Doing <<Scalable Things vs Right Things>>

Quick context - why am I even talking about this?

In one of the discussions that I had earlier this week, we were talking about Feedbacks that go to the parents on the students' performance. With a very strong opinion, I said parents are tired of only charts and graphs as a means of sending feedback - they want qualitative feedback from the teachers. Here is what I got as the response

You can only afford to send charts and graphs because that's the only scalable way of sending feedback!

And this is when it struck me -

<aside> 💡 Shall we do things that are scalable or shall we focus on doing things which the customers want and then figure out a way to scale them?

</aside>

To be honest, there is no perfect answer to this but when it comes to your core product there is no point doing scalable things if your customers aren't happy with it. When it comes to your core product - always do the right things and then figure out a way to scale them

At DUX Education, we have always been conscious of doing the right thing → we always give it a try. Let me share three specific examples with you:

Shall we solve for mid-term exams at all?

Oh! the sheer number of conversations and debates we have had around this! To set the context, no one in India has been able to prepare students for mid-term exams and unit tests → the reason being, every single school has a different syllabus; a different schedule. This is also one of the reasons that no matter how much edtechs have grown; 99% of the after-school education market remains unorganised. I write about this in detail here.

The end point was

if we aren't able to solve for this problem for the parents; there is no need for DUX Education to exist at all!

So we went about studying the syllabus of 500 schools and created a fluid session plan engine that ensures that we cater to every single student; every single school in a batch of 10 students. Took us 3 months to figure this out and then another 3 to scale that up to hundreds of batches but here we stand - DUX Education is the only player to have solved for it!

Polls and Quizzes do not work, what should we do?

We had seen so many platforms and also the earlier sessions where the only way to judge the understanding of the students was polls and quizzes in the class. Early on in the journey, we understood that it's not effective and the only good way to test the understanding of the students is to actually check the notebook - just like the good old days when your teacher would take your notebook and check it in front of you.

Well the same question comes back to you to haunt - how do we develop this? Even if we do it, this is no way scalable! If no one is doing it, there must be a reason for it!

The answer - if the customer really needs it; it has to be done..period!

So we ideate, experiment, implement and iterate and there we have India's first live classwork module - scalable and effective!

The key message being - push the boundaries!

If not just charts and graphs, what should be the shape of feedbacks?

This wasn't an easy one - we spoke to all our teachers and parents - and guess what, it actually turned out to be the most simple one!

Parents said

• We want some qualitative feedback → we mandated some qualitative comments along with the scores. The quality of qualitative feedback is automatically scanned for length of comment and key words - so the teachers can't just write "Good kid" etc - it has to be descriptive
• We want to talk to the teachers → we started PTMs. Now again, there were discussions around how many PTMs shall we allow, what happens if someone abuses the system but we went with an open mind and made unlimited PTMs available for parents. There is no learning without experimenting (this is for some other day though!) → we have delivered more than 100K hours of teaching on the platform and keep on doing this even today. No question on this being scalable or not!

Teachers said

• How do we communicate with the parents outside the monthly feedback system?
• we created an intermittent feedback system which is whatsapp first. As a teacher, go to your admin panel and just type the message → it goes as an automated whatsapp message to the parents. This continues to be the most used and loved feature by teachers!

Have a question on why we are doing what we are doing? Write to me at [email protected]

What is your "doing right things" vs "doing scalable things" story?