Product specifications document - Sharing feedback and achievements

Develop a product requirements document describing how the feedback and achievements that users receive on Riipen could more easily be shared to other platforms, primarily LinkedIn. Currently, all users receive feedback from other users at the conclusion of a project. They also receive gamification awards called "achievements" at different points in the user journey. We would like to promote the opportunity to share achievements and feedback, and provide easy tools for users to do so. The only current offering is for learners; from received feedback they can access a "share" icon to share a piece of feedback to their LinkedIn profile as a "certification." The goal is to get more users leveraging the recognition they receive on Riipen in other contexts, and to make them aware of the benefits of doing so.

User Case Study Creation

Riipen is looking to have students interview up to 5 pre-identified customers, in order to put together content pieces describing those customers' experience with Riipen. Riipen will provide the customer contact information, and will obtain their consent to participate. Students will be responsible for: Interview scheduling Developing the list of questions, with input from Riipen Conducting the interviews (virtually) with customers Writing the case study content Presenting the case studies in a PDF document that uses Riipen branding Following up with the customers to share the final case studies and thank them for their participation Customers will include educators, employers and students. Case studies should be no longer than 1 page each. Our objective is to create content that highlights positive customer experiences with Riipen, which can be used for multiple purposes. A bonus would be for each case study to highlight slightly different aspects of the Riipen experience. Possible uses for the content: Shared with prospects in the sales process Published to Riipen's blog (https://riipen.com/blog) Downloadable collateral for customers through our CRM platform Included in our newsletter in full or in part

Competitive Analysis

It’s important for us to have a better understanding of how our target audience perceives our brand and competitors. We want to develop clarity on our competitive advantages and optimize our marketing strategy.  Given the complexity of Riipen's business model (three types of users: students, educators, employers), we suggest that this focus only on the educator experience. This project will include: An identification of our current competitors An identification of potential future competitors (eg. a large company in a similar industry who may enter the space) The creation of a matrix identifying features shared across the companies and those that are different. A summary of 2-4 paragraphs describing Riipen's competitive advantages and disadvantages relative to the competition identified. This could be done in the form of a SWOT analysis. We will give you access to organizational assets to support this project such as personnel, website analytics, sales and brand collateral, and more. We can suggest names of competitors to research, listed under 'Resources.' Objective We hope to gain a comprehensive understanding of the competitors in our space and how we can differentiate ourselves through our product/service offering, and our messaging. 

Consultation en matière d'achats

Nous nous préparons à compléter notre plan d'achat et souhaitons en tirer le maximum d'informations pertinentes sur le marché et l'évolution de nos ventes avant de passer nos commandes. Nous espérons travailler avec les étudiant.e.s pour générer des informations pertinentes et déterminer la stratégie d'achat la plus idéale pour la prochaine période. Les étudiant.e.s doivent être prêt.e.s à : Effectuer des recherches sur nos pratiques d'achat existantes, les fournisseurs potentiels et les opportunités. Effectuer une analyse de marché; Déterminer les prévisions d'opportunité de croissance; Élaborer une prévision de la demande; Présenter une stratégie d'achat recommandée pour notre organisation. Ressources Nous pouvons fournir tout matériel interne supplémentaire pour assurer une compréhension complète et une collaboration harmonieuse.

Analyse des prévisions de ventes

Cette tâche comprendra l'analyse des actifs organisationnels tels que le personnel, les documents stratégiques, notre plan d'affaires et l'information sur les prix et la promotion. À partir de ces informations, nous aimerions que vous construisiez une prévision des ventes en notre nom. Vos priorités devraient être : La révision de notre date d'exécution des ventes. Le suivi des tendances historiques. La comparaison des prévisions de cette année et l'année passée. L’inclusion des événements projetables de déplacement du marché. Le suivi des activités des concurrents. L’intégration de notre plan d'affaires actuel. Le livrable final du projet est un rapport écrit de 10 pages comprenant : Les détails de votre analyse prévisionnelle et de vos aperçus. Une prévision des ventes pour les 12 prochains mois avec des projections mensuelles. Une prévision annuelle des ventes pour les deux années d’après.

