Ontos
Supporting teachers to boost individual student outcomes.
On average, teachers have more than 25 students per class. Each of those students has their own learning needs, and today’s K–12 teachers don’t have the resources to address the unique needs of each student.
In 2021, a confidential educational technology client saw an opportunity to support teachers and students through a novel approach—to design and develop an adaptive digital platform for in-class assessments. Such a system should understand the context of curriculum requirements, ask students questions that help inform the system of how effectively students are learning, and provide recommendations to teachers to help them teach each student in a way that supports their individual growth and learning outcomes.
So what happened?
In 2021, Ben began working with client leadership, and led a cross-functional task group to articulate the business opportunity, conduct field remote field research with educators and students, establish a set of foundational use cases, and develop a strong business case and product roadmap for funding and executing on this compelling shared vision, initially called Project START.
In late 2021, Ben worked with education researchers and data scientists to understand how data might flow, and uncover the kinds of insights that could be realistically achieved. In parallel, Ben led a team of strategic designers and engineers to prototype and conduct usability testing for student and teacher interfaces.
In 2022, it became clear that the client’s data research team would need their own set of custom tools to conduct research pertaining to the quality of assessment items that would be delivered to students. We immediately pivoted our focus to discovery and prototype development for a research application to support this important foundational work.
Ultimately, Ben played a visionary client leadership role, helping the project grow into a multi-million dollar engagement employing over 2 dozen researchers, designers, software engineers, and managers for nearly 2 years. In early 2023, the Ontos project was dissolved after an acquisition by a large edtech company.
