IXL Group Jam and Lightning Jam: Insights from Ritchie Iu

Transcript

Of course, Group Jams can just be a lot of fun, right? Because it's just a way to get students to participate more and get everyone just actively thinking rather than waiting for the one student in class who always raises their hand to answer every question. My name is Richie Iu and I'm a Senior Product Manager at IXL. Group Jams are a classroom engagement tool that we have on IXL, and basically, all the students in the class are answering the same question at the same time. And so, that's different from our traditional skill practice on IXL. We've made Group Jams a few years ago was back in 2021. So, you know, that was in the midst of the whole lockdown and everyone was working from home, including teachers and students. And of course, that was a very challenging time for teachers to be connected with their students because they weren't even physically in the same room. And so, we knew about all these difficulties that teachers and students had. And at the same time, we were wondering, you know, how can we take advantage of what IXL has to offer, that is our massive curriculum, you know, tens of thousands of skills across different subjects. How can we take what we already have and package it in a different way to be useful for teachers and students during this time, but of course also in general as well. When we build out new features, there's definitely a good amount of development time between conception and research and release. Generally the process that we follow is like when we have this idea, we identified this problem of teachers not feeling as connected with their students. And then at that point we kind of working with the design team to kind of sketch out some ideas of how it could possibly work. One challenge here with the Group Jams is there's a lot of information going on at once, right? Like, you can, the teacher can see like all their students, they can see who has answered the question so far, and they can even see who got it right, who got it wrong, and what each student specifically answers. So that's a lot of information to take in at once. So a big part of our design philosophy at IXL is to make sure that everything is very intuitive and very easy to use and not overwhelming to someone. And so that was a really key priority for us. Another challenge that we had to tackle was the technical side of it too, because the aspect of sending so much data in real time meant that we had to explore some new technologies and figure out how to apply them to IXL. Fortunately, real time information was not completely new to us because we also have the Live Classroom feature where teachers can see what their students are doing in real time. But still a little bit different because in this scenario, all the students are getting the same question at once. So trying to having to figure that out, how to do that was a little bit of a challenge as well. And so, yeah, if I had to estimate, I think it probably took a few months overall between initial conception and the ultimate launch of the feature. But we definitely were moving really fast because again, we wanted to make sure that we could just come up with something to help teachers and students at that time. The really cool thing, though, was that once we launched, we immediately got really positive feedback from teachers and students, and we continue to do so. Even today, people still see a lot of use out of Group Jams. Group Jams are very flexible and first of all, great in the classroom for teaching and checking, for understanding, just to see in the moment, like do I need to explain further or not? They're also great at the end of the class to serve as an exit ticket. And one really useful part about Group Jams is that we show a summary report at the end of the session for teachers to see the data of each question and percentage of students that got it right or wrong, and teachers can go back to that. Or even after their Group Jams over, so they can use it when they're preparing for their next class period or trying to figure out who needs extra remediation or something like that. And of course, Group Jams can just be a lot of fun, right? Because it's just a way to get students to participate more and get everyone just actively thinking rather than, again, waiting for the one student in class who always raises their hand to answer every question. So Lightning Jam is an alternative mode of Group Jam. It's very similar in that everyone is going through the same question still, but the difference is that students are earning points when they're answering questions correctly in the Lightning Jam, and they're additionally earning bonus points for answering quickly. And so as you might imagine, that adds this element of speed, hence the lightning term. And so that's why we have these two different modes of the Group Jam essentially now again being going back to that flexibility that we want to have in the product. With a classic Group Jam, because you know there's none of that time pressure involved, teachers can use it when they're in a setting where they're more concerned with checking for understanding. So immediately after teaching a new concept, you don't want to pressure your students or anything like that, right? You want to give them a lot of time to think through it and just check. Did they really get it or not by another instances like maybe when you're preparing for a unit test or preparing for standardized. Assessments and your students, they've learned the material already, they got it down and you just want to find some new way to motivate them. Then Lightning Jams are really great for that, to add some spice and add some additional competition, you know, we know. From other features like our Leaderboards that students really do get motivated by that competition aspect, seeing who is in the first place, second place, and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, we definitely see that in the Lightning Jam as well. I mean, I've got to say that even when we were testing out Lightning Jam amongst ourselves here at IXL. We really got wrapped up in all all the competition of it. It's really hard to kind of resist it. But at the same time, you kind of have to watch out, right? Because if you answer wrong, if you're speeding too fast and rushing, then you're going to get no points out of that and then you're going to be behind people. So it kind of adds that, a little bit of a a risk reward kind of scenario too, because you want to be fast but not too fast as to lose out on points. From all the positive reception that we've heard from teachers about Group Jams, I think it's been able to make a really positive impact on the way that they're able to teach. Ultimately, it saves them a lot of time and provides more variety for how they can engage with their students. And I think going back to IXL, I think it's really cool because we were able to take what we have on IXL, our curriculum, and then think about how can we adapt our curriculum to different contexts that teachers might need. So we did that with Group Jams and then we were able to apply that concept with other features on IXL as well, like with Quizzes, how teachers can pull different skills and make their own custom assignments, essentially. Yeah. It's been really cool to hear about the different ways that teachers have been able to take advantage of Group Jams and Lightning Jams. And we can just see from also the usage metrics how much Group Jams and Lightning Jams are being created. At the moment we don't have any, you know, concrete plans for what to build out in Group Jams and Lightning Jams next. But I'm sure we're going to hear lots of ideas from people. So we definitely love hearing feedback from from everyone and that honestly inspires a lot of what we build because, you know, we want to be building things that people enjoy and get a lot of use out of. So we'll just have to see.