Plan.it

Involvement

I developed the concept with Toke Fritzemeier, Mark Hjelmgaard, Nadja Toft, and Mads Fors. My involvement included:

• Initial concept sketch
• Technical audit of the company
• Articulating technical aspects of the problem and solution
• Observation and interview with UCplus’ IT director
• Business and economical analysis of Plan.it

Background

The leading transportation industry training academy UCplus sought to improve how they manage teaching resources. After in-depth investigation and several interviews with the company, we found a core problem with the time-consuming and cumbersome process of managing teaching resources. Currently, UC Plus uses many external sources of information, including sites for downloading tests, teaching materials, evaluations, and absence registration. Teachers have to remember where to find each of these and download or print them for each class. Our solution organizes these resources for each course and day, allowing teachers to spend more time to plan their lessons rather than just fetching materials.

The primary target group for which we are designing our concept are the teachers at UCplus. The teachers will be using the solution on a daily basis and it is especially their managing issues we want to solve.

Solution

The solution we developed, called Plan.it, is a daily organizer, streamlining teachers’ daily tasks such as registering absences, requesting teacher and testing materials, and recording notes. It can be available offline and easily printable. The system should be very simple and robust to accommodate teachers with little computer experience or patience for learning a new system like Plan.it. Lesson plans would be immediately available for a teacher’s class on their scheduled days, as well as to other teachers substituting for other classes.

The core value of our solution is that it will accommodate the current difficulties of planning and managing the course lectures. By organizing the links and other teaching resources needed to carry out a course in a day-to-day organizer/planner, the system will streamline the currently long and cumbersome process of accessing booking systems for tests, materials or sharing resources internally. The planner will of course be individual, following each teacher’s course, giving him or her a simple overview and schedule of today’s tasks, lecture slides and reminders. However the mission is also to create a common file- and note sharing service for the teachers and thereby avoid having files stuck on a local computer or not making use of each other’s knowledge.

Comprehensive analysis

We wrote a report that documents and analyzes the process of developing a novel concept to address problems faced by the company. This process begins with evaluating the problem description furnished by the company and roughly outlining the business concepts. After further investigation via several research methods, we accurately define the problem space and begin a more targeted concept development process. Our academic backgrounds in business development, IT use in organizations, and user-centered design allows us to clearly identify points of improvement. We found that teachers were spending far more time than they were comfortable with just locating and downloading class resources. We confirmed this with administrators and found that much business value was wasted in this process. Our final concept returns this time and value to the company by streamlining the process of organizing class resources.