Rafraîchissement de présence en ligne

Avant de commencer des campagnes promotionnelles payantes, nous voudrions peaufiner notre logo et notre site Web afin de refléter nos normes et les attentes de nos clients. Il s'agira également de mettre à jour les éléments visuels clés de la marque. Pour ce faire, il nous semble que les priorités seront : Des recherches sur l'organisation et l'industrie. Des sondages et des entrevues auprès des clients. La conception et la construction d’un nouveau site Web entièrement fonctionnel avec un moteur de réservation. Le développement de nouvelles variantes du logo. La production d’exemples de matériel de marque, par exemple des cartes d'affaires, des signatures de courriels et des modèles de compte clients. Nous voudrions avoir un nouveau style qui reflète notre engagement envers une expérience client impeccable et qui attire notre clientèle cible.

Workflow Recommendations

Riipen is constantly striving to improve our platform, and we welcome feedback from all users. We have received feedback that the UI could be made more efficient by implementing a workflow into the project/course matchmaking process. We would like to have a design mock-up made that would demo how integrating a workflow into our platform would optimize user experiences. We believe this project will include: Reviewing our current website content and design. Interviewing our target customer for insights on their needs. (In this case, student and educator experiences.) Demonstrating a new workflow based on your insights and UX best practices. Your tasks: Create a mockup of a workflow in Drupal 8. Demo your suggestions to the Riipen team. This demo would be presented to our Product team so that they can consider your recommendations for future platform updates.

Increasing Student Engagement on Riipen

We are looking for students to work on this gamification project. Riipen has 3 types of users: students, educators, and employers. We are interested in a product solution or other recommendations to gamify our platform in order to increase student engagement. Potential scopes for this project can include, but are not limited to: An increase in completed student profiles An increase in student usage of the in-app chat, file sharing, and the meeting scheduling function An increase in student submissions to Challenges An increase in metrics not identified above An increase in the average time spent per user session

Pricing Model Development

We would like you to develop and test a series of pricing model options and present an effective data-based pricing model recommendation for our organization. You should conduct primary and secondary research to confirm your recommendation is validated by our target customer in this market.  To accomplish this, we believe you will need to conduct the following research: Our organization’s costs, target customer, revenue targets, and business goals. The competitive landscape of this new market. Organizing focus groups, surveys, and/or customer discovery interviews to get input and feedback on potential pricing models. Using targeted online ads to A/B test landing pages with different price models. We want to enter this new market with a proven pricing model so that we can have a successful launch.  Final deliverables should include: A written report including an Executive Summary that illustrates your research findings and recommendations on our pricing model. A visual presentation of your research findings and recommendations. 

Riipen-Fanshawe College test 2

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D2L-Riipen Integration

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How has use of "Requests" on Riipen changed over time?

In Spring 2018, Riipen launched a two-sided marketplace feature on our platform. This marketplace feature allows employers to apply to work with professors (as they could before), and also allows professors to apply to work with companies (a new feature as of April 2018). Internally, these applications are called "requests" as the other party must approve or decline the request to collaborate. Since launch, we've seen significant growth in the number of professors requesting companies. A challenge that was encountered early on was that some users were not responding to requests, or were responding very slowly, causing frustration for the other party. On November 21, 2018, we launched a "request expiry" feature which requires users to respond to requests with 14 days, or they will expire. We would be interested in having students look into how requests have evolved over time. Number of requests per user, by user type Volume of requests (of both types) over time Request response time Request acceptance rate Request expiry rate With respect to the metrics above, it would be interesting to look at how (or whether) the Nov 21 launch of request expiry has changed user behaviour. Do users now respond to requests more quickly? Send more requests? Less? Our hypothesis was that they would respond more quickly, and send more requests due to the improved response rate. We can provide anonymized data up to the launch of the project, from April 2018 forward (approximately 2400 requests to date). We can also provide complementary data sets if needed, such as new user accounts created over time.

