Edio – Education for individualized outcomes

Education that fits the student, not the system

In a rapidly changing world, access to innovative, high-quality education remains a priority. In a major effort to meet that goal, the Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA) engaged RSM to create a software platform offering a new and improved educational experience for students that focuses on providing successful learning outcomes. The RSM team behind CCA’s new project truly understood that every student learns differently, and aimed to create an experience uniquely tailored to the individual.

CCA’s reality

After RSM worked with CCA on improving its website to provide a better cyber school experience, CCA sought to bring families, students and educators together in a cohesive learning community. Their leadership realized the only way to successfully develop and engage with that community was by replacing their existing learning platform. CCA tapped RSM to design a new software system with the student at the center—a product and approach known as edio, or education for individualized outcomes. Our partnership marked the beginning of an amazing journey toward redefining education, one experience at a time.

Tackling the problem

The public education system in the United States is in many ways broken, the result of decades of policy- and decision-making based on an idealized view of how students learn and teachers teach. The RSM team utilized a human-centered approach to understand the system’s real participants and students’ everyday struggles, and to build solutions with each of them at the center.

Allow us to take you through two years, hundreds of miles, and thousands upon thousands of hours of work on this ambitious project.

Research

To fully understand how to create an effective platform, we started with a discovery phase, striving to ask the right questions and let the answers guide us. We traveled the state of Pennsylvania and visited seven school sites. We learned the stories of the student, the parent, the teacher, and the administrator and immersed ourselves in their respective worlds. We held workshops with CCA staff members and conducted a deep, competitive analysis of educational product features. We created personas, defined roles, and developed affinity maps from volumes of sticky notes that tied features to those personas.

Synthesis

To synthesize this extensive research, we mapped user flows and corresponding product flows. We diagrammed systems and the activity of their users, detailing how data was processed and which integrations were the most valuable. We tested how other systems would integrate with edio, which offers over 30 third-party content integrations that seamlessly allow for the creation of hybrid courses incorporating external resources.

Design

Once we knew what was needed, the RSM team began the visual design process by producing hundreds of rough sketches of the new platform. Simultaneously, we conducted style explorations to hone the system’s visual language and identity.

User testing

We started writing the code to build the product. The RSM team tested the code repeatedly, solicited and categorized feedback, and used the resulting information to make changes.