Project Background
Being a crucial part of the Ross Learning System, the Professional Development (PD) project involves a plan to construct 8 distinct online courses through which teachers get certified as Ross Master Teachers. Ross School requires their new hires to possess the ability to teach K-12 curriculum in an interdisciplinary manner. Furthermore, Ross Curriculum was constructed around Evolution of Consciousness, a chronological narrative from early humans all the way to present and into the future that aligns with children's cognitive development. The goal of the project was to teach new Ross School teachers and speed up their on boarding process. I was hired as the lead instructional designer and UX designer of these courses, and worked with content experts, script writers, video crews, and instructional designers for 13 month. I was producing both content (learning materials) and design solutions (flowcharts, wireframes and prototypes) in the first 6 months of the project, and some interesting solutions were proposed. Unfortunately, the production schedule shifted in other RLS components and development team were unable to deliver the platform by the summer deadline. In order to deliver existing learning material, an open source LMS (Moodle) was set up as a host of the Professional Development (PD) courses. After a successful launch of the PD project, I joined the UX team of the entire RLS project.
Project ScopeThe Ross Learning System was visioned to host four root categories in the header navigation area: Explore, Teach, Learn and Build (later changed into Create). The entire Ross Learning System was being designed from scratch at the same time. Except from some curriculum materials, most of which lived in Microsoft Word documents, nothing was ready. All we knew at the moment was that PD lives under the "Learn" tab, and everything else needs to be figured out from scratch.
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The Need / Problem
#1 Quality Assurance of TeachingFor years, Ross School Curriculum has been carried out by talented Ross teachers. While most of the cases teaching quality were up to par, there were times when Academic Team at Ross School felt that professional development is needed in order for the teachers to protect the academic integrity of the curriculum. With a series of PD courses, the School can make sure that their new hires will perform above the required standard after training. A well-designed on boarding experience could go a long way in helping the new teachers getting there.
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#2 Standardize and Digitize PDIn Ross School history, professional development usually happens in the summer, in the form of in-person lectures and seminars. Guest speakers were invited to work with the teachers, but no assessment were enforced at the end of the events. Everything needs to happen in an intensive three-week timeframe, and no resources were accessible afterwords. With a standardized and digitalized professional development experience, Ross can monitor the outcome of PD for teachers through assessment, and teachers will be able to access learning material and support throughout the year, and build a timeline around their own schedules.
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#3 Better Teamwork and IntegrationRoss School has a unique interdisciplinary curriculum, in which learning modules called Integrated Projects are carried out every trimester with students. Teachers from different Domains work together and lead the students in hands-on projects where they demonstrate their understanding of knowledge learned so far through interdisciplinary research and production. Teachers are required not only to possess an expert knowledge of his/her domain, but to have a sufficient understanding of others domains as well in order to work together. Current lack of such understanding often result in lack of involvement and inefficient communications.
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User Research
Key Questions
What does a typical day of a Ross School teacher look like? |
What do new Ross School teachers have in common? |
Will teachers be comfortable with online learning experience? |
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MethodologyThe user research started with finding out more information about the learners. Interviews were conducted directly with Ross School teachers who has been teaching here for three years or less. The instructional design (ID) team learned about the teachers' confusions and trip-ups on the curriculum content, while the UX team gathered data on their demographics and key behavioral patterns. Personas were constructed based on the understandings from the interviewees as well as national databases.
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Key Findings
Implications
The workload and schedule of the interviewees suggest that being a teacher is not easy, and there is limited time available for professional development after school hours. It is understandable when we learnt that lesson plans were usually written after school on their own time, and that some teachers are also house parents (there are boarding international students in high school who live in houses managed by house parents, a position frequently filled by Ross teachers) in addition to their day job. Everyone is very used to the fact that PD happens in summer, and potentially resists devoting more time during school trimesters. A hybrid solution with some work done during the summer for this particular setting might be a nicer transition compared to a pure self-paced online course over a year.
I was very happy to see that new teachers are generally tech savvy when it comes to personal electronics and internet experience. However, there are a few claims that they avoid using technology in their classroom and that "everything done in [his/her] class was purely on paper". Given the fact that all Ross faculty and students are given a MacBook when coming onboard, the delivery of such courses through a digital solution should not be a problem from a hardware's perspective, but it would be highly risky to assume that every new teacher coming on board will be have the same level of tech fluency. A hybrid course with long-term supporting roles can better guarantee a successful delivery.
Looking back from the pilot, we should have interviewed yet another group of potential users (although they were not our target users at the time) - Ross School faculty who have taught here for a long time. Their lack of familiarity with internet (mainly the senior faculty avoid using technology when they didn't have to) and with the most up to date Ross Curriculum (some have taught at the school for 20+ years and refused to adapt