BRIDGE BUILDERS®
A Devwalks Case Study
Project Background
BRIDGE BUILDERS® is a highly effective and widely recognised conflict resolution and emotional intelligence program, equipping primary schools and their associated communities with a great range of tools and skillsets. The program has traditionally been delivered in person by the creator of the project, Jocelyne Chirnside from Empowering Life Skills.
In-person delivery of the BRIDGE BUILDERS® educational program is a highly effective way of presenting the program and seeing incredible student outcomes, but unfortunately hinders the scalability of the program from both a revenue and impact perspective. The Empowering Life Skills team were looking for ways to create a version of their program that could be delivered across the world by either teachers or as a self-driven program with parental guidance.
Scaling Traditional Business
There are often many novel ways of scaling a traditional business model and product to a far wider audience with the use of technology.
Service based businesses can transform their IP into an online-based product and experience the many benefits that an online offering can create, such as monthly recurring revenue business models and the ability to reach a much larger customer base. Other traditional businesses can also often find ways of leveraging the interenet to create interesting new revenue streams and ways of helping their customers.
Project Goals
Online education platforms could create fantastic opportunities for the scalability and impact of the BRIDGE BUILDERS® program, but online education is also notorious for its high drop-out rates and we were concerned that without care and attention, an online program wouldn't be engaging enough for our young user demographic.
Creating an online program to be used within school systems would have other challenges as well, such as school on-boarding, principal and teacher ownership as well as the need to mitigate other risks, such as education firewalls and the usage of older hardware within some schools.
Our primary goals for this project were:
- Create an engaging online educational program for young students.
- Be compatible with the strict education firewalls and blocks.
- Ability to scale the program across Australia and the world.
- Manage schools, principals, teachers and students across a range of admin dashboards.
- Administrators should be able to edit the educational content in a simple way based on new research and findings.
- Have clear positive outcomes for students in the same way in-person delivery has traditionally
Not All Learning Management Systems are Equal
There are many off-the-shelf LMS systems for businesses to use, and quite often they're a great fit for a basic educational product.
Difficulties can emerge if you try to introduce complexity through novel methods of delivery or more robust analytics or back-end control. It's important that you know exactly what your product needs are and then choose either the right existing product or create the right custom product to fit your exact needs.
"The devwalks team went above and beyond with the creation of the online version of the BRIDGE BUILDERS® program and we couldn't be happier with the result. Their guidance along the whole process was invaluable."
- Jocelyne Chirnside, Program Creator and Founder of Empowering Life Skills Pty. Ltd.
Project Outcomes
BRIDGE BUILDERS® is now a fully fledged online course with a custom learning management system to manage stakeholders across the whole system. The online version of BRIDGE BUILDERS® now allows schools to purchase the program and manage the rollout internally, creating a completely scalable sales model for the team behind the program.
We realised our goal of creating a very engaging user experience with the use of sound, video, vibrant colours, role-play prompts, audio-readings and interactive games.
Ongoing management is required to mitigate the risks working with the strict requirements of the education system and we will continue to work together to ensure that the BRIDGE BUILDERS® program reaches its full impact and potential across Australia and the world.
Unique Risks
Every project will have it's own unique challenges to overcome. One of the challenges in this project was answering how to best deliver an online program to a young audience whilst maintaining their attention.
When beginning your own software project, it's important that you determine the unique challenges for your product and your business as well as the unique opportunities available. You know your customer and business best and it's crucial that the team building your software project also understand your unique position.
