UP / Undervisningsplan

Gathers the best teaching material and ensures that teachers and students have quick and easy access to all the innovative and future-oriented teaching resources that individual teachers create every day.

Spotify for school. Provides easy access to a large library of quality content that improves education for both students and teachers, and makes it easier for the teacher to meet their class with the very best teaching plans every day.

By teachers, for teachers. The diversity in the teaching plans is our superpower. A skilled teacher in Oslo or Toronto can now suddenly become a teaching producer for teachers all over the world.

High quality. All content is linked to the national curriculum. Before our Norwegian launch in August 2021, we already have thousands of teachers who have used our teaching programs, and almost 2,000 are pre-registered as users.

Cooperation. We have already connected with various organizations and people who create teaching plans for schools, 

Little time for planning, outdated textbooks, and the need for good, digital solutions that make the teaching job easier and the teaching relevant and engaging for the students.

The textbooks have always been the teacher's main resource, but as society is changing faster and faster we see a growing need for alternative teaching production and distribution. With UP, Teachers and students will get access to all the innovative and future-oriented teaching resources that individual teachers develop every day, and find what they need - when they need it - and be assured the content is quality assured and up to date. That is why UP was created. We are ready for launch in Norway in August.

Our solution is a digital platform for web and tablet which lets teachers, school leaders, companies, organizations, and others log in and find and share lesson plans.

Features: 

Theme calendar

Our theme calendar follows the school year, and here you will find inspiring, interdisciplinary theme weeks (Including all subjects) ready to use for each week, from 1st to 10th grade. 

Teaching bank

When you log in to UP, the system will become increasingly familiar with you and your preferences and needs. You will receive personal suggestions based on which subjects and steps you teach.

Planning tool

Here you can easily submit and share your own teaching plans, and at the same time let other educators enjoy them. The planning tool is connected to the national curriculum.

Teacher community

You can follow skilled and inspiring teachers, colleagues, and organizations in the platform. You can also like and save teaching plans. 

Our full-fledged solution recognizes the pressures teachers face in developing lessons, and by utilizing UP, teachers can quickly access, relevant and tailored material allowing them to spend more time with their students.

Keep costs down for municipalities and schools by offering our full-fledged solution for a fraction of what existing solutions cost. When using our solution the schools and municipalities can save money they normally would spent on text books, utilizing copy-righted material (paying for it), printing costs, sick teachers (due to burn out), etc.

Where many of the major publishers and other teaching platforms make teaching plans for the students, and mainly only offer teaching materials in the basic subjects, we have an equal focus on all subjects. An arts and crafts teacher must be able to find as good resources as a mathematics teacher.

Contribute positively to the sharing culture in the school and create recognition and status for teachers who create good teaching arrangements.

Contribute to all students always receiving good and up-to-date teaching, which equips the young people for the future they will face.

Ensure that the content of UP is always up-to-date and relevant, so that students encounter instruction that equips them for the future they will encounter.

Contribute to simplifying the facilitation of teaching with a focus on creative, practical and relevant teaching arrangements, so that as many as possible can be equal participants in the teaching on their terms (eg children with dyslexia and ADHD - we are cooperating with Dyslexia Norway and ADHD Norway)

The students - even those who do not fit into the "A4 school" will have meaningful content in the school, and we facilitate that each child's abilities and competence are highly valued at school.

Maintain the national curriculum in all stages. With UP, the national framework will be implemented in the classroom without the teachers having to attend courses.

As an independent player, we can offer the very best content without having to deal with a publisher.

Fulfill Sustainability Goal 4: Good education.

Teachers will get more time, and this can increase the quality of the other tasks the teacher has.

It will give more satisfied students, who will have the opportunity to develop good and correct competence based on their own abilities.

Interdisciplinary teaching programs will make it easier to collaborate across steps and subjects.

A national teaching community will be useful in that you can share, spar and get input from a unified teaching staff - which will increase the quality and lead to the content of the teaching always being updated and good.

School leaders and owners will be able to offer their employees a good and unifying tool - at a lower cost than existing alternatives.

Teachers will receive greater recognition for their good teaching arrangements, and this will help to increase the status of the teaching profession.

External teaching producers will experience that their message gets a place in the school. Many sit on opposite sides and work hard to reach as many people as possible.

