R.U.M.
PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
General description of the problem
R.U.M. which stands for Review Unal Math, an entrepreneurial idea. R.U.M. is a cell phone application that has the objective of solving a problem that has been presenting in the National University for a long time: the high percentage of failure in courses at early semestres. This application will be a studying alternative that will offer a solution to some of the causes of the problem, bringing benefits not only to the students but the university itself. Since people have different ways of learning, one of our main goals is to recreate some kind of customized education system that adapts to the different student's needs.
Causes
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The students that are entering the university, have weak foundations of mathematics, and the short course they take before they start the first semestre is not enough to level them to a point that they can take the courses successfully.
The increase of the number of students per course is making classes less customized, and this affects the quality of the lessons, mainly because the teacher cannot ensure that all the students have understand.
There is a tendency towards individualism in the students, they are only concerned with their own problems and don't really care for helping their peers, and if there is one thing that can benefit a student's performance in the early semestres, it is the strong relationships with other students, because they can help each other to succeed in the hardest courses.
Effects
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Then, among the effects of such failure of courses related to mathematics at the National University due to the weak foundations, is appearance of mental illnesses like the depression and stress of students, increasing the possibility of failing tests because of nerves and anxiety. And eventually causes the loss of disposition towards this subjects.
Attached to the high percentage of failure in the early courses is the problem of the high desertion, where the campus of the National University of Medellin has one of the highest dropout rates of students in comparison with other campus of the National University in the country (Figure 1). This brings great economic and social consequences, because when the students drop out of college, the investment that the state made by each student is lost, also as the student leaves the opportunity to be professional the gap of inequity increases. On the other hand these strong academic shortcomings could be handled better if education could be customized, which is infeasible since it would be very expensive.