Venture Plan

ConcIn terms of the timeline for the critical plan for success, this plan could likely be implemented over a 3 to 15 month timeframe depending on which iteration of the venture was enacted. The authorized seller of the Pi 400 in North America, Digikey, estimated a 3 month delay between ordering and delivery of 24,000 units (Figure 2). Assuming ordering were to take place before June of the prior school year, the next logistical herdal would be the training and professional development of staff prior to delivery of Raspberry Pi 400 units to students. If this phase were to involve only those 10% of students who do not have personal computer access and a single lead teacher per school (44 in total), it could potentially occur during a summer professional development session prior to the start of the new year, and delivery of the Raspberry Pi units to students could be delegated to each lead teacher for students in need at their schools. However, if the larger scale program of delivering a Raspberry Pi 400 to each student in the district were to be implemented, this would require all 1300 teachers in the district to be trained on the Raspberry Pi 400 and its operations, which would likely need to take place locally at each school during staff meetings over the course of an entire academic year, hence the broad timeframe of 3 to 15 months for implementation (3 being for implementation with 10% of the student body and 1 teacher per school; 15 months being the timeframe for implementation for all teachers and students in the district).

Regarding an “exit strategy” the goal described in the previous marketability section seems appropriate and clear, especially if the goal is to help 10% of the student body who might not have personal computer access at home. Namely, if that 10% of the student body was previously not engaging with Google Classroom on a regular basis, then this venture will have proved successful if those students do participate successfully on a regular weekly basis after receipt of their Raspberry Pi 400 computers.

Of course, the primary risk of this venture is that these devices will ultimately go unused, and that the Raspberry Pi 400 units will gather dust for students who ultimately didn’t want to engage in online learning anyway. Yet this risk is present even before online learning became a consideration: how many textbooks went unused for students who did not want to study in the 20th century? Yet still as public educators we must prepare for our students to succeed, not to fail, and so likewise the risk is worthwhile in equipping our students with the tools they need today (namely, a personal computer) to succeed in the technological world of tomorrow.

Conclusions

In closing, I would reiterate that despite the unprecedented scale of this venture (ensuring equitable access to personal computing and online education for all students across the central Okanagan School District), it also has multiple potential means of execution (whole district, semi-annual or 10% purchasing and local training models) and the platform itself has unique selling features that no other contemporary platform currently matches. The social goal of this goal is not only specific and achievable (increasing consistent weekly online learning engagement by 10%), but it is essential to the future of public education not just in the Okanagan, but around the world, and that is a venture worth the (extremely low) cost.