Venture: Learn4Life
Learn4Life ensures that earning a high school diploma is within the reach of every child in the United States
Expert: Tim Chang
Head of Engineering, Fictiv
• Director of Engineering, Shopkick
Learn4Life partnered with Rippleworks to understand how to best serve students with technology
Learn4Life is a network of non-profit public schools that provides students that have not had success in a traditional setting with personalized learning, career training, and life skills. Each school is locally controlled, tuition-free, and gives students the flexibility and 1:1 time they need to succeed. Learn4life serves nearly 50,000 students each year in nearly 100 resource centers with an 89 percent success rate.
Learn4Life’s top priority was to more deeply understand how to best serve its students using technology. Learn4Life partnered with Rippleworks to adopt user-centered design thinking best practices to better understand student pain points and prioritize potential solutions.
Rippleworks helped us fully integrate student voice into our technology strategies right before the pandemic hit. The timing could not have been better if we had foreseen what was about to hit us.
On March 13, 2020, right in the middle of our Rippleworks consultation, we immediately pivoted from an in person model to an online educational model: distributing 25,000 laptops and hot spots; moving curriculum and instruction into the virtual space; establishing a student staffed inventory tracking and user support helpdesk; and fully utilizing our SMS communication systems based on what we learned during our earlier student focus groups with Rippleworks.
We consider our work learner-centered, at it truly is.
—Lifelong Learning National Superintendent Caprice Young
Learn4Life partnered with Tim Chang, a startup engineering expert who led technology and product teams at Fictiv, shopkick, and TellMe Networks. Together they:
• Learned human-centered design-thinking methodology and how to apply it to Learn4Life’s context
• Understood students’ top pain points by conducting six focus groups across three Learn4Life campuses
• Aligned on a set of recommendations and an approach to uplevel systems to tackle students’ top pain points
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