Context
For teams to work their best, we believe that knowledge and skills are the cornerstones for practicing effective communication, delegation, efficacy, ideation, support, and process implementation. Building strong and effective teams requires more than an assembly of talented individuals. For a team to be truly effective, its members must unite with a shared vision and be motivated by the same goal(s) to bring that vision into fruition. The success of a team is rooted in the unique competencies and skills each member possesses. When prompted with the task to build a better way for teams to work, our team chose to focus on the area of education to create an app that helps strengthen the knowledge and skills a team can master to drive business success.
The Problem
Skills and knowledge gaps are one of the biggest roadblocks to successfully achieving business goals. Skill gaps lead to low performance and to increased costs, while also impacting motivation, engagement and retention. Together, our team decided to embark on creating an app designed to close the gaps between the needs of an organization and the capabilities of its team members by making an engaging learning environment available directly through the monday.com platform.
The Solution
Introducing monday dojo…
A learning hub for individuals and teams to build their skills by completing fun and engaging courses on a variety of topics designed to support collaboration, goal sharing, strengthen the way teams work, and help project management teams work together more efficiently and effectively.
monday dojo is a scalable solution built to exist within the monday.com framework. We firmly believe that learning should be fun, which is why we’ve created this platform to help bridge gaps in team knowledge and skills while strengthening the capabilities of the team. Our goal is to help businesses attain the excellence they strive for. By improving the knowledge and skills of a team, this directly benefits not only the individual, but the business as a whole.
The app itself is designed to offer a series of lessons and modules that include videos, text, and quizzes to help people learn new skills and methodologies. Whether it’s a desire to learn how to become a Scrum Master, or the best approach to run a Design Sprint, monday dojo helps teams gain the knowledge and skills needed to support their workflows and to directly impact business goals and outcomes.
How We Started
To kick-off the project, we decided to use the Google Ventures 5-day design sprint methodology to help us narrow down a large focus area into an achievable solution within a short period of time. We started off by establishing a long-term goal which then led us to defining a series of How Might We questions followed by an Affinity Diagram, Note-N-Map exercise, Lightning Demos, and more. Given the massive scope of the problem and the timeline constraints we were working under, we found that running the sprint helped to ensure everyone was able to contribute equally towards uncovering what our MVP deliverable would become.
How It Works
The app is centered around a main dashboard that features the individual users achievements and current progress for the courses they’re enrolled in and have completed. From the dashboard the user can resume their course or join a new course. Once the user is enrolled in the course there will be a series of lessons featuring both videos and text summaries which are then followed by a quiz. Upon completion of each module the user unlocks their certificate of completion followed by a badge on their dashboard to celebrate and reward their newly acquired skills.
How We Built It
Languages JavaScript ES6 Node.js
Framework Express.js
Database MongoDB
API monday SDK
Deployed on Heroku
Libraries React Material UI
Challenges
Using the monday SDK presented a slight challenge at the start where we found there was limited documentation on the monday storage feature; however, this was easily sorted out as we continued to move forward. In addition to this, the departure of a team member due to health reasons during the development process also set us back a bit but we were able to quickly recalibrate team roles and responsibilities to keep the project on schedule.
Accomplishments
Although our initial goal was to implement the hands-on learning module into our mvp solution, time constraints became our primary challenge towards the end of the hackathon. We are extremely proud of the mvp we’ve accomplished - between how we reached the overall concept to what we’ve developed - and ultimately we’re excited by the possibilities we believe the product has moving forward. We certainly look forward to continuing to build upon the app to introduce new features that will continue to add value to not only monday dojo itself, but also as a valuable addition to the monday.com ecosystem as well.
What We Learned
The essence of any hackathon lies in camaraderie and solving real problems as a team. We found that as individuals with a range of education and experience, our productivity was best when everyone listened and was open to other people’s ideas, allowing everyone to see the bigger picture while keeping the solution’s business goals and value proposition in mind.
Further to this, there were a few steps during our design sprint process where we realized we should have spent more time on in some areas, and less time on in other areas. We felt that this approach would be an optimal way to keep everyone in the group on the same page; however, what we learned is that once the sprint was complete, time management became an issue, and also because of the busy schedules each of us have due to work and education commitments. We found that in order for it to be a fluid and beneficial process for everyone, it was imperative that everyone be fully committed to each activity and to play their part in the overall success of the solution.
Value Proposition
monday dojo is an app that has been designed with scalability in mind. The intended purpose of our mvp solution is to ensure users do not feel a need to leave their monday.com workspace to use competitor products, including: Lynda.com, Udemy, or even the GitHub Learning Lab, for skills and information. By offering an education service directly within the monday platform, users are granted unparalleled access to learn not only new skills and frameworks to increase productivity and strengthen project management, but to also find learning tools demonstrating how to use the monday platform more effectively as well.
Our goal moving forward is to easily allow and accommodate new courses to be added to the platform, while also focusing on introducing features to improve and strengthen the user’s learning potential. While the app would be introduced as a free product during the introductory phase, our goal is to be able to introduce new courses and features that could be made available at a tiered price point - longer and more in-depth courses with hands-on learning modules might be priced at a premium, while simple introductory courses could be made available for free.
What’s Next for monday dojo
Further iterations aim to include several new features, including:
- Hands-on learning modules to help teams practice new methodologies and learn new skills by completing fun and realistic tasks.
- Integrate a calendar feature to track course start dates, set time aside to work on each course, etc.
- Introduce an internal rewards system where users are incentivized to participate in more courses to help build their knowledge base and skill sets.
- A feature to allow managers to invite members of their teams to participate in certain courses.
- Our ultimate high-level goal would be to integrate a content creation studio where companies may design and upload their own courses - perhaps as a way to learn a new travel booking system within the business, or to introduce a new rollout for an expense tracking, approval, and reimbursement system.
example images of the hands on module we would like to develop for the next iteration
Links
Code Repo https://github.com/sero-dev/monday-dojo
Try It! https://sero-dev.monday.com/boards/1147606054/views/23011718
Built With
- es6
- express.js
- heroku
- javascript
- materialui
- mondaysdk
- mongodb
- node.js
- react
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