LessonUp

Iris Harpman about LessonUp: an interview by Tonya Godee

Before the pandemic, did your organization already have a strategy and/or offer to reach audiences online? And if so, could you please talk about it and its effectiveness and how did the pandemic impact the strategy and or offer?

At LessonUp, our original strategy was to support teachers in the classroom by providing an online presentation platform where teachers can create, find, share and teach interactive learning material. Due to the pandemic, teachers were forced to start teaching online or hybrid. We found that we provide a flexible and easy-to-use platform that meets the needs of teachers, whether in the classroom or virtually. So we saw our user base growing exponentially.
This brought a change in our marketing strategies, as teachers were and are still using LessonUp for online and hybrid teaching. Whether you are working offline, with no student devices or full on in-class lessons, you have the flexibility to choose how you want to teach. In regards to our platform, our strategy has always been to provide teachers with simple and easy-to-use features that boost student interactivity and engagement. That hasn’t changed.

So could you please tell us about the people involved in Lesson Up? Their roles and how many people were involved?

We as a LessonUp team have grown immensely in the last two years. What was a team of 7 members pre-pandemic has now grown to a team of 25 members. This new team consists of a couple of categories such as IT, Customer Success, Marketing and Sales. We’ve been incredibly happy with each new edition to the team. It’s also been a wonderful motivation to help as many educators, schools and organizations as possible.

As for organizations like museums, the pandemic brought a lot of challenges to “keep their doors open.” They found with LessonUp, they had a new opportunity to offer digital content that could be directly used within the classroom. During the pandemic it helped organizations to remain relevant, but now that we are slowly going back to normal, it helps to reach a broader audience. In addition, we see the need of teachers looking for high quality lesson material rapidly growing. Museums can play an important role here to fulfill those needs.
As part of the Education Specialist team at LessonUp, I work closely with marketing or education teams within museums to understand their challenges and to provide unique solutions to help their organization transition to digital learning and to expose their content to teachers.

We’ve seen great success in the way museums curate their lessons and provide unique learning opportunities to students across the world.

What digital skills do the people involved in the online projects already have or what skills did the people need to develop?

We have seen that the digital skillset of an organization varies. Although LessonUp is an intuitive tool, we always make sure our partners get up to speed. We offer a variety of webinars and workshops to seamlessly onboard teams to the platform.

Most importantly, we collaborate together to create curated and branded lessons that not only inspire teachers but also engage their students. In addition, we provide data insights of all content created in LessonUp to be able to learn and optimize.

Organizations can see the success of their lessons being shared or taught in class, globally. With the data, museums are able to manage, create or rebrand lessons that they know match the needs of educators and curriculum standards.

Lessons learned during and after the pandemic

What did we learn?

• Teachers were looking for new ways to interact with students;

• Organizations realized that they needed a stronger digital presence;

• Teachers have an increasing need for high qualitative lesson material.

What was more successful?

• We were able to stay flexible and adjust where needed to keep supporting teachers.

• The pandemic contributed to the need for digitization in education.

• We had the opportunity to learn fast about our audience, due to the increase in usage.

  And we now know our solution is not only great to use in class, but as well online or hybride.

What was less successful?

● We had to juggle with internal resources to handle the fast growth of our platform. But because we saw we were really delivering value, it was extremely motivating to keep pushing for innovative ways to help educators, schools and organizations.

Focus project: Migration Museum London

The Migration Museum based in London, who has been using LessonUp since last year, did not offer any form of online workshop prior to the pandemic. The museum was focused on developing their in-person education program and building up relationships with teachers. They were always aware that with more capacity, creating an online digital offer would be a good next step to engage more students and make sure their program had national reach. The pandemic gave them the space and capacity, and further incentivised them to develop their digital offer.

Moving forward the Migration Museum will continue to welcome schools to the physical museum, but are delighted to have a good offer for those who may not be able to make it to London. These online workshops also provide some digital legacy to the physical exhibitions.

Education and Events Manager, Liberty Melly, decided to work with LessonUp as she finds it an exciting new platform that recreates aspects of the immersive experience that physically visiting a museum gives you. Liberty: “It is exciting to see a platform that you can get students to interact with, meaning you can create an online workshop as opposed to a lecture. With the topic of migration it is important for everyone to engage and contribute, LessonUp allows for this.”

“Working with LessonUp and Iris has been an absolute pleasure. Taking the time to talk us through the different aspects of creating and editing lessons, being on hand to answer questions. It's exciting to see the potential a platform like this can bring to the classroom.

I think our use of LessonUp would have been better if I had dedicated more time to using it and learning how students engage with it. Take up of our online sessions was slow during the lockdown, when students were learning from home - if we had used it more during this time when students had their own devices to respond from I think I would have then adapted for classroom use better.”

Click here to view Migration Museum lesson material. Want to know more about LessonUp as an organization? Click here to view more information.