Efficiency for the Future
By: Natalia Nazeem Ahmed
Tags: Education Marketplace, Recommendation Engine, User Experience, Better Student Lives, UX

By Mahmud Ridwan on Toptal

One of the overriding principles here at Lock&Stock is pretty straightforward — it’s to ‘better student lives’. Though this can mean a number of different things, Lock&Stock defines this with a down-to-earth response that can significantly change a student’s future.

Higher education has become saturated with colleges and universities, each one offering a wide range of courses to choose from. With many options available, choosing the right university is one of the toughest decisions faced by a student and one that impacts their future:

“This is a big decision, right? Where am I going to study for the next four years? We have to be able to support the user and help them out through this journey,” Mustafa Ahmed, CTO, explains.

The aim was to simplify this process and help make this decision much easier to approach. Achieving this meant building a support system with the intention to understand each individual user and guide them towards finding a university. Lock&Stock have done just that with the recent launch of their university recommendation engine. Like the name suggests, a recommendation engine is an AI system that recommends particular services or products from data that’s gathered from the user.

Via Analytics Vidhya

Lock&Stock’s recommendation engine is designed to understand the needs of a student and help narrow down their search. This can range from information such as the courses they’re interested in, to their budget, and even the country they want to study in.

The engine works on user input, taking data from other users and finding a list that best matches the student’s unique priorities. It’s a great way to cull out irrelevant options from the mix and give each user a clearer idea of the choices available to them.

“If a student has applied to X, Y, and Z universities and the person seems similar to yourself based on demographic information and other data points, then the engine recommends the same options, with the assumption that you would also most likely go to those universities,” Mustafa Ahmed, CTO at Lock&Stock

Lock&Stock has a clear vision behind this, which also ties into its core ideal of bettering student lives — to become a ‘higher education marketplace’. Lock&Stock ensures that the education marketplace remains a fair and level playing field, where universities that are new to the platform are displayed alongside other popular, older universities.

It’s easier to make a decision when you know that an algorithm has taken every aspect into consideration to create a tailored experience for each individual. Choosing the right university is a crucial moment in a young adult’s life, and Lock&Stock’s recommendation engine can play a key role in their university journey.

Want to know more about Lock&Stock’s many projects? Check out the blog here for more deep dives into how we use tech to improve the lives of others. To know more about Lock&Stock, click here for a detailed introduction into what we do, and how we do it.

Written by: Simran Chaudhry and Natalia Nazeem