The scene is familiar to anyone who has observed a middle school student attempting to use a phone to manage four different classroom apps, a school email account, and a Google Classroom stream. Tabs piling up. Notifications are blending together. Somehow, a class announcement from three weeks ago overshadowed an assignment that was due tomorrow. It has nothing to do with discipline. It’s a design issue. The Hapara Student Dashboard is worthwhile because of this.
The Hapara Student Dashboard is essentially an online school planner designed to bring together the disparate elements of a student’s digital learning experience in one location. Google Classroom assignments, announcements, grades, emails, and Hapara Workspaces are all pulled in and presented in a mobile-friendly interface that students can actually use without assistance. It sounds almost too easy. It probably works because of this.
In edtech circles, there’s a perception that platforms and administrative ease come first when designing tools, with students coming in later. With this product, Hapara adopted a different strategy, purportedly developing it with direct input from students in various age groups and regions. As a result, assignments are arranged according to their due dates rather than when a teacher happens to post them, which is clearly how students perceive time.
The dashboard won an EdTech Digest Trendsetter Finalist Award and a Cool Tool Award for Best New Product or Service at the 2020 EdTech Awards. Apart from recognition, the practical argument it makes for itself is more telling. Students can view everything at once or filter by class. They are able to view assignments without due dates, impending deadlines, and past due work. They don’t have to switch between apps or keep track of which teachers use which platforms on different days. Most adults are unaware of how much cognitive energy context-switching alone consumes.
The group of mental abilities known as executive functioning, which includes time management, planning, and prioritization, is something that schools discuss frequently but hardly ever teach explicitly. Students are not lectured about organization by Hapara Student Dashboard. It simply creates an atmosphere where maintaining organization is the easiest thing to do. That is a more sincere approach to the issue. Although it’s still unclear if every student will interact with it to the fullest extent that its creators intended, the framework is in place in the event that they do.
It doesn’t feel like an add-on tool because of how smoothly it integrates with Google Workspace for Education. Hāpara Workspaces and Google Docs, Slides, Forms, and Gmail are all accessible from a single dashboard. It’s more of a missing layer that ought to have been there from the beginning for educational institutions already using Google’s ecosystem.
This product’s underlying philosophy is what makes it truly intriguing. The majority of school software is designed with a teacher’s workflow, administrative reporting, or compliance in mind. The everyday reality of being a learner, which entails taking in information from various sources, attempting to quickly make sense of it, and determining what actually needs to happen next, is the foundation of Hapara Student Dashboard. It’s not easy to get that right. It’s also difficult to ignore how infrequently people attempt.
