The project
Nova Escola is a non-profit social business in Brazil that helps teachers with all their educational journey, from individual and social aspects to class content.
They were born in the ’80s as a magazine that delivered quality content to almost all teachers in the country. With the ongoing changes in the press industry, Nova Escola evolved into a digital content platform with different offers.
My role
Co-Project Manager – overseeing 2 UX designers – focused on Product Design
Our role was to identify new opportunities to help teachers to improve their teaching practice.
Project
Identify opportunities and prototype solutions to help Brazilian teachers with their practice.
Solution
A list of different service offers to test and implement.
Impact
Launch of Nova Escola Box – a subscription-based content delivery solution.
Findings
Teachers in Brazil face a large number of problems, the consequence of a problematic educational system that has been running with problems for decades. The most relevant issues are low salary and the lack of general education financial resources.
This situation makes it even more difficult to keep a fresh teaching practice, that uses technology and content that relates to students. Teachers usually consume 60% or more of their time preparing classes and filling bureaucratic duties, like filling reports. Also, they still want to keep up with a daily routine, personal development, family etc.
During our extensive research, we talked with 20 or more teachers working on public education.
Based on a combination of the use of technology personal development teaching skills and individual motivation we identified five unique teachers personas with opportunities areas for each.
Every opportunity was transformed into a design challenge to ideate in a sequence of workshops.
The ideation output was a list of service and business ideas organized by career, content (classes), personal development, health, educational system policies.
Teachers main challenges
- Produce and prepare class content to a heterogeneous group of students
- Advance in the career (monetary and professional safety)
- Maintain professional and personal motivation in challenging times.
- Adopt new technologies while maintaining class quality.
Solutions
With Nova Escola’s deep understanding of the Brazilian educational scenario and our Customer Discvory data, we prioritized one project to prototype and test.
Only prototyping a solution was not enough. As our research process has collected a large amount of relevant data about the market and Nova Escola’s internal structure we went further: we also provided a set of business and operational recommendations to increase the chances of successfully implementing the different workshop solutions.
We prepared a pipeline of all projects that were ideated but not prototyped.
Beyond providing answers and solutions our team was also tasked with teaching Nova Escola’s team about the Customer Discovery process, Prototyping and Testing solutions.
Our solution covered
- Professional formation solutions
- Career solutions
- Different revenue models
- Migrating from product to service model
Impact
Nova Escola is working on three new developments based on our recommendations:
1 – Launched a new Subscription Service to help teachers prepare classes.
2 – Moved from a paper magazine subscription to a digital-only model.
3 – Development of a new platform to help teachers advance their careers.