Planner-19. Plan smart. Teach smart.

Inspiration

Across the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought on school closures that most schools were not adequately prepared for. Although Education Continuity Plans (ECPs) exist, it is unclear how consistently schools had them prepared and whether they have been effectively deployed upon closures.

In Germany, schooling is obligatory and public schools far outweigh private ones in number. Both follow curriculums governed by each state. Until now, remote teaching in Germany has primarily been adopted by higher education institutions and private schools.

The nature of Covid-19 has left many teachers scrambling to move from face-to-face to purely remote classes. Most teachers were not given adequate guidance in how to transfer their engaging and effective classroom content into remote learning content. Even the "best" teachers known for having fun classes are struggling to maintain this. Friends in our networks who are teachers have been discussing online how little to no support they have received and the added stress that this has brought. Remote learning comes with many challenges for children and parents, but we feel like the attention on teachers has remained neglected. Remote learning requires more variety in learning material, relies heavily on resources available to the child at home, reduces peer to peer interaction and lacks mechanisms and techniques used by teachers in a face-to-face setting. Teachers also receive little to no feedback from how the students are responding to the work. What works in a normal classroom setting doesn’t work as well at home. Teachers have no ways in which to control the class, keep individuals on track, give extra support to students who are struggling etc. Parents are complaining of too many worksheets being sent home, some are also noticing a heavy reliance on tutorials online- both of which can be effective- but in moderation. Many schools in Germany have not adopted live, online classrooms into their remote working schedules and it is apparent that teachers have been expected to know instinctively how to transfer their lesson plans into remote lessons. Little to no guidance has been given to teachers to support their transition and to understand what remote learning lesson plans should look like. Anxieties around using technology to teach have not been addressed.

Planner-19 aims to support teachers in creating exciting, engaging, effective lesson plans suited for remote learning. A “smart” component would help teachers to easily recognise plans that are not balanced in content and make recommendations on other similar content that could optimise the lesson. We aim to reduce the anxieties and difficulties faced by our teachers and support them through this time. With greater use of the tool, we hope that in the future, teachers are inspired to continue creating machine optimised classroom plans to ease their preparation and delivery of learning materials.

What it does

The tool allows teachers to create smart, effective remote lesson plans that balance learning formats and advise teachers on how to improve them. Teachers are able to see the requirements from the state/government and see the learning objectives of each module. They are able to choose from a wide variety of sources (either free online content or content prepared and shared by other teachers on the platform) to build a lesson plan. Based along some criteria and learning models (e.g. too short vs. too long, difficult content vs. easy content, interactive vs. instructional etc.) the tool recognises when a lesson is not optimal and makes suggestions on areas that can be improved.

Challenges I ran into

There is a lot of variance in what teachers are experiencing- a wider analysis of the situation is necessary to understand all the needs and which ones could be addressed by this tool. We're still missing the understanding from the state/government point of view- what is allowed, what is already on offer that we are unaware of etc.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We're a group of friends who only found out about this hackathon the day before/day it was due to start. We approached it as a creative challenge- had an idea of which domain we were interested in, but only that. We started at 0 and we've reached an idea with detailed features in one weekend.

What I learned

By bringing together a mix of people with different skills and experiences, adding a little bit of time pressure and thinking together and working towards a common goal can result in creative solutions. Hackathons are fun- and I've learned a lot from this experience- mostly I'm impressed by all the other ideas that I have seen and now feel like I have a small glimpse into what hackathons are about.

What's next for Planner-19

We would need to decide whether to push this idea through to a solution. In order to do that, we would need to discuss with some more teachers in the public school sector to understand the situation more. We would involve the Ministry of Education/ Educational institutions to understand their specific needs and wants. Once the research is done, we would need to involve experts to develop the AI/ML algorithms and pilot to a small group of public school teachers, develop go-to-market strategy and pricing models, launch to public schools and make the tool accessible to a wider audience.