During my downtime a couple of weeks ago, I was reading Judaism’s Life Changing Ideas, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He mentioned the behavioural economist Dan Ariely, who describes in his book The Upside of Irrationality a series of experiments on what is known as the “Ikea Effect”.

Even if someone else designed the furniture – there is something about investing your labour that makes you value that item more. Ariely wanted to conclusively test this theory,  so he asked volunteers to create elaborate origami models and then asked them how much they were prepared to pay for the models they made. The average answer was 25 cents.

After he showed the models to other people and they said they were worth 5 cents. In other words, people were prepared to pay 5 times the amount of money for something they had created.

This analogy was tied into one of the reasons why God asked the Jewish people to build the mishkan, the Tabernacle, rather than just miraculously providing a ready-made model. 

Rabbi Sacks’s life changing lesson was  “the effort you put into something does not just change the object – it changes you. The greater the labour, the greater the love for what you have made”.

Could this have been any more apt then for our teachers during and post pandemic?

Teachers who were forced to create, expand and utilize new techniques amongst multiple challenges.

The pandemic coincided with Jewish Interactive, the non-profit I lead, embarking on an ambitious journey of creating a new digital platform specifically for teachers of Jewish and Hebrew studies.

This was no easy task and, as we sat with our whiteboards and Post It stickers ready to brainstorm, we knew we needed to partner with our users.

So we engaged Dr Shuli Gilutz Ph.D., one of the top UX advisors in the world, to conduct an extensive survey with teachers of Judaics and Hebrew Studies. We carried out 2 surveys – pre and during the pandemic, extensive interviews and user testing.

The results of the survey are fascinating to read.