The societal benefits of updated and motivated teachers, satisfied students, and well-adapted content in the school will in the long run make a great impact on the whole society.

Our solution fits well with 3 of 4 points: By offering teachers a solution that supports them in adapting the pedagogy and facilitating personal instruction, as well as offering good and up-to-date teaching arrangements, we can at the same time make sure to solve an increased commitment to students, either in class learning or in hybrid environments. The teaching programs are also of high quality and focus on play, collaboration, and practical experiments.

None of the points suit us 100%. We have received very good feedback and tested our beta version with 100 Norwegian teachers. The beta version can be found here: https://beta.undervisningsplan...

Teaching plans we have posted for free through our blog have been clicked on 150,000 times and downloaded 70-80,000 times.

The developers are now completing version 1 of the platform, and this will be launched in Norway on 1st of August 2021. We already have 2,000 pre-registered Norwegian users and are launching major campaigns before the schools start up this autumn.

Undervisningsplan (UP) is a personalized digital workspace for teachers, where they can share and find structured quality-assured teaching programs and educational content.

UP works to optimize the content of the school, simplify the teacher's everyday life, and contribute to an inspiring and future-oriented school for pupils. In our digital platform, teachers will be able to easily plan, share and gain access to lesson plans in all subjects and for all grades - all in line with the national curriculum.

Every day, very good teaching plans are created by teachers and other learners. With UP we put teaching plans into a system, so that teachers can easily use them in a structured way. The teachers do not have to spend time looking for themselves in the jungle of learning materials when they have UP. They get access to content that is always up-to-date, quality-assured, and adapted to the curriculum. This could make an especially huge impact in low-income / development countries that we know are using outdated textbooks in education. 

We create the best school together. Therefore, we want to give teachers a smart online community that is easy, safe, and motivating to use.

UP should be the place where teachers find what they need - when they need it!

· A digital workspace for teachers.

· Engaging and future oriented teaching plans.

· Direct connection to the national curricula.

· A unique solution for the production of teaching programs.

· Simple, time-saving, and inspiring for both teachers and students.

Currently, we have invited in among 100 teachers to test and use our beta version. This has been especially successful, and we have gathered so much valuable feedback for the continuation in the development of our platform before launching autumn 2021. 

In one year we hope to get 25.000 (36%) of the Norwegian teachers to use our platform by offering a freemium solution autumn 2021. We hope to turn them over to paying customers (paid by their school or municipality) from January 2022. 

In five years we have scaled internationally, to English-speaking countries, (hopefully with the help of MIT Faculty network) and a few low-income countries (we have already looked into the possibilities, which are huge, and we applied to Innovation Norway's program Vision 2020), and we should have at least 1 million users around the world. 

We have already received fantastic feedback from teachers who have used UP's lesson plans in their teaching. Teachers report increased involvement among their students, both in physical teaching situations and even when teaching has taken place digitally. In the long term, we will implement a function so that parents can also log in to UP, so we will focus on increasing parental involvement.

In order to achieve the goal of providing increased learning outcomes to all students, it is important that the school is not just made for theorists. UP's teaching plans are varied, interdisciplinary, and require collaboration, practical experiments, and play.

We collaborate with, among others, ADHD Norway and Dyslexia Norway to ensure that our content is best adapted for students with LD and to give teachers good support in the work with facilitation.

By making it easy for the teacher to plan and facilitate the school day, we hope that we will achieve our goals and visions. Clicks, downloads, online surveys, and interaction in social media can already prove that we are helping teachers and students receiving their goals. In the beta testing stage we have had 150 K visitors and 70-80K downloads on our homepage, and since we haven't even launched the platform yet, we are just kicking of now.

Full time: 2
Founder and CEO Karen Wiik, and CO-founder and COO Tonje Brattås.

Contractors full time: 5
Development team

Part time:
40 lesson plan creators / teachers

Internship full time 6 weeks: 6
Paid internship program within teaching, design, marketing, content writing and photography/film 

We are teachers who have faced the challenges ourselves, while the rest of our team has expertise in finance, design, technology and marketing. We have already approved that our solution is needed, and that it is working through the mvp-stage and the beta-testing, and now we are just doing some adjustments to make it even better-looking and better-working before launching for the masses. 

We are two women leading and building Undervisningsplan, and with us, we have a great development theme of 5 men's, our teachers /content creators are mostly women (but there are most female teachers too, so that makes sense) and in our internship program we have 5 woman and one man, while our board of advisors are 4 men's and 1 woman. 

