MIPT: PrepTime

Main article: Mobile applications

2024: PrepTime Presentation

The IT solution proposed by Tatyana Mukhina, a student of the Department of Technology of the Future of MIPT, will save up to 10 hours a week on non-core tasks for the teacher: formation and control of the schedule, work with educational materials, notifications about upcoming lessons for students, as well as accounting for tuition. The digital platform is called PrepTime.  The university announced this on September 17, 2024.

Tatiana Mukhina

On the PrepTime platform, the teacher will be able not only to fill out the class schedule and the educational progress card of each student, but also to keep records of tuition fees. At the end of the lesson, the amount is simply debited from the student's virtual account in the application. Important: the application does not accept payments, the tutor himself notes the payments received from customers in the application, as he previously did in tables/diary and analogues. 

The project team conducted a series of in-depth interviews with tutors from Moscow. Participants in the study were both teachers for whom private lessons are a part-time option (they have 1-2 regular students), and experienced professionals who simultaneously lead groups of 10 or more people. Most of the respondents use non-specialized services: Yandex and Google calendar, notebooks and notes. At the same time, tutors can solve all tasks with their help only partially, which creates difficulties in planning and organizing the educational process.

70% of tutors noted that a service is needed to automatically record payments and debits, of which 25% were looking for a suitable specialized service, but did not find it, and the rest did not hope to find something suitable or did not know how to look. Tutors noted the need to take into account one-time payments and season tickets, fines in case of late cancellation of classes and work with group classes. About 30% of tutors talked about difficulties with the organization of materials, where the main problem is precisely the need to sort tasks both by topic and by student, - continued the author of the project, student of the Department of Technologies of the Future of MIPT, Tatyana Mukhina.

The service can be used for free with up to three students on the platform. This option is suitable for getting acquainted with all the functionality of the platform, and will also allow novice tutors to use the service. If there are more students, then the subscription cost will be 290 rubles per month. At the same time, specialists will be able to manage workflows from any convenient device. 

PWA technology allows you to transform the site into an application for Android, iOS. The externally received application does not differ from the usual applications on the phone, but it is more convenient to use it than to open a site in a browser. The choice for such a technology fell due to the fact that part of the tutor's work is tied to a computer and it is often convenient to open a program with a schedule on it. However, if a new payment or message is received from a student, there may be a need for quick access to the application from the phone, - said Tatyana Mukhina.

The project became a finalist of the Fiztekh accelerator. Idea and the winner of the grant competition of the Innovation Assistance Fund. The total amount of state investment in the startup of MIPT students amounted to 1 million rubles. 

For September 2024, the PrepTime project team is completing testing of the main platform options. By the end of 2024, the first publicly available version of the digital service for tutors will work.