Clinical Trials Awareness Video

Student have the opportunity to create a short, compelling video to help raise clinical trials awareness in the community. You can include any of the following topics, or choose your own: Why clinical trials are important generally and how they move science/medicine forward (even if they're not successful) Potential benefits and risks of participating in a clinical trial. What are some of the potential risks and benefits and what protections are there for participants? The fundamentals - what is involved in participating in a clinical trial? The issue of (continued) informed consent Therapeutic misconception. Medical research is not the same as treatment and clinical care. Help clarify this important issue for potential clinical trial participants.

Your Revel Experience - Final Round

Students will be expected to understand the features and benefits of Revel as a platform, specifically as it relates to their own lived in-class experience, and to be able to clearly articulate the benefit that it provided (or didn't provide to them) in their own learning context. Students will be expected to write a creative and compelling evidence-based argument for or against using a digital resource in class. Although the main ask is for a written submission we are open to any creative multimedia submission that expresses a truly authentic student voice and perspective.

Improving Remote Culture

We pride ourselves on having a strong company culture, and a close-knit community of employees. Riipen has a very flat hierarchy, where any employee can (or should) feel comfortable speaking to any other. Riipen-eers generally feel very closely connected to the company's mission, and are very motivated and willing to go above and beyond to achieve it: "Empowering emerging talent to gain relevant skills and find jobs they love." That said, our retention of employees who work remotely has been much less strong than that of employees who work primarily out of an office. The remote employees who stay with Riipen are less likely to participate in company events, sometimes less likely to put their hand up for special projects, and have reported feeling disconnected from day to day operations and company culture. The exception to this is our tech team - they are all located in different cities, and work together remotely extremely well, with strong retention rates, but are somewhat less engaged with the rest of the company than within their own team. This extends even to when people are traveling for work or working from home - they report feeling "out of the loop" even when away for short periods. Our primary mode of internal communication is Slack, and there are both company-wide channels (#riipenstuff, #peopleandculture, #deployments and many more) and team-specific ones. Company events tend to focus on the experience of the Vancouver office (eg. bringing in cake once a month for the birthdays of the month, going out for drinks on a Friday, etc). For internal meetings that involve remote workers, we usually meet over videoconference. Sound issues and connectivity problems sometimes get in the way of this. In Slack, we have a tool called Coffee Buddies which randomly pairs two employees (located anywhere) to meet in person or virtually to catch up every week. Every week you're assigned a different "buddy." Some employees do a great job keeping up with these, but others find the weekly commitment too much and tend to miss them. Since the Vancouver office makes up the large majority of our employees, we suspect the strong intra-office culture here can feel exclusionary. We want remote employees to feel equally valued and equally a part of Riipen. Our goals for the project would be to have tangible suggestions on changes we could make in our day-to-day operations to improve collaboration between employees in different locations, and to improve the job satisfaction of remote employees. We would love to gain insight into these questions: Why do remote employees feel disconnected from company culture? How can we improve retention of our remote employees? How can we improve collaboration between employees located in different places? Long term our goal is that an employee working from any location has a similar experience with Riipen, experiences a high degree of job satisfaction, feels connected to the company mission and culture, and never leaves. (Mostly kidding about that last part.)

Your Revel Experience - Round 2

Students will be expected to understand the features and benefits of Revel as a platform, specifically as it relates to their own lived in-class experience, and to be able to clearly articulate the benefit that it provided (or didn't provide to them) in their own learning context. Students will be expected to write a creative and compelling evidence-based argument for or against using a digital resource in class. Although the main ask is for a written submission we are open to any creative multimedia submission that expresses a truly authentic student voice and perspective.

Entrepreneurship & Innovation

As a growing start-up, our needs may shift over the next six months, but we would most likely want to have a student focusing on business development. This could be developing new industry partnerships or identifying growth opportunities in our partner institutions. We can also offer experience in and exposure to strategy, marketing, user experience design, or other areas that fit with the student's skillset and interests. The first deliverable will be the report on the students' findings at the end of February. Over the work term, there may be various deliverables depending on the nature of the student's work.

