Today we will be filing our quarterly reports with the New York City Department of Education. In addition to the Individualized Home Instruction Plan (or IHIP), quarterly reports are one of the legal requirements for homeschooling in New York. The report that we actually send in to the DOE is the minimal one possible by law – essentially an affirmation that the children are progressing well. But for ourselves and for the kids we pull together a detailed report from all their tutors.

So just like when I wrote about the IHIP I want to again suggest that there is a startup opportunity here. Tracking one’s learning progress across many different classes, books, online courses, offline activities is quite hard. And even though we use modern tools such as Google docs we are essentially just stringing together a bunch of unstructured prose.

I don’t know what the right format for all of this would be and it probably shouldn’t be completely structured. But what I have in mind is a system that lets students (and teachers) create plans for what to learn and then track their progress and revise the plans. As I am writing this, I am beginning to think that it could be something similar to what companies are looking for to do OKR style management. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.