Reboot Presentation

[dagilleland]

Make a presentation for re-booting this project.

[dagilleland]

I would recommend a few reading points, for inspiration.

• Lean Startup Development
  • Business Model - Capture Your Vision on a Single Page - plus 5 follow-up articles
    1. How to Document Your Business Model
    2. Your Product is NOT “The Product”
    3. Why Lean Canvas vs Business Model Canvas?
    4. The Different Worldviews of a Startup
    5. Delivering Effective Investor Pitches With Lean Canvas
    6. Build Your Startup Through Conversations
  • The Waffle.io blog, specifically
  • The First Post - Lean Startup Internship - Intro to Innovation Island and Waffle.io
  • Lessons Learned Doing Customer Development
  • Learning Before Building
  • Not TDD, or BDD, but EDD (about creating "experiments")
• Version Control
  • Using GitHub Issues Effectively

[dagilleland]

Why am I doing this project?

The idea for this project came when I saw students having problems figuring out what courses to take in order to go down a particular career path. I saw them burning up lots of time and energy and sometimes making mistakes that could cost them both money and time in getting their diploma.

On the other side of the fence, I saw the people who were planning the courses and career paths: Juggling how to get ~100 courses arranged into 9 career paths with pre-requisites and co-requisites - all for a two-year diploma in which students would take only 20-25 courses in total! Part of the goal for the program was to create something that was both flexible for students and adaptive for the rapid pace of change and knowledge in our field.

When I saw the way it was being done, I thought, "Surely there must be a better way!" I wanted to help build a solution.

Side-Benefits

Time to fess up! I also was looking for some side-benefits.

I teach people how to write software, and I wanted a larger project that would help me to a) upgrade my own skills, b) try out stuff I had been reading about, and c) develop some good patterns & practices that will help my day-to-day job go smoother (for me and my students).

I also have to confess that I can be really good at starting up ideas and projects, but I'm terrible at completing them. What's worse, I've seen myself over the years doing most of my work as "solo" projects, and there just isn't enough time/money/energy in a day to do everything myself. I need to get better at gathering people around me to help me solve problems and build solutions.

So, I hope to gain both professional and personal benefits from a project like this.

Oh, and I also just like to help. I see people & organizations struggling, and I want to make life better for them. It's part of how I'm wired in wanting to make a difference in the world. And I want this project to make a difference in my school, and others too.

The Problem (in a nut-shell)

The Student Side

Part of what made it difficult for the students was the tool that they were given to make their decisions - it was an Excel spreadsheet showing the potential career paths, their related courses, and all the pre-requisites and co-requisites. What added to the difficulty was the large number of "electives" (E.g.: "You need 4 of these 8 potential courses as 3rd-term courses; 3 of them are strongly recommended and the other 5 are just suggested.").

The other parts that made it difficult relate to what the students had already taken and their desire to sometimes change career paths part-way through their studies ("Do I have the courses I need to go forward?" "Will I have all the requirements to graduate?").

To top it all off, the self-enrollment tools are totally separate from this spreadsheet. And the whole process is so new & different to students coming from High School that it could feel pretty bewildering.

The School's Side

It's hard to plan a curriculum: Juggling how to get ~100 courses arranged into 9 career paths with pre-requisites and co-requisites. It had to be done in a short time and with few resources. But it was done - and a lot of people went the extra-mile to make the plan come together.

But it's a constantly changing landscape of courses. Technologies change. Industry needs more adaptive solutions and employers. And students need to be equipped. From the perspective of instructors, the actual delivery of courses reveals opportunities to improve and change them. Sure, there is a lot of pre-planning going on, but in the end it's still a trial-and-error experience where we discover what works and what doesn't.

And so, as a complex curriculum is maintained and upgraded, the old challenges of co-coordinating it all remain while new challenges emerge. How do you handle course equivalencies for students who "straddle" different versions of the curriculum? What about changes in pre-requisites that could leave a student unable to take a course? And what if the student wants to change career paths? How will that affect them? How do you keep it all straight, from the perspective of the administrators?

And the current tools to help solve these problems? Again, Excel spreadsheets. It's a quick & dirty solution. But like I tell my students, "When the quick is said and done, the dirty remains."

Summary

In many ways, these are not new problems. Universities have experienced them for years. Many technical schools skirted the issues, because such complexities weren't relevant for two-year diplomas. But that's changing, because the needs and opportunities of industry are changing.

This project isn't meant to solve all the problems - or even be the "best" or "only" solution. But maybe it can solve it for us. Or someone else. And maybe we can learn something along the way.