Douglas College: B2B Sales Management Plan

Review and critique of our existing sales strategy - Opportunities to scale up in our B2B sector - Material and strategy for outreach to future clients. - How to build our sales team researching and identifying the right sales tools developing competitive sales compensation packages, etc. Success is connecting new clients to the value of our solution. We are a sustainability company with a new technology that saves energy use in commercial buildings. A sales management plan needs to build on sustainability & purpose values and strategies that help the triple bottom line for our clients (which are university and college campuses). A marketing plan would be very helpful for our company because we lack a sales team. We are a team four engineers and scientists and would benefit from insight into marketing and sales Interests or skills that are could help us with the following: Conduct primary and secondary market research directly for Sensible's target market segment Provide SWOT based competitive intelligence and monitoring Assist in transitioning projects from proven R&D beta model to commercialization and scaling Support our CEO and development team with market input and support our Go-To Market activities Use LLP methods to develop to streamline differentiated value propositions for new product development Conduct market research using qualitative and quantitative research efforts to evaluate market barriers and opportunities Analyze and synthesize data to provide logical insights and recommendations for strategy optimization Work with technical team to produce B2B centric marketing materials We are a highly motivated team and creating innovative sustainability solutions that we hope will change the world. We recently won the NVBC City Innovation Prize for our work (http://sensiblebuildingscience.com/news/), and have growing relationships with partners like UBC. If your students like the fast moving environment of a start-up then it will be a great fit! Students will work to develop a professional sales management plan (less than 25 pages) that could include a two - year sales plan, budgets, forecasts, recruiting plans, as well as their approach to co-ordinating with other departments such as marketing. Students will also present a 7 to 10-minute summary of their plan which will be followed by a Q&A period.

Suffolk: Business Consulting Project

In partnership with teacher prep programs across the country, TeachersConnect is laying the groundwork to ensure a world in which teaching is never a solo activity and "teacher prep" stays with their new-teacher alumni for as long as they want. TeachersConnect is an in-person and online network that gives new K-12 teachers a safe place to ask their most urgent questions—even the embarrassing ones—and get answers from a trusted network of peers, mentors, and experts who understand the real-world classroom challenges. TeachersConnect also enables teacher prep programs to build deep, lasting relationships with their graduates and gather the data they need to meet new standards and improve their courses swiftly and purposefully. Our number one goal for the next 12 months is user growth (e.g. Get K-12 teachers onto our platform). We’ve determined that partnerships with other teacher communities (companies like TeachersPayTeachers; associations like the teachers unions or National Council of Teachers of Math; and “hacked” teacher communities on Pinterest and Twitter) is the most efficient way to acquire lots of new teachers quickly. We need to develop a funnel/pipeline for these strategic partnerships. Of all the communities and companies out there, which ones most need us and what’s the specific story we’d take to them to get them to partner with us (i.e. Why would it make sense for them to partner with us? What urgent itch would we scratch for them?). It’s a big qualitative market research project. If time allows, the students would also explore three other types of partnerships we believe we'll need: Partnerships that yield functionality for us quickly. For example, we know that teachers will want to share videos of themselves and get expert feedback. Should we build or buy that functionality, and if the answer is "buy" from whom should we consider buying? Partnerships that yield sponsors who want to give away free stuff to teachers. For example, we currently have a rewards program for teachers who provide us with feedback as we develop. If we decided to find sponsors whose stuff we use as prizes to teachers, where would we start? Whose stuff would make teachers happiest? Partnerships that yield revenue via references. There's a whole slew of teacher professional development products ($18B annual market in the US) that comprise a very fragmented and cut-throat market. We believe those companies would benefit from getting in front of teachers like ours, and we think we can charge a click through or referral fee. A database of companies to fill the top of our biz dev pipeline that includes something like: Name of company / Description of what they do / Type of partnership (from the list above) / How we'd solve a problem for them / How they'd solve a problem for us (i.e. Why it's a partnership that would benefit both orgs) / The person within the org to speak with first / Some of their main competitors / organizational goals, and/or what really motivates them right now. An annotated list of the top 10-12 "hot" candidates for us to begin approaching. This is a massive, multi-faceted project. Each of the 5 groups will be in charge of a facet of the project (answering important questions that you co-create with the professor) and do 3 months of work to help your firm find creative, tangible, and implementable solutions - a total of 1000 hours of work. Each group will provide a 15-minute presentation, as well as a report answer your questions, which together will formulate your strategy moving forward.