Due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2019, the delivery of post-secondary education had to adapt and change drastically, with many institutions having to transition to a remote learning environment. However, online learning can have several significant barriers for students, such as adapting to the software and managing different methods of content delivery. We conducted this study to investigate and understand the complexities of remote learning.
How might we enhance the education experience of post-secondary students during the pandemic?
We created an additional function in Microsoft Teams that focuses on academic and wellness support for students. The function helps students manage their schoolwork and time while giving emotional support and comfort with remote communication.
We interviewed 10 participants from Canada and Hong Kong that were post-secondary students immersed in remote learning. Our goal was to understand the pain points in students’ online learning experiences bred from transitioning in-person learning to remote or hybrid classes. We also aimed to discover the different tools participants use for remote schools to uncover design and usability-focused issues.
Here are some questions we asked during the interviews:
We organized the qualitative data we collected as a spreadsheet and analyzed the comments participants mentioned regarding their remote learning experience.
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We conducted an activity analysis to identify the common pain points linked to the type of activity conducted by multiple participants. Each of these activities is linked to a theme/mode in order to group activities with similar functions.
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Our research, including the user interviews and activity analysis, has brought to light multiple gaps in the current remote learning system that are contributing to a negative learning experience for post-secondary students.
I personally, am feeling like there isn't a lot of support for me as a third year... if we need something, we have questions like here's how to reach out, but in terms of like mental health services and just regular services that the school was providing, I'm feeling a little bit a little bit lacklustre.
Scheduling time outside of that to meet up has been rather difficult, especially with international students being on a 12 hour time difference. So for them meeting at noon is midnight. And they can't really meet anytime after that, because that's 3am and things like that.
I think being alone, or learning alone has been the most difficult part of transitioning into online learning, because I don't think I'm learning much and I think part of that is because I'm learning alone, I feel like when school was like an in person thing I learned a lot more from my peers and like seeing what they were doing, and how they were handling assignments.
Based on the findings above, our team narrowed our solution to a system redesign with:
We condensed all the key information we identified and transformed it into a persona, listing the scenario, needs, and pain points for users.
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We separated our flow into two main sections which are: academic support and wellness support.
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We brainstormed how might the application look like and what features should be included. We then converged our ideas by using a dot voting system in order to determine as a group what features should be prioritized. This design studio workshop was effective for visualizing how we wanted our solution to be.
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Based on the features we all agreed upon, we iterated our sketches to draft a vision of our final solution.
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We built a plugin added into Microsoft Teams to provide additional features for post-secondary students in terms of academic success and well-being.
Students can schedule meetings and communicate with professors and mentors to keep in track with school.
Students can check the profiles of school counsellors and arrange calls to seek mental health assistance and emotional support.
View additional resources related to academics or well-being to seek for more support.
Or click on the button below to fully view the prototype in Adobe XD.
View Prototype Full ScreenDiving deep into the different research tools helped us troubleshoot the area of focus for our problem and visualize the features that were important.
As a team we knew we had to cover a lot of deliverables within a short time frame. Crafting research plans and preparing for interviews took the most time. Having a detailed schedule plan from the get go helped us tremendously with keeping our project on track.
