Background
Flohh is a powerful assessment solution that streamlines the marking process.
The all-in-one platform allows teachers to mark both handwritten and digital work, reuse annotation and comment banks, automatically calculate grades and scores, and ensure students read their feedback.
By automating tasks and reducing marking time by 40%, Flohh eases teacher workload and improves student outcomes.
Challenge
A 2021 report by the National Excellence in Teaching Awards (NEiTA) Foundation found that just under half of Australian teachers think about leaving the profession fairly often if not all the time over the course of the year.
Citing “massive” workloads and “unrealistic” expectations, 82% of teachers said their work-life balance was less than ideal or non-existent.
As a high school English and History teacher, Ange Alcock is all too familiar with the pressures of the profession.
Frustrated with the time-consuming and repetitive nature of essay marking, she started searching for a solution that would make the process more efficient. When she couldn’t find a platform that met her needs and those of her colleagues, she decided to design it herself.
Solution
With input from her colleagues, Ange created an easy-to-use platform that empowers teachers to mark both handwritten and digital work in a fraction of the time manual marking requires. Instead of writing the same comment over and over, they can drag and drop annotations and comment banks they’ve created.
They can also keep track of student’s progress at a glance in their dashboard and access microdata.
Flohh even calculates all grades and scores and keeps students accountable via an integrated feedback loop.
“Our main goal is to reduce teacher workload when it comes to marking,” says Ange.
“Writing feedback takes so much time and then students just don’t read it, so we’ve also created systems that require students to engage with teachers’ feedback to learn and improve.”
Outcomes
During beta testing, Flohh was shown to reduce marking time by an impressive 40%.
“It takes about 20 minutes per student to manually mark a piece of work and we brought that down to about 12 and a half minutes with our beta product,” says Ange.
“There’s a lot of potential to make it even faster.”
After winning the Innovation Alley pitch competition at the 2021 EduTech Congress & Expo, Flohh gained valuable brand recognition and initial traction.
More than 6,000 teachers are already using Flohh and are highly engaged with the platform.
They’ve now released their new platform based on the feedback from all beta users. Within the first 24 hours, they had teachers logging in from Australia, USA, UK, NZ and India.
Key learnings
Ange advises other EdTech entrepreneurs to start by creating a vision of their product and then figuring out what their commercial model will be.
“Selling directly to schools is difficult because it’s hard to get your foot in the door,” she says.
“You have to figure out the difference between your user and your customer and try to find clear relationship pathways to organically allow your product to grow.”
She also highly recommends joining the EduGrowth community.
“The LaunchPad events are great when you’re starting out and it’s really handy having a community because you can lean on others when you have a question or need a soundboard,” she says.
“It’s invaluable for getting feedback and making decisions with better information than if you tried to figure it out yourself.”