Back to School 2019: Teacher Experience Improvements, Part I
By Jen Begonia, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Andrew Ordover, Director of Product Management, and Tracy Vigus, User Experience Manager
One of the great (albeit exhausting) things about working for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company like Achieve3000 is that we exist in a state of continuous improvement. Our product is never done. We don’t manufacture and roll out a car that someone will drive for 10 years with (hopefully) just a few visits for scheduled maintenance. No, to play with that metaphor, we constantly upgrade the tires, the engine, the exterior…
In our case, of course, we’re not thinking about how to get better highway gas mileage; we’re focusing on supporting our users’ literacy acceleration goals at the individual, class, school, or district level. To that end, we listen and talk to students, teachers, instructional leaders, and district admins all year round. We constantly extrapolate from these interactions with users the usability improvements we prioritize for research and development. As we design and refine features, our user experience team explores and validates interface decisions with our users in the field. Our product development teams release improvements to different branches of our software multiple times per year.
One of those times is usually toward the end of June. This year’s release is scheduled for June 30 and it’s an exciting evolution in the teacher experience. Yes, for the first time in several years, educators using Achieve3000’s PRO family of solutions (including BOOST and ACCESS) will benefit from a major ease-of-use redesign within the Teacher Edition.
As of July 1, teachers coming to the new Teacher Edition home page [TV1] [TV2] will notice a much sleeker look and feel that more closely mirrors [TV3] the Student Edition for middle and high schools. But it’s not just flash—there are incredible changes in functionality to be found on this new home page, too.
Teachers familiar with our solutions will discover that they can drive the program (i.e., make instructional and scheduling decisions for their classes) entirely from the homepage instead of going through My Lessons. Key lesson attributes for decision-making will be accessible with one click. Opportunities for previewing and assigning content will be more intuitive, with the information and capabilities teachers told us they want now provided at point-of-use. Our relaunched Resource Center (formerly AskAchieve3000) in the Teacher Edition will better service users’ needs with even more on-demand learning and support.
We’re proud that our users’ ongoing feedback systematically informs everything we develop. They care enough to tell us what they want and need for learning, and we care enough to improve. And that’s why, together, we can unlock potential for students worldwide.[TV4]
Come back soon to read the next installment, Back to School 2019: Teacher Experience Improvements, Part II, where we tell you about the brand-new data center [TV5] launching in the Teacher Edition before the U.S. Labor Day holiday! One click from the home page will bring teachers to a dashboard for class and student performance and usage metrics. Here’s a sneak peek:
