How a Pair of University of Michigan Professors Built a Free Creative Learning Platform Used by 2 Million Teachers

The Collabrify Roadmap platform’s unglamorous appearance is the first thing you notice about it. There isn’t a fancy onboarding video or a homepage supported by venture capital that promises to “reimagine education.” All that’s needed is a quiet interface, a collection of tools, and a roadmap that outlines the school day in the manner that a considerate instructor might draw it on the back of a napkin. Nevertheless, this small piece of software, developed at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, has found its way into the hands of about two million educators. That’s not a figure you would expect from a side project in Ann Arbor managed by two professors and a few educators. However, here we are.

In 2019, Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris established the Center for Digital Curricula, which is housed within the College of Engineering and has a mission that is difficult to put into a pitch deck. They aimed to create open, highly digital curricula that could be accessed by anyone. Paywalls are absent. There is no enterprise tier. Just K–5 lessons in all four core subjects that are in line with standards, presented via a platform they have been discreetly creating since the mid-2010s. It’s the kind of outmoded notion that might have remained buried in an academic journal in a different decade.

Then March 2020 arrived. Schools close. Teachers rushed. And all of a sudden, Soloway’s modest little platform—which he described as bridging the gap between digital devices and digital curricula—found itself providing an answer to a question that millions of educators were simultaneously posing. “When we started, we went from zero to 1,500 students in three weeks,” Soloway said to reporters at the university. In retrospect, it’s simple to ignore how hectic those weeks seemed. However, anyone who has witnessed a third-grade teacher attempt to teach long division using a frozen Zoom screen can see the kind of void the Roadmap entered.

One of the early adopters was Dawn Michalek, a third-grade teacher at Bay City Public Schools. She discussed the difficulty of instructing children who were not physically in front of her, as well as how instinct fails you when you are unable to see a child squint or hesitate. The Roadmap provided her with a tool that she could give a student at home and rely on to help them get through the day. Listening to educators like her gives me the impression that the platform’s success wasn’t due to its technological prowess, but rather to the fact that its developers truly understood what it’s like to be in a classroom at 9:42 on a Tuesday morning.

The tool itself is a collection of what the team refers to as “collabrified” apps: a spreadsheet, a concept mapper, a PDF editor, a Venn diagrammer, a multimedia writer, and a flipbook for drawing and animating. Synchronous collaboration—a geeky way of saying that children can collaborate in real time—is supported by everything. STEM teacher Billie Freeland of Kent City Elementary said she was taken aback by the students’ increased creativity and eagerness to see each other’s work. To put it more simply, someone can help you if you’re stuck, according to Emma, one of her students.

The team’s determination to stay local is impressive. Soloway has been candid about her loyalty to Michigan, Michigan educators, and Michigan students. Seven educators in Michigan complete the core curriculum work in addition to their teaching duties. The project might eventually outgrow that frame. Another possibility is that it shouldn’t.

Observing the entire endeavor has an almost antiquated feel to it. While ed-tech behemoths chase valuations, two professors, a small team, a state university, and a freely distributed tool are involved. Naturally, everything was accelerated by the pandemic. However, this creature’s bones were already present and ready. And the teachers—there are currently two million of them—managed to get to it.⁖※⃻⃹⃎