There is no doubt that the grant from MIT Solve, as well as access to extra funding, will have a big impact on UPs growth, especially considering our international potential in both industrialized and developing countries.

However, it is not the financing that is the most important. For UP to function optimally, and to actually be able to solve the challenges for teachers and students around the world, we are completely dependent on knowing the markets we are entering. Therefore, we need an international network, and here we are confident that MIT Faculty can help us get in touch with key people. After a year of support from national advisers here in little Norway, it would be absolutely invaluable to receive nine months of personal support from Solve employees and members of Solve's cross-sectoral community. We are humbled and excited when we now apply for MIT Solve, and hope for the opportunity to accelerate our work, validate our impact and further develop our business model to be best equipped to help as many students as possible to get the education they deserve.

The future belongs to today's young people.

Human Capital: We always need good and skilled people that have knowledge in areas we are not as confident in, e.g. finance, sourcing talent, sales, and board development. 

Business model: We always need to continually develop our business model, until we find the perfect solution. We really appreciate input from advisors here.

Financial (e.g. improving accounting practices, pitching to investors): YES!

Legal or Regulatory Matters: Our board leader today is a lawyer, but we definitely need good lawyers who can help us with international laws. 

Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media): YES

Monitoring & Evaluation (e.g. collecting/using data, measuring impact) YES

Product / Service Distribution (e.g. expanding client base) YES

Technology (e.g. software or hardware, web development/design, data analysis, etc.) YES, our team now consists of five hard working developers, and to scale internationally and adjust the platform to new countries we definitely need to expand the development team.

• MIT Faculty
• International board of educators
• Unicef and other help organizations

Our team will use the ASA Prize for Equitable Education both in the matter of our broad vision to scale in developing countries, and we are highly focused on making our solution optimized for helping kids with LD, autism, ADHD, Dyslexia ++. With UP the teachers will have resources to help them. 

UP is qualified for the GM prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion because our broad vision is to scale in developing countries, and we have already started to look into possibilities of partnerships with help organizations (e.g. Unicef), and have applied for Vision 2020, which was a program from Innovation Norway for solutions that could help refugees and low-income countries. We are also highly focused on making our solution optimized for helping kids with LD, autism, ADHD, Dyslexia ++. With UP the teachers will have resources to help them.

Our platform makes education being more accessible and addresses this because our material is always up-to-date and focuses on bringing in material for our current and future societal needs.

We would use the Innovation for Women Prize to advance our solution because most teachers are women (around 70% of the teachers worldwide?) Besides being a teacher, many female teachers have children on their own, and with UP they can go home after work, not needing to spend hours planning for the next day of education. In this way, they can get more time with their children, both at home and in school. By using our platform we can provide content that can be tailored to the girls directly, which our partner: Girls in Technology is a great example of! Also material can easily be generated on empowerment, up-to-date sex education, and finding your voice.

Our solution will use AI to make the platform know our users better and better. As for now this is not the most advanced AI system. Right now it predicts content and gives suggestions on lesson plans. It becomes more customized the more the teacher uses it thereby reducing time searching for information. In the future there are lots of features to be added to make the system extremely smart. This we could implement if we were to be selected for this prize.   E.g. Through our platform we will have a lot of data - content being utilized, and in our comment function we will get information about the discussed topics to build more relevant material. Then we want to be sure that data is anonymized - and we may need a better tool for this.

Our platform, because it's up to date, will be using STEM. We help kids being in the 21st-century mindset, and by getting selected for the GSR Prize, we would be able to facilitate equitable Classrooms. We need to get to more schools, school boards, have dialogue with international education bodies, and countries. this platform allows teachers to have relevant, engaging and up-to-date material. The material can be easily accessed anywhere and is not dependent on outdated textbooks. Teachers can spend more time with students, provide customized material for those needing extra resources/assistance and can interact with one another to share, brainstorm and help each other be better - all with the mindset of helping their students be offering an equitable learning environment.   As the material on our platform is up-to-date STEM will be a large component of the offering to help students be prepared for the demands of the 21st century.  By receiving these funds we can continually build and focus on content to ensure the material is exclusive  for all learners. We will be able to bring in content providers, build a more robust machine learning tool and continue our outreach.