Just as the Milestones update is to be released to your systems, we bring you an extra email with the idea behind this new creation and the development process.
What prompted the development of milestones?
You guys! In our annual end of season customer surveys, some form of ‘student level tracking’ as it was called back then, consistently ranked highly. Schools clearly felt some need to track the level of students and make their progress visible. However upon asking some follow up questions (like ‘how exactly would you envision this working’), the answers were quite broad and varied wildly in terms of what functionality was expected.
There already are many ‘level’ based systems like IKO and VDWS, so can we use these in Viking now?
Well, no and yes. We actually started out with a mockup design of what it would entail to digitally create the IKO levels in Viking, both for planners and for students. And funny enough, a few things became clear immediately:
- There is no linear progress through the IKO levels, making it hard to automate
- The levels are broken up into very detailed skills
- Even students in the same lesson progress through the levels differently
In practice, this would mean that an instructor would have to accurately input the level of every individual student after every lesson, probably on a computer (given the information density of such a task), creating a lot of extra work for them. Also students wouldn’t get much from looking at this information on a screen, because just the levels are quite meaningless on themselves, and explaining everything would involve a full course-guide that very few people would actually read.
Many schools work with ‘lesson cards’ where they check the IKO progress at the end of a course in person with the student, and we feel this is a much better way because you can directly relate to the experience from the lesson.
Doing this digitally would just make it more cumbersome and that is really something we never wanted (and you shouldn’t either).
So back to the drawing board?
In the process it became clearer and clearer where we could add most value if we created a functionality like this, luckily this is part of agile development. The most important insights:
- The actual reasons to show anything level-related to students in their customer dashboard are twofold, one is to give some information upfront that helps to prepare AND get them stoked for a lesson, and second to incentivise them to book next lessons. (note that this is quite different from trying to teach someone how to kite, from information off a screen)
- Tracking of the progress should be simple enough that it can be automated.
- It should be generic enough, as not conflict with the many different teaching methods and styles in and between sports.
These realisations led to milestones in their current form. “What if the student simply opened up a new ‘milestone’ after every lesson, with one pretty-lookin’ accompanying information page that has most of the info you would want a student to have before their next lesson?” This ticked the boxes.
It sounds rather simple when you put it like that?
Nice isn’t it? We find that most good solutions are simple ones. Which, by the way, doesn’t mean they are easy to create or come up with. There still was a lot of work to integrate this really well into both the customer portal, the planning views and other parts of Viking. Another wish we heard from many customers was the ability for the student to state their level upon booking, so there now is integration with the booking forms as well.
Also we realised at some point, it would be up to us to provide some default content that is based on the principles above. You can change the content yourself, but creating it from scratch would just be a huge amount of work that we didn’t see most schools doing. So we took the initiative there to design really good looking theory pages, drawing on our own experience.
Now with the functionality gradually going live in more and more systems, we are excited to see how it will be used in practice!
Disclaimer
- Your center is responsible for the contents of the milestone pages. Viking has only put down a general concept, which still needs to be reviewed and amended by your center.
- The (instruction) videos are compiled with the greatest possible care by a team of experts. Nevertheless, Viking does not accept any liability for the content.
- If you don't agree with the contents of the milestones pages, either change the content or in case of non-changeable content (videos), don't use the milestones update at all.
- If you want to disconnect the milestones from your system on the date of launch: go to your product settings - click on the product - disconnect the milestone from the product.
- The milestones are translated by Translation Kings. They know all about translations and nothing about water sports, so you might need to rewrite some stuff they translated.