Announcing iBaguette for Institutions

tl;dr:

We will be making public our resources and expertise in education and technology to expand our impact on learning, by better allowing the things at the heart of our mission — of bringing free, unified access to education for everyone, whilst having fun doing it — to already-exisiting educational institutions around the world.

The service is currently available right now at institutions.ibaguette.com!

 

What is being announced?

The services which iBaguette has created and currently use across the website are now being made available for select educational institutions, after a successful alpha testing round internally and across select establishments. 

How can I get access to the Institutions area?

To go to your institution's dedicated section, please go to institutions.ibaguette.com and sign in with the username and password that you received in your affiliated email address. Alternatively, if your institution uses the Google Workspace for Education or Apple for Education programs, your account may already be compatible for use with our services. Use the "Continue with Apple" or "Sign in with Google" buttons to find out if your institution's administrator has enabled this.

Note: you must sign in with your institution's domain in order to be given access. If prompted, select this email, instead of personal accounts.

What does the institution program offer?

Firstly, thank you for taking your time to have a look at us!

iBaguette's institution program is currently in its early stages and we don't recommend a full switch yet from other resources which you may be using. First and foremost, features have a high chance of breaking, site layout may change significantly and features may be completely removed. However, we will be granting the highest tier lifetime access to all institutions who help in this beta stage, completely free of charge. Education should be available for everyone for free, and we passionately believe in this.

Below is a list of features that we currently provide:

• Unlimited, collaborative file storage for all students, teachers and staff
• Access to enhanced versions and formats of all our public revision material
• new, innovative software that helps teachers plan lessons, manage students, organise teaching material and save time.
• Our repositories of existing and new content for A-level subject NEAs and EPQs to give your classes inspiration
• A collection of world-renowned research papers, some even in the preprint stage for cutting edge research and ideas  
• Classroom management tools comparable to Google Classroom with a feed, options to manage and add resources and students
• A world-class MIS (school management information system) that connects students, teachers and parents
• Timetabling systems and clash mitigation
• Student resources with attendance and behaviour monitoring, report publication and grade breakdowns

These are just examples of the solutions we currently offer, as a result of alpha testing. During our beta stage, we will be accepting and implementing many times more features and suggestions we receive from educators like you to expand and make this platform as friendly and useful as possible for everyone.

All our services are offered with complete security and will become open-source, meaning that anyone can contribute to and fix potential vulnerabilities or add new features. 

For developers and larger establishments, we are also working on enabling our current technology stack to support advanced APIs and highly configurable role-based access levels and modules which can be installed across a network, on groups of students, or even for specific criteria-matching 'objects' in the MIS. 

What about for educators themselves?

The features included in the Institution program are built around teachers and other educators and academics primarily. Educators should not have to waste time using the clunky tools available on the market at present to simply organise a classroom. In the program, all educators can add comments — publicly or privately — to explain what they do not like or what needs to be added to make their workflow easier. We have received over 10,000 comments and havebeen able — and are continuing — to create powerful and robust tools to empower them, from better site layout, completely rewriting searching algorithms and adding class-specific views across many pages.

Enabling access to our range of technology is also essential. We've conducted user experience research, targeting those who may not be as in-tune with tech as typically their younger colleagues, to create a simplistic yet empowering subversion of our entire toolset which "frankly puts everything else I've used to shame" - according to a 60-year-old History teacher. These people should not be left behind by ever more clunky, flashy devices that are seemingly more complex and no longer 'just work' as expected.

How can I trust iBaguette, being a new player in this field?

We've worked hard to build and create intuitive and useful software and products, and we're working even harder to show off what we do and how well we do it. Anyone, including you, can access our range of student-focused exam revision resources on the site right now! By boasting a range if reliable, audited and acclaimed resources as they are currently, we hope to show that we can be trusted. Furthermore, our code and backend are open-source. iBaguette has also received many positive reviews and testimonials across the site as a result of this, visible elsewhere on other content on this website and on other community-centred platforms.

We receive thousands of unique visitors daily and, during peak exam season times, many hundreds of students concurrently use the resources we have right now on offer to improve their grades, with proven results.

How can our institution apply to join the program?

Please send an email to us at [email protected], or utilise the online forms available on our partner sites such as geog.uk. Inform us of your current use case, solution and student head count totals and we will assess whether or not your institution will be a good fit for our beta program. (Spoiler alert: we will probably say yes!)

Alternatively, if you are in contact with an institution with existing beta program access, you may be able to obtain a unique referral link from them and gain access, no questions asked.

If you recognise some of the following names as program members, you're in luck: Cambridge, Oxford, Notre Dame, Sir Isaac.

Please be aware that we expect moderate demand, so we may not be able to facilitate everyone at once, and a 'staggered' entry may be used. 

How many people were involved in the pilot/alpha program?

A total of 11 institutions took part in our initial testing, and we expect some to continue into the more open beta testing program. This accounted for 4,500 student accounts and our systems handled interactions between 35,000 unique relationships per day easily.

How much does iBaguette for Institutions cost?

The program is currently free. Alpha and beta testers will continue to have access to all features implemented currently and in the future, even after these tests conclude, for completely free for all students and educators. We truly believe in access to unified, free education access for everyone. 

Additional compute features currently being developed such as AI-augmented suggestion *might* incur additional costs for institutions not part of the testing programs.

I'm seeing the error "account doesn't match a partner organisation's domain"!

Please sign in on either an institutional device, or select your institutional account whilst logging in! It's also possible that your institution may have been removed from the program, please contact your administrator.

Written by Draggie (22/08/2023)

Amendment 1: Clarity improved. (22/08/2023)