Overview
Free Range and Friday partnered with the Gates Foundation to launch ChangeMakers—a platform where higher education leaders and practitioners can access resources and participate in learning and process-based projects that guide their transformation in achieving a greater mission.
ChangeMakers is a product that combines project and learning management capabilities for designing, sharing, and participating in projects, collaborating with peers, and accessing resources in a consistent, easy-to-use experience.
Free Range and Friday worked together to assess the feasibility of all the features envisioned in the ChangeMakers platform. As we understood more about the target student population, we suggested the following features
- A hierarchical system for org
- Slack-based chat functionality for collaboration
- Streamlined page builder for administrators
- Notifications for students
Working closely with the leadership team and the Friday team, identified useful third-party integrations such as:
- Chat
- WYSIWYG integrations
We spent time doing feasibility for all integrations and updating timelines based on the required features.
We were able to complete the product on-time and at one third of the cost as compared to other bids. During the build, we created standalone products such as
- A custom-built chat system for more differentiated functionalities.
- A page builder made with CKEditor.
To fully meet the demands of the ChangeMakers project, we shifted our product engineering process to a tracked sprint-based approach that improved efficiency and across a wide-ranging global development team.
ChangeMakers is poised to significantly impact students in higher education systems. The platform will
- Facilitate a customizable institution-wide transformation process.
- Facilitate a learning-and-doing experience with a cohort of individuals or small teams that combines asynchronous reading and activities with occasional synchronous sessions and dialogue.
- Allow IFS organizations to make use of resources as they develop experiences.
- Allow higher education institutions to participate in projects and access resources.
- Offer a common platform and process for delivering and sharing resources and projects.
We continue to support the platform and assist ChangeMakers in getting this tool to multiple universities. Currently, ChangeMakers is being used with organizations such as AASCU and ASPEN.
