Boston-based Panorama Education acknowledged publicly Tuesday that schools need more than just the company's technology.
"One of the most important data sources school districts have is survey data from students," noted Founder and CEO Aaron Feuer (photographed below) in an email to BostInno. And although the ed-tech startup has successfully started helping K-12 schools gather feedback and analyze results, a noticeable void still needed to be filled.
In partnership with scholars from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, however, Panorama has debuted a new open-source tool capable of capturing the data necessary to help schools improve the quality of their education.
Over the last year, the startup has been working with researchers to create the "Panorama Student Survey," an open-source survey on teaching that provides educators and principals with feedback on how students see their classes and overall school.
"When I taught high school social studies, feedback from my students played a vital role in helping me improve my pedagogy," said Hunter Gehlbach, the associate professor who led the research. "Feedback can be a really powerful tool, but you have to ask the right questions in the right way."
The Harvard Graduate School of Education and Panorama tasked themselves with creating just the right questions, which they did by following a two-pronged approach. First, the pair conducted an extensive literary review to gain a "scholarly perspective," and then interviewed dozens of students to gain a "real world perspective" on which aspects of students' experiences were most important to highlight in the survey.
Researchers also went beyond the students and interviewed dozens of academic experts, as well, to gather feedback on items that fell within their areas of specialty. With potential questions drafted, the pair conducted cognitive interviews with students to ensure they understood each inquiry the way it was intended. With that, the survey was piloted in 13 school districts across the country; the questions tweaked after each administration provided personal feedback.
Panorama Education will now be integrating the Student Survey into its products. In a blog post, Feuer added:
By making the survey “open source," we’re encouraging everyone to customize the survey and help make it better. This is a collaborative endeavor. Our only request is that you share your improvements back with our research team so we can consider incorporating them into future versions of the survey.
Through Panorama's technology platform, which offers a mixture of digital questionnaires, paper surveys and phone interviews, schools can better understand how to address issues such as parent involvement, bullying prevention, school safety and student engagement.
Roughly 5,000 schools use Panorama. And that early success has attracted the likes Startup: Education, the foundation of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who Feuer first met at a Y Combinator participant dinner. Panorama Education became the foundation's first national equity investment.
The startup raised $4 million in October 2013 with the help of Zuckerberg. Other investors who participated in Panorama's seed round included SoftTech VC, Google Ventures, Ashton Kutcher's A-Grade Investments and Yale University.
