Education Institutions
Schools, colleges, universities, IITs, NITs, IIITs, teacher educators, and research groups with a clear learning problem.
Client onboarding
Partner with ET617 student teams on real educational problems.
Clients help students work on authentic educational needs by providing context, feedback, constraints, representative users where feasible, and a realistic handover target for a semester-length prototype.
Who Can Be a Client?
ET617 clients can come from a wide range of educational and social contexts.
Public and Social Sector
NCERT, SCERTs, AICTE, UGC, NGOs, foundations, community learning programs, and inclusion-focused initiatives.
EdTech and Industry
Startups, companies, learning platforms, training teams, and product groups looking for exploratory educational prototypes.
What Clients Provide
A good client brief is specific enough for students to start, but open enough for discovery and iteration.
Problem Context
Describe the learners, current practice, pain points, educational goals, language context, accessibility needs, and why the problem matters.
Project Brief
Provide a one-page assignment with desired outcomes, constraints, non-negotiables, examples of existing materials, and rough success criteria.
Feedback Access
Join discovery, review, and handover conversations. Help identify representative users or domain experts when appropriate and approved.
Decision Support
Clarify priorities when scope must be reduced, respond to meeting minutes, and validate assumptions before students build too far.
IPR Clarity
Discuss ownership, licensing, repository visibility, attribution, reuse, and open-source expectations early with the teaching team.
Responsible Data
Avoid sharing sensitive personal data unless explicitly approved and necessary. Student projects should minimize data collection and protect learners.
How the Collaboration Runs
The course uses a lightweight but disciplined project rhythm.
Proposal and confirmation
Clients are contacted, project ideas are collected, proposals are reviewed for educational relevance, technical feasibility, scope, IPR clarity, accessibility, and diversity.
Kickoff and discovery
Student teams meet clients and mentors, write meeting minutes, study the context, and convert the brief into requirements and design priorities.
Prototype and review
Teams demonstrate early builds, collect feedback, revise the backlog, and manage risks such as exam periods, festival breaks, or unavailable stakeholders.
Demo and handover
Teams submit the final report, repository, presentation, deployment notes, and demonstrate the prototype to clients and evaluators.
Meeting Expectations
Clear communication keeps the project useful even when the problem evolves.
Before Meetings
Teams send time, place, agenda, intended outcome, background documents, and expected preparation. Two working days of notice is a useful default.
During Meetings
Focus on learner needs, scope, decisions, assumptions, validation evidence, risks, and what must be demonstrated in the next sprint.
After Meetings
Teams share minutes with client, mentor, and members. Clients review decisions and corrections quickly so work does not drift.
Scope note: ET617 projects are educational prototypes built within a semester. Production deployment needs additional review, maintenance planning, institutional approval, and data protection checks.