Forming an Opportunity Belief

Beginning Point: I believe that there is an unmet need concerning differences in class difficulty among teachers. Students can never accurately predict if a class they are signing up for will be easy or unnecessarily difficult, because teachers vary so much in their teaching styles and workloads they assign. If you take a class with one teacher it might be an easy A, but that same class with a different instructor may be a struggle to keep a B or C. This makes me think an opportunity exists to better inform students on the specifics of each educator so they can achieve the highest grade in a course with the least amount of stress.

Belief Description:

1. The unmet need that I identified is that students are unable to gauge how difficult a class will be prior to taking it, making it hard to ensure they're schedules will have reasonable workloads and difficulty.

2. College students will primarily have this need, as their course selection is almost entirely in their hands. Students at other schooling levels (middle, high, professional licensing), may have this problem as well, but I think that college students tend to have the least restrictions on the classes they are allowed to take, producing the most variability in class difficulty.

3. This need comes from the fact that college instructor are given a lot of leeway when it comes to organizing their class. They may have certain requirements they must fulfill given by the University, but workload and testing difficulty is often up to their discretion, leading to drastic differences in class structure between professors.

4. Websites like "RateMyProfessor" try to solve this problem by allowing students to communicate their experience with an instructor to other students and give this professor a rating from 1 to 5, so that the average score of the professor determines their quality in relation to other instructors in their field. However, these ratings are often unreliable, with no way to ensure the authenticity of the student response and the true quality of the teacher.

5. I would say I am 70 percent sure this issue exists. I know I have had this problem in the past, but maybe other students have not faced this issue or have sufficiently solved it with tools like "RateMyProfessor".

Prototypical Customer: The prototypical customer who has this need is a college student signing up for classes, likely a student who is newer to the University as upperclassmen students likely have more inside knowledge about the professors from friends who have taken the class before, but also because newer students have more classes they must sign up for in the future, likely making this a need of theirs for multiple years.

Interview #1: Freshman at the University of Florida (19M)
     For my first interview, I spoke to a freshman at UF who was doing the PACE program, but living in Gainesville with his friend who went in-person classes. He agreed that the variability in the difficulty of a class between instructors was an issue he faced, and that other students face this issue too. When I asked him to talk about a time that this happened, he said that his roommate suggested a class to fill out his spring schedule that was really easy, but his experience in the course was a pretty hefty workload, a lot of which was just busy work in his eyes. He said that the online versions of a lot of classes have a lot of assignments that he thinks are pointless, and that the instructors of the classes don't care enough to structure the course efficiently. He wishes he could know which instructors would offer meaningful assignments and which were not as invested in their students' academics.

Interview #2: Freshman at Santa Fe Community College (18F)

     For my second interview, I talked to a biology major at Santa Fe. She agreed that the variability among instructors in a course was an issue she faced, but she also admits that she uses this fact to her advantage. For example, she is going to transfer to UF next year, so she's taking harder classes now at Santa Fe, because she knows the instructors make the class less strenuous. This means she can complete classes necessary to her major with higher grades, which gives her a better shot at getting into a good medical school by having a higher GPA on her transcript. However, she wishes she knew which professors at UF would be most beneficial for her future difficult classes, such as Organic Chemistry, which she believes would be extremely difficult with a professor who was terrible at lecturing or assigned pointless homework.

Interview #3: Sophomore at the University of Florida (19M)
     My final interview was with a sophomore at UF. He wholeheartedly agrees that there is variability among teachers within a course, and that this variability can influence your final grade in the class. He relayed a story of how he took Sociology at the same time as one of his friends and the two of them had different instructors. While his friend got an A easily, he finished with a B+ after working really hard, because his instructor tested him on very specific information from the textbook and even from his published sociology research, which he felt was necessary to the course. He says he warns his friends who are younger than him of instructors who made class unnecessarily difficult, and asks friends who have taken a class before him for advice on teacher selection.

Reflection: My original idea on what issues students face with instructor variability changed with each interview. I learned that almost all students have faced this issue at some point, and that some attempt to solve it by sharing information on teachers among themselves. I also learned that those who are taught through different mediums, such as UF online, often have a different set of requirements to pass a class, and that some rigidity in class structure between mediums might also be desired. What surprised me most about my opportunity was that some students are actually using this issue to their advantage by finding out which professors have easier classes and planning their schedules accordingly.

Summary: My original opportunity to provide students with information about the difficulty of classes under different instructors is still there, although I have expanded my idea to include information on whether a certain class is easier to to take online or at another University, such as Santa Fe, versus in-person at the University of Florida. I think this expanded opportunity better reflects the reality of scheduling that students are facing and the decisions they must make to ensure the best quality of their education with the highest marks. I definitely think entrepreneurs should adapt their business strategy to the specific needs of their customers, as without this interview process I would not have considered information about where to take a class alongside who to take a class with.