Education
Every semester, the rules change.
Five new instructors. Five ways of doing things. Some post everything on the first day. Some post it whenever.
If you just got here, it’s high school made bigger, and nobody’s checking anymore. If you transferred, you know how to do college — just not this one. If you’ve been here three years, it still starts over in January.
Nobody hands you a manual for any of it.
Classes are only part of it.
A student isn’t managing five classes. They’re managing a week. A shift at work. A friend who needs something. A morning that got away from them. Money. Sleep.
The classes get graded. Everything around them is what decides how the classes go.
What gets graded
What a student is actually running
Only the top row lands on a transcript. The bottom row decides it.
Inside out
Most apps just do their thing. They don’t know who you are, how you work, or what else you’ve got going on. Some people are like that too.
selfActual starts from the other end — with the person — and connects everything else to that.
Talia is built on that approach.
The app
Talia
Talia is an app that helps students do school better.
Version one is a conversation. It connects to Canvas and keeps an eye on it, so it starts out knowing what a student is taking and what’s due.
From there it’s up to them. Break an assignment into steps. Build a study schedule around a work shift. Ask where something is and get a link to it. Hear about the thing that matters before it turns into a problem.
It doesn’t do the work. It helps them figure out the work.
The course site
Talia reads what’s already in Canvas. The student still works there.
The student owns it.
Talia runs on a selfActual vault. The student owns their record — not the school, and not us.
They decide what to share, who to share it with, and for how long. A study group. An advisor. A tutor. Or nobody. They can change their mind.
There’s no parent dashboard and no school dashboard. Sharing is something the student does, not something that happens to them.
When they leave school, it goes with them and plugs into the tools they use at work.
The student’s vault
Everything else stays inside.
The advisor’s view
The one item the student sent.
Doesn’t contain: the rest of the vault.
The student is the one sending. One thing leaves; the rest doesn’t.
Two students
Four demos, two each. They run in your browser — real screens, real typing, not video. Each one opens by asking how you want it paced, soAuto-play, with pauses is the one to open in a room.
Maya
A first-year business major. Five classes, plus a bookstore shift two nights a week. She set Talia up herself.
Marcus
Has ADHD and an accommodation plan. He set his up with someone from student success in the room, so it started out knowing what it needed to know.
Where this goes
That’s version one. A few of the things we’re building toward:
Everything the school already tells you.
Add and drop dates. What the writing center actually does. Which office handles what. What happens if you miss a deadline for a real reason.
Schools do tell students most of this. It just arrives all at once, months before anyone needs it. Talia could hold it and bring it up when it’s the thing that matters.
The people doing the teaching.
A professor building a course. An advisor carrying two hundred students. Someone in a support office with ten minutes who wants them to count. The same vault works for them.
Schools running vaults of their own.
So the school’s work stays with the school, and a student’s record stays with the student.
We’re building the student piece first.
We’re still building this.
If you work with students, or you’re raising one, tell us what you’d want it to do.
Got it — thanks.
We read every one of these. Someone will follow up by email; there’s nothing else you need to do right now.