Peeristics Design Principles

Peeristics was built under a design philosophy that starts with a simple user experience.  Our core design principles are outlined below:

Fewer spaces with better features

Simplicity is key to user adoption and satisfaction. Peeristics ensures that everything a user needs is just a few clicks away. By allowing users to do everything they need in fewer places than our competitors, they quickly feel at home.

Incorporate the tools everyone is already using

The world of education is ever-changing and this change should be embraced: fantastic tools, communities of learners, new resources, and better practices abound. In this environment, it is a difficult job to convince everyone of a single way of doing anything, so we choose not to. Peeristics is a flexible framework that integrates numerous data sources and educational tools so that what you want is what you use. We let the educational market evolve and connect to the market leaders.  It gives school boards the ability to link with, search, and use reference repositories and sites they have already invested in. We let users find and gather what they need, and as their source changes, we change too.

Atomic Level Content

The cycle of content creation is often build, revise, and revise again. We use the Learning Block to encourage users to build once and re-use everywhere. A Learning Block details not only what a resource is, but why it is being used and how, providing context to tag materials, align with objectives, and create rich datasets. The Learning Block is dynamic, easy to integrate, and can be moved or copied into most features of the system. This allows users to meet the needs of new audiences and goals, without needing to reinvent the wheel.

Reduce Administrative Burden

A single sprawling system can quickly become a major challenge to administer. Peeristics simplifies delegation protocols and responsibilities by enabling administrative users to leverage mechanics that are already in place within their organization. Administrators can be distributed across the system, with administrative functions happening on the network, group, and class level. Each administrative user type can work within the Network Administration Panel to create, import, and maintain the features of the system. Each network can be managed by a set of administrators, thereby allowing the organizational unit (school, board, etc.) to have control over its own system and decision-making independently.

To support oversight and quality, Moderator roles exist throughout the system to take care of content moderation and user management in each Group or Class space. This further reduces the administrative burden on a single process or entity in the event that change, authorization or controls are required.

Better data means better analytics

Analytics are important at a personal, class, and organizational level to understand and better interpret patterns and trends: What is working well? What needs support? Peeristics was built to ensure that the data behind these questions is available to drive quality analytics that enable discovery, improved results, and informed decision making.

Peeristics was designed from the ground up to provide data points that can feed almost any analytics query imaginable. The Learning Block concept means that linked resources such as uploaded files or external links will point back to a meaningful, context-rich source. This provides data on why, where, and when resources are used. Further, because Learning Blocks can be tagged and aligned with curriculum objectives, the amount of metadata and categorization captured for data within the system is nearly limitless. Peeristics can also provide data on resources used externally, including through jurisdiction sites or repositories.