How We Got Started
Our Story
The Timeline
Our Past -
Our Present -
Our Future -
Our project started in the fall of 2021, as part of the Integrated Management Student Fellowship (IMSF) at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management.
We were tasked with creating an initiative surrounding one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and chose to tackle Goal (SDG) number 4, Quality Education, which aims to ensure everyone has access to inclusive and equitable quality education to promote lifelong learning opportunities. To narrow our impact even further, we focused on United Nations’ target 4.4 and 4.7, to aid in promoting sustainable development education for public school students. With this framework in mind, we wanted to develop an initiative that would pinpoint a smaller niche that could provide immense support to both teachers and students.
ConnectED stemmed from interviews and conversations with a primary school teacher, where we learned more about the day-to-day reality of primary and high-school teachers. We were shocked to learn how large the workload of teachers are, and how little resources and in-person help they receive.
In order to design a solution that filled a gap that wasn't already filled by other existing services, we conducted weeks of primary and secondary research (e.g., interviews with teachers and principals, conducting a high-level market scan of existing solutions, and scouring news articles) to land on the idea of providing in-person support for teachers that could be tailored and adjusted iteratively to their needs.
In March 2022, the Bancroft Elementary School & MIND High School agreed to be our partners for a pilot project that would enable us to test out the service and hear real feedback from teachers and students. For the pilot project, ConnectED gave two workshops to two high-school classes. Both workshops were interactive and well-received by the eager and engaged students as well as the teachers who could supplement their curriculums without any additional work.
We kept in contact with the public school teacher that inspired our work throughout the different stages from ideation to implementation to ensure that we could build something that was truly valuable for the teachers and students. That intense year-long process led to what ConnectED is today.
Now, we want to grow our initiative! We want to recruit more student volunteers at McGill with a wide variety of backgrounds to be able to give a presentation on… well… pretty much anything! We are also constantly looking for opportunities to onboard more schools into our initiative to expand our services to more teachers and students.
Finally, we’ve got some pretty big hopes for the long-term future of ConnectED. For the time being, we’re focused on making sure the next year is a success, but there’s no harm in sharing what we have in the back of our minds! Our mid-term goal is to develop additional partnerships with more schools in the Montreal area. Eventually, we’d like to expand the ConnectED movement through opening university chapters across Montreal and beyond so that we can scale the amount of impact we are delivering to classrooms across Canada.