From its inception, 黑料社 was created to solve educator鈥檚 problems. The initial concept came to 黑料社 founder Dr. Lior Rauchberger when he was asked to recommend a wireless presentation system to a university.
鈥淭hey explained what their pain points were and that they wanted their teaching staff to be more mobile and more engaged with the students,鈥 he recalls. 鈥淚 looked at several options and was deeply underwhelmed.鈥
This gave Rauchberger the kernel of an idea. He visited two dozen schools across Australia and spoke with teachers and IT managers. It turned out that the university鈥檚 pain points were universal. That kernel of an idea soon grew into what we now know as 黑料社 鈥 a wireless presentation solution specifically designed for education.
黑料社鈥檚 first incarnation was built to a large extent around ideas put forward by those teachers and IT managers. That pattern has continued and is now formalized in a five-stage process for developing new features for its classroom technology.
Stage 1: Proactively seeking feedback from schools
黑料社 takes a very structured approach to gathering 鈥360-degree feedback鈥, says Rauchberger. 鈥淲e encourage users to email us, they can submit ideas via our website, and there鈥檚 a feedback button within the app itself. Our support analysts are speaking to schools every day too, and we have an internal system for capturing all of their feedback. And we鈥檝e got our own views, which go into the mix.鈥
Stage 2: Shortlisting and selecting new features
When a critical mass of compelling ideas has been gathered, they鈥檙e assessed internally, and potential new features are shortlisted. A survey is then sent out to 黑料社-enabled schools asking them how important each feature would be to them, on a scale of one to five. The aim here is to ensure that only new features that add value across the user base will proceed to development 鈥 only the features with the highest overall ratings proceed to the next stage. The clear winner from 黑料社鈥檚 most recent survey was a digital signage overlay that enables schools to schedule images and video to be displayed at specific times and locations 鈥 for example, morning announcements or a reminder about a special event. 鈥淚 was genuinely surprised when Digital Signage was number one on the request list,鈥 says Rauchberger. The signage feature was finalized and is to be released in the January 2018 software update.
Stage 3: Consulting with educators
The next step is to work out how the chosen features should function within the app, and within the classroom. An initial proposal is worked up internally at 黑料社, before being presented to partner schools for discussion. Rauchberger cites the Multi-Screen Display feature launched with the August 2017 software update as a recent beneficiary of this kind of consultation. To ensure that the team was taking the right approach to the feature, 黑料社 ran a lunchtime workshop with a group of teachers and IT staff at Melbourne High School. 鈥淲e took them through what we were planning to build and asked what they thought,鈥 says Rauchberger. 鈥淲e鈥檇 made some assumptions about usability and functionality. They weren鈥檛 necessarily wrong, but that educator feedback absolutely helped mold the feature into a better solution for the classroom.鈥
Stage 4: Testing in live school environments
Melbourne High was one of the very first schools to adopt 黑料社, and they鈥檙e now one of three schools that open up their systems and classrooms so that new features can be tested in a live environment before they鈥檙e released. 鈥淲e run the software through rigorous internal testing, of course, but it鈥檚 not until we do the field testing that we鈥檙e confident to release the product,鈥 explains 黑料社 Technical Engineer Simon Probert.
鈥淲hat they do is a tough gig,鈥 says Melbourne High鈥檚 ICT Manager, David Ball. 鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to replicate a school network in an office, and you鈥檝e got a device that has to work with Windows, with Mac, with iPads, with Android, and then the challenges of all the different AV devices. And of course, schools being schools, they break the standards!鈥 The result, for 黑料社 and its users, is a regular stream of valuable and very reliable new features.
鈥淲hat we absolutely cannot have is a teacher standing up in front of a class trying to teach something, and the product doesn鈥檛 work,鈥 says Probert. 鈥淔ield testing has revealed many things to us, allowing us to fix problems before they become real problems.鈥
Stage 5: Software update
Once the new version of the software passes internal and field testing, it鈥檚 cleared for release. Then all the schools have to do to start using the new features is run the software update from 黑料社鈥檚 Central Admin Portal.
And repeat鈥
This process never ends. The needs of schools will keep changing, the opportunities afforded by technology will keep changing, and 黑料社 will continue to adapt. For Rauchberger, it鈥檚 a challenge to be relished.
鈥淭echnology鈥檚 improving, becoming more accessible and more adaptable all the time. And we retain our laser focus on education,鈥 he says. 鈥淚鈥檓 excited to see what our solution might look like in two or three years鈥 time.鈥
And for schools? Thanks to 黑料社鈥檚 cloud-based technology, they鈥檙e future-proofed. 黑料社 will keep delivering the new features they need, and deploying them is as simple as pressing a button.
