Mai
A school's records, its accreditation evidence and each student's story sit in different systems.
Mai is in development, so this page says what it is designed to do rather than what it does.
How it works
Mai is designed to hold a school's everyday records, the evidence behind its standards, and a portfolio that follows each student.
- Record
The everyday register a school has to keep anyway.
- Map
Each piece of learner evidence tied to the rubric it belongs to, as it is created.
- Carry forward
A portfolio that follows the student rather than the school year.
Example entries, not a real student
- Term 1, a science inquiry projectEvidence added by the teacherRubric: inquiry 2.1
- Term 2, the class debate finalsReflection written by the studentRubric: communication 1.3
- Term 3, a maths reasoning checkGrowth since term 1 recorded against the same standardRubric: reasoning 3.2
What it does today
- Design work, and conversations with schools about what a first version has to do.
- No software a school can log into.
Roadmap
- A first version, scoped with the schools we are talking to.
What we do not claim
- No school is running on Mai.
- There is no screenshot and no demo, and the example on this page was written for this page.
- No accreditation body has reviewed or approved anything here.
- The portfolio is not the LUMEN Learning Passport, which is a separate thing under a separate name.
A good fit
- Schools willing to shape a first version and tell us when we have it wrong.
Not a fit yet
- A school that needs a working system this term.
- Anyone who wants to buy Mai today. There is nothing to sell yet.
Why the name
Mai is one word carrying two meanings, and both of them are the point.
- Tamilமை
- Ink. The indelible kind, used to write down what happened so that it stays written.
- Vietnamesemai
- Tomorrow. Which is what a school's record is ultimately for.
A school record is both of those at once. It has to be permanent, because it is evidence. And it exists for a future that has not arrived, because its whole purpose is what the student does next.
For academic leaders and accreditors
To show the quality of an institution you need one record everybody trusts, not a folder put together in the weeks before a visit. Mai is designed so that evidence is tied to the standard it answers at the moment it is created. A rubric, the work that meets it, and the person who signed that off are designed to sit together and stay together, so at review time the evidence is already where a reviewer would look for it.
For admissions and parents
What a parent wants to know is how a school is preparing their child for what comes next. Mai is designed to carry a portfolio that follows the student rather than the school year, so the answer to that question is made of the child’s own work. A parent should be able to see what their child has done and how it was assessed without asking for a report to be assembled by hand.
For school leaders
Mai is designed around the register a school has to keep anyway. If the everyday record is the same record the accreditation evidence comes out of, nobody is keeping two sets of books, and an accreditation cycle stops being a separate project that starts from nothing every time. The evidence is a view of the register rather than a second job.
We check the problem before anyone talks about a build.