Connecting Classrooms
| ROLE
| DURATION
| TEAM
| TOOLS
UX/UI Designer
2 Days
February 2020
Masters Cohort partner
Adobe XD
Overview:
A&E Networks has hundreds of hours of historical video clips sitting online with low interactivity. Is there a way to leverage these in an educational context?
Solution:
An application (available on mobile) in which educators can setup classrooms and assign prepared lessons, modules, and organize their own homework assignments around History Channel content.
OVERVIEW
Building a mobile application to be used as an educational tool that highlighted the existing History Channel digital content and media.
PROBLEM
The History Channel of A+E Networks is a treasure trove of digital, informational content. From televised media to content produced for their web-based and social media platforms, The History Channel wanted to figure out how they could package this content most easily for educators to use for K-12 students. My teammate and I wound up thinking about how we could create a platform that would not be more work than it could be worth, and how we could produce more beneficial opportunities for students.
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How might we provide teachers with a learning experience that complements the use of technology in the modern classroom? Is there an easy way to integrate essentially a YouTube-like platform solely comprised of historical video content into assignments, study guides, projects, and even homework for history classes?
PROCESS & ROLE
Research | Design | Map | Refine | Present
Most useful to our initial research phases were considering our own educational backgrounds. While it had been a while since we were in high school, but my teammate and I had experienced private and public schools, and I had even completed two years of online schooling through high school. We started by talking about what was successful, what we hated doing, and ultimately what seemed to work the best for history content as years later we know we can only recall a fraction of what we had to study in high school.
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We then thought about our college, and even graduate education opportunities. We did research on developing online platforms and digital schooling. We know that it is more common for schools to have 1:1 technology programs where financially viable, and that a lot of teachers are shifting away from printed essays and hand-out homework to digital textbooks and assignments.
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We decided to create a platform that allowed teachers to create organized collections of videos, with the ability to write prompts, questions, and notes in the organized "playlists." These playlists could be virtual/remote assignments, study guides, or assignments for substitute teachers to proctor and oversee while an instructor is out. Teachers could link out to external resources, articles, and instruct written assignments or prompts. Additionally, teachers can monitor the completion by their students and see overall class progress on assignments.
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Similarly, the application has a student login where students can see their assigned work, past work, and review the lessons as a study method. They can be notified of work still to do and work past due as a member of a digital "class."
THE SOLUTION
The final solution my teammate and I were able to produce was a comprehensive Adobe XD prototype. With over 80 wireframes presenting views for both the teacher and student, we highlighted a few use cases for the application, including:
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teachers seeing class progress, including specific student progress
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teachers creating and modifying lesson plans
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a visual of video searching with filters by genre
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a view of video player
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reviewing lessons as both a student and teacher
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Additionally, we were wanted to work within the existing History Channel branding. Given that a lot of their content is serious, educational, and informative, we wanted to fall in line with their reductive use of color. We also considered that this platform is optimized for video playback, so we chose a dark background for the entire app so as not to cause eye strain between a white or light background and constant video playing.
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Our proposed solution for the History Channel was selected as a finalist in the competition, placing in the top ten team out of 55 teams from across the nation. As such, we got to present to lead product and UX designers both with Adobe as well as A+E Networks.
KEY INSIGHTS
DIGITAL CLASSROOMS REQUIRE ORGANIZATION
Users must have signed-on before they can entertain the idea of enabling a second-authentication measure.
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CREATING VIDEO-BASED LEARNING CONTENT CAN BE DISENGAGING
In today's world, we had to recognize that just watching a video on your phone or laptop could become passive and reduce the content to background noise if the student was distracted. Similarly, students could easily be distracted from their work by texts or other notifications
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TEACHERS HAVE ENOUGH WORK
How can we create something that is not going to be more work than the content is worth? How can we make something intuitive for millennial teachers as well as Gen-Z students, who have different relationships with technology and the internet (and different comfort levels)?
DISCOVERING FLOWS
After spending the first 6 hours of our weekend sprint (Friday night) in research and settling on producing a digital classroom-emulating application, we realized there were a lot of potential flows to develop. We had decided to let individual teachers create classrooms with individual student accounts (not dissimilar from how Google Classroom, Pearson Online et. al.) in addition to teachers releasing and assigning individually curated lessons to entire classes. Thinking through the complexity of the back-end was a task we knew we would not be able to flesh-out fully, but we had an acute awareness that we could develop a large number of wireframes for a visual, working prototype of the interfaces for teachers, students, and potentially even users who had not signed into the application.
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REPLICATING DESIGNS
ITERATIVELY
As we began working, we realized a lot of screens would get to build off of each other—even though we split tasks of creating wireframes between the two of us to focus on various different flows. We realized that after building a dozen screens, we could make a lot of journeys easily by building upon those, but knew that changing any of those integral details intended to be consistent throughout the prototype would require lots of manual changes if we did not think through each bit of our design thoughtfully at the beginning.
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Below, you can review our frame-heavy prototype to capture the feel of how we wanted to manage user goals while serving as a lesson platform and match the History Channel's existing identity. You can also watch our 2-minute presentation here, starting around the 57:30 time mark.
FINAL PROPOSAL
NEXT STEPS
This Adobe Creative Jam has no next steps in terms of development! Going back and reflecting as I share this on my website, I feel as though the project had a lot of foresight in considering new applications for digital learning. Some things we want to consider now much be how we structure courses, how we can maximize lessons learning potential when considering educational psychology as well as how young students might interact with the content. Additionally, security issues would need to be thought through, as well as the storage of individual accounts and progress.
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If History Channel is going to develop account sales, management, IT, and support for this new product, they also might benefit from considering new content delivery methods compared to e-textbooks. The education space has lots of room to grow with digital technology and developing a video-based lesson platform could be the future development when looking at how remote and digital learning has transformed in 2020.