UpGrade Overview

UpGrade is an open source environment to create and manage online randomized controlled trials in educational software. Any EdTech client app can deploy the UpGrade service in its infrastructure.

UpGrade Can Be Used For...

• Learning Science and Continuous Improvement in EdTech software

  • Current and prior studies have used UpGrade with Carnegie Learning's MATHia software, and Playpower's Battleship Numberline game

  • We can use A/B testing at scale to scientifically and measurably improve EdTech software

• UpGrade is specific for educational experiments in schools and classroom settings

  • UpGrade's support of group random assignment allows us to run experiments in educational settings while maintaining consistent learning experiences within a group

  • Reduce teacher burden and possible class disruption by maintaining group consistency

  • Allows users to set consistency parameter settings for managing experiment behavior in adaptive educational software, when students reach the content of interest at different times

• How can UpGrade help different teams in your organization?

  • Research Teams

    • Design and deploy experiments easily

    • Monitor experiments using data feedback loops

    • ‍Automatically start and end experiments

    • ‍Export data for further analysis

    • Run multi-site experiments

  • Engineering Teams

    • Use feature flags to release features over time ‍

    • QA new features in production before releasing them to everyone ‍

    • Easily keep track of the errors ‍

    • A structured way to experiment with features

  • Product Teams

    • Run A/B tests with consistent user experiences at the individual, class, school, or district level

    • Test how new effective new features

    • Exclude or manually assign users from the field tests

    • See how experiments run in a demo mode

How to start using UpGrade?

Developer: Read our Quick Start and other Developer Guides that will walk you through installing and running UpGrade on your local computer or in the cloud.

Researcher: Read the Experimentation in UpGrade section, then the Example sections to see how UpGrade can help you improve learning experiences at scale.

How you can use UpGrade for experimentation?

Run UpGrade somewhere (locally or on the cloud)

Add 'decision points' in your app (read more in key concepts page)

Connect your app with UpGrade via client libs

Run experiments on your decision points in the code using UpGrade