PilotCity Product Updates
Every year, we talk to teachers, our alumni, schools, employers and stakeholders and ask them - what needs to be better with PilotCity?
What Our Teachers Want - In summary and in ranked order, they asked for:
1. Better student monitoring
2. Capabilities with program creation
3. Improved activity experiences
4. Support for student participants
5. Better exploration of programs
6. Improved sponsorship and enrollment systems
7. Better overall participant experience
8. More program models
9. Better program development infrastructure
10. Better timeline structure for participation
11. Portfolio building & sharing capabilities
12. Smoother signup, login & accessibility
New Product Updates - In return, these are our recent updates as of Oct 2024:
- Teacher onboard program now exists live or asynchronously
- Sponsor links now include benefits, onboarding & your created programs
- Success stories of alumni now on sponsor link landing & front page
- Student or class onboard program now exists live or asynchronously
- "Scope" activity now has more less text & more fine-tuned info
- "Ideate" and "Pitch" activities now has hover over tips & auto-adjusted fields
- Made skipping joining Discord or "Community" activity more prominent
- Improved student monitoring capabilities (ie: Search, high-level report, etc)
- Added time participants spend on program & individual activities
- Easier, simpler signup & login experience
- Ability for students to create & participate in their own employer projects
- Introducing participation "Rounds" every month for better program structure
- Share program models & pathways from sharable, pre-filtered landing URLs
- Easier navigation of program models on landing page
- Support or sales phone line now on front page at (510) 488-5005
- Launched a new blog and place for us to share news (such as this)
- Creating programs for any employer now takes 1-2 minutes & re-designed
- Improved program creation capabilities (ie: renaming program, category, etc)
- Founding story and context page now exists
Currently in development - Look forward to these roadmap items:
- 1:1 assistant for every student participant through a SMS textline
- Ability to customize your own Sponsor Link landing page for students
- Ability for students to join programs again, or delete their prior programs
- "Demo" activity to allow Google Drive video uploads instead of just YouTube
- Teacher customization of project scopes (ie: curricula-aligned)
- More still being decided upon
Our objective is to build our capacities to be able to serve our teachers & educators earlier in the school year with our new capabilities. This year, we've achieved a level of this capacity building and look forward to serving our classrooms.
Shoutouts to the following teachers & educators for their feedback and input including Lawrence Taylor, Sarina Ko, Jerry Huang, Melissa Hale, Marc Gordon, Jason Ebner, Jamal Felton, Mitzi Perez-Caro, Patrick Fawcett, Diego Garcia, Ryan Anthony, Joel Bruxvoort, Robert Casas, Anthony Rafaetto, Courtney Craig, Kristin Berbawy, Taylor Moxon, Lauren Gonzalez, Willene Biere, Grace Karr, Shannon O' Kane, Andrea Hutchison and Katie Salo.
Sincerely,
Derick Lee
CEO, PilotCity