EduGREAT

Capstone - Case Study

Overview

This project explores the challenges of virtual and hybrid education, which have become more apparent and frequently evolving, due to COVID-19. Remote education presents a number of opportunities for improvement. Based on a preliminary literature review and competitive analysis, findings from live remote interviews and usability testing with remote and hybrid K-12 educators, we propose a collaborative digital toolkit. We believe this virtual education platform will be better adapted to the needs of educators, students and guardians in the current educational climate, than the existing remote education platforms we reviewed. 

Problem

The challenges of online and hybrid education have become more apparent with the recent changes implemented because of COVID-19. There are few online platforms that allow educators to effectively collaborate with their peers on educational materials and organize them. There is a need to integrate multiple apps and resources into one platform for easier access and utilization. Streamlining teachers’ tools and encouraging them to share resources will allow them to apply a more personalized approach to educating students with diverse needs and abilities. 

Competitive Review

We used a competitive review to help us gain a better understanding of the market by evaluating competitors’ products in the online learning space that support remote educators. We identified the strengths and weaknesses of each product to determine areas of opportunity that we can apply to our product.

Remote Interviews

We conduced in-depth remote interviews through Zoom with 7 current K-12 teachers to determine remote education tools, goals, challenges, and potential recommendations for improvement. Interview findings were used to develop design implications and shape the product direction.

Research Goal: Learn more about the tools and resources that K-12 educators use in hybrid and remote education. Better understand their goals, challenges, and identify areas of opportunity to apply to the design of a collaborative digital toolkit for educators.

Research Questions:

• What is essential for collaborative learning tools in teaching?

• What applications and resources are teachers using for remote and hybrid education?

• Do users really need another digital product for collaborating and finding resources?

• How do teachers currently collaborate with other teachers? 

Affinity mapping

With an extensive data set from our interviews, we needed some way to categorize and relate pain points. We turned to affinity mapping as a strategy since it is a natural way to group problems commonly faced. The team created a shared affinity diagram in Mural to synthesize and organize findings into three main focus categories: 1) Collaboration, 2) Remote Teaching Methods and Challenges, and 3) Lesson Planning and Resources.

User Archetypes

We developed user archetypes to help the team better understand different target users who will be interacting with our product. Based on our research, we created archetypes with specific goals, motivations, and pain points, to ensure that our product is designed to meet the needs of these users. Throughout the product development process, we referenced these archetypes to ensure we were staying on track with our design decisions. The user archetypes were created in Figma using the synthesized data from our interviews with K-12 educators.

Journey Map

We designed a journey map to provide a visual representation of our primary archetype’s actions as they relate to remote education. This helped the team understand the mental models of our users and prioritize potential areas of opportunity for the prototype design. The Journey map was created in Figma, based on information gathered from the interviews conducted with K-12 remote and hybrid educators.

Insights

All of these activities led us to 4 prominent insights for educators.

Revised Problem Statement

How might we streamline teachers’ tools, help teachers make more informed decisions based on student performance, and discover new resources, so they can apply a more personalized approach to educating students with diverse needs and abilities? 

Ideation

Crazy 8’s

The crazy-8s sketching exercise was used to create eight distinct ideas for our prototype. Each team member quickly sketched design concepts. As a result, each team member created their own eight distinct concepts for prototype screens that addressed the remote education problems we were exploring.

Conducting usability testing

We recruited 5 K-12 educators for remote low-fidelity usability testing through personal connections. We conducted a low-fidelity prototype evaluation to identify potential usability problems our users might encounter when trying to complete tasks. This evaluation feedback allowed us to modify the prototype early in the design process, test ideas, and collect feedback on revised designs more efficiently.

High-fidelity prototyping

We created the high-fidelity prototype in Figma using the low-fidelity screens as a base. The low-fidelity usability testing results informed the changes we made to the high-fidelity prototype. We added 20 additional screens to complete the six task flows for our second round of usability testing.

Opportunity 1

How might we increase communication, access, and collaboration for teachers?

Plan for every student to succeed

Users have the ability to add supporting team members to student profiles to increase communication, access, and collaboration between main classroom instructors and supporting teachers. Supporting teachers can upload IEP/504 and other specialized plan on student profile pages to increase ease of access of these items for the main classroom and specialized teachers to better support their students. Finally, our users can use teacher groups, forums, and messaging to aid in collaboration, discussion, and connection between educators.

Opportunity 2

How might we provide teachers with a more simplified workflow?

Seeing everything in one place

EduGREAT toolkit allows users to see important information on their dashboard. This includes announcements, lesson plans, emails and upcoming events

Opportunity 3

How might we make discovering effective supplemental resources more efficient?

Explore resources easily

Users can easily sort and filter through resources using the advanced search system. We created a rating and review system to help educators find effective supplemental resources and minimize the time spent looking for them. EduGREAT uses a resource verification feature to indicate resources that have been vetted by an authoritative source to minimize frustration over determining which resources are legitimate.

Opportunity 4

How might we make it easier for teachers to track student performance?

Pinpoint needs and opportunities

Monitor student progress in real time to identify students who need attention and support.

Reflection

Project limitations
There were several limitations to our work on EduGREAT. COVID was a factor, because it limited our interviews exclusively to remote Zoom interviews. It also affected the availability of some of our interview and usability participants, which made scheduling them more difficult. In addition, our participants were all K-12 remote or hybrid educators, so they are under a tremendous amount of stress. They often interacted with us at the end of a full day of teaching, which may have impacted some of their interview responses and usability testing results. The relatively short ten week timeline of this project was another limitation, which forced us to prioritize our efforts. Finally, all of our interviewees and usability testing participants were personal connections. While we would have preferred to utilize participants that we did not know, given our participant criteria and time limitations, using acquaintances was our only viable option. Our connection to participants could have positively biased some of their responses, as we noted above in relation to our goals. In addition, the majority of our interviewees were female, which means there could be a gender bias.

Future considerations
For future work, we would like to explore the student and guardian facing side of the platform, so that we can better understand and build the holistic Toolkit experience for all potential users. Our future work may include additional research on existing platforms that guardians and students are currently interacting with, to help us assess the challenges, successful features, and limitations of these. We would also like to interview guardians and students to determine their goals, challenges, and needs as they relate to remote educational platforms. These additional research methods would help us gather key insights and implement potential solutions for the guardian and student facing side of the EduGREAT Toolkit. Finally, we would refine our high-fidelity prototype so that it includes additional features such as Zoom integration, ability to upload additional resources, and incorporating student feedback. Once these design changes were implemented, we would evaluate these additional features with a usability test, then further refine it as needed.