterating our solutions. We built using Ant Design design system to make quicker progress both in designing interfaces and coding.
The MVP consisted on digitalizing teacher observations (in a method we learned from one teacher) and visually displaying them. But the tool soon evolved to a more complex year-long evaluation that teachers and students would input tiny bits of information according to the proprietary competencies calendar created by VOA´s educators.
Teachers are busy professionals and already have too many tasks in their routine, and still, we would request them to assess students using our app. Considering we needed to collect a large volume of information, we invested a lot of time in creating a user flow that would request the least possible effort from them, getting positive feedback when they performed this specific task.
The product started being used by one school in the first year, reached about 20 during VOA years, and grew to up 100 schools after merging with Vivadí. Still today it is a constant work in progress and our roadmap includes new features requestes and other improvements brought to the product team by the client success area.
Dashboard studies for validation with clients and scientific council
consolidated numbers in orange | projected numbers in blue
Class overview. Educators' view compared to self-evaluation and punctual observations.
Student's overview. Educators' view compared to self-evaluation, punctual observations, and grades.
A detailed comparison between student's self-evaluation and teachers' assessments in every competence.
