Reflection

Entrepreneurship Inclinations:

My interests in this venture stem from personal interests and perception of needs based on learning analytics and assessment practices found in British Columbia, Canada. I do not see myself as an entrepreneur but I do see myself as a problem solver. This venture was inspired by the realities in which I work and create solutions for the school district I work for. I have developed custom digital assessment tools for early literacy phonological awareness and letter recognition, numeracy including the DMA and Island Numeracy assessments, provincial performance standard based assessments for reading and writing, core competency self reflections, and a Six Traits of Writing. It is important to note that I am not a developer but saw a need in my district for these types of solutions and worked to acquire the skills needed to develop them. Moving forward, I will be developing capture tools for diagnostic assessments including the Three Minute Reading, Fountas and Pinnell, and PM Benchmark assessments. In addition to these developed assessments, automation tools have been developed to sync these assessments with the provincial data system to ensure students information is available to learning partners. These automation tools use libraries and languages such as Selenium, Beautiful Soup, Python, and Java Script. I have also developed data libraries and analytic tools using Filemaker, Power BI, Django and Flask. I have implemented data scraping techniques to gather information for district decision makers from ministry data sets and representations. It has been my goal to limit the number of places district personnel have to go in order to access information and to that end Microsoft Teams and Azure APIs have been used to aggregate data. Though I do not see myself as a entrepreneur I have demonstrated strong inclination for creativity and solution development. Transparency is a business idea which stems from these experiences.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Pitch:

The idea for Transparency stems from practical experience. For that reason I see validity in the concept. I see some issues in the concept resulting from a lack of diversification of contexts due to having worked in a single school district for my entire career. Though I have spent a lot of time being involved in provincial initiatives, I feel that I lack context for realities of systems outside of British Columbia. For that reason, the concept for Transparency may not translate well to other contexts such as all North American systems as stated in the target audience section.

The market research conducted for this pitch was limited in that I did not engage and try out the functionality of existing competing solutions. More work needs to be done to ensure Transparency's offerings are competitive in terms of functionality. In addition, analysis of the market in terms of pricing and ROI has not been completed. To further divulge deficiencies of the venture I must point out that labor pool and resource analysis have not been completed; a much more detailed business analysis would need to be completed. At this point in the venture I am offering an idea rather than a ready to go business solution.