The clarity to create more effective learning outcomes for all.
When using UpGrade to deploy fair comparisons that help understand what works best, UpGrade empowers you to optimize learning experiences, making them more effective for students and educators alike.
The open source platform uses an evidence-based approach to support continuous improvement in learning methodologies, allowing scalable, timely and iterative design of new experiences across entire classrooms.
How UpGrade works.
Learning scientists and EdTech professionals can implement UpGrade to assign students variations of a particular learning experience ranging from videos, educational models and sequences, even button colors or other UX-driven elements. Changes can be assigned across many different districts, schools, or individuals who use educational software.
The experiences are then compared to see how each impacts student learning efficacy and engagement. Whichever version proves most effective can then be implemented at scale to additional, wider audiences.
It’s fast, efficient, and, most importantly, objective.
Features that empower today’s learning experiences.
UpGrade’s robust feature set offers researchers and edtech professionals the tools to develop powerful learning experiences.
More effective learning benefits everyone.
UpGrade is more than a technology platform. It’s a step forward in transforming education for students, communities, educators and technologists alike.
Students and parents gain more powerful, evidence-based educational experiences that drive success.
Educators and school districts can employ a higher level of inclusion with learning experiences that are proven to be effective.
EdTech professionals save time, resources and costs in creating products for improved engagement and performance.
Learning innovators can advance more equitable learning across the educational spectrum.
our mission and vision
Redefining the potential of education technology
Our mission is to fuel equitable, transformative technology experiences in education. In environments where many students risk falling behind, evidence-based learning has never been so important.
That’s why we strive to give every technology company, every school and every educator the ability to use evidence to continually improve products, instruction and educational experiences.
And, since UpGrade evaluates learning experiences rather than students, there is no need to store personally identifiable information.
ADVISORY BOARD
Our Advisory Board.
UpGrade is developed with independent advice and recommendations from an advisory board of learning and technology experts. Our Board members include:
Chief Learning Officer, Khan Academy
Assistant Professor, University of California – Irvine
Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Founder of ASSISTments
CEO/Founder, Cignition
CEO/Founder, PlayPower
Research Scientist and Chief Technology Officer, Latsinger Center for Learning, University of Florida
Founder, Gooru
Research Scientist and Director of eLearning and Research Lab, University of Indiana
Director, PhET Interactive Simulations and Professor Attendant Rank, University of Colorado Boulder
Associated Professor, Economics and Eductation, Teachers College, Columbia University, Co-Director of Educational Technology Initiative, J-PAL
Associate Professor, Duquesne University
Strategic Advisor, Reading Plus
COMMUNITY
Join the conversation.
Visit our UpGrade Slack channel to see who’s using the platform and how it makes a difference in the classroom.
FAQ
Your questions. Our answers
UpGrade is an open-source, dashboard-based web service that facilitates designing and deploying randomized A/B tests and fair comparisons of learning experiences in educational software. With UpGrade, product managers, learning scientists, and software developers can define and run A/B tests to explore what works best for supporting the most effective learning outcomes.
EdTech Professionals such as software developers and product managers can use UpGrade to bring learning-science based randomized field trials to product improvement. Using UpGrade for fair comparisons and A/B testing can alert developers to what kinds of software improvements are most effective at positively impacting learning outcomes.
Learning Scientists and Researchers can use UpGrade to conduct educational field tests at scale, exploring how interventions affect learning across larger populations and more variable school districts than typical educational research studies. UpGrade manages the unit of assignment across classes, districts, and schools, so research can be conducted with minimal disruption of these groups when delivering comparison learning experiences.
UpGrade’s client API manages the design and management of randomized controlled trials in educational software. UpGrade works by connecting to the software application that will be used for delivering educational content. Then, using UpGrade’s web-based UI, design parameters such as control of conditions, unit of assignment (group or individual), start and end criteria, consistency parameters, and which metrics will be monitored can be set up and managed. The UpGrade server stores no personally-identifiable information, protecting the privacy of students and other users of the integrated software. If UpGrade will be used for group assignment, it can either connect to an external roster service that provides student group information, or retrieve group data from the integrated application (if the application collects such information). For monitoring simple metrics, UpGrade communicates with the integrated application to provide a simple dashboard view of selected, anonymized data by condition for each experiment. For additional questions about how UpGrade works and/or how you can use it in your own software, get in touch with us at upgradeplatform@carnegielearning.com.
UpGrade is written in Typescript, with API libraries in both Javascript and Java.
UpGrade is free and open source, with all code hosted on GitHub. Contact upgradeplatform@carnegielearning.com with questions about integrating UpGrade with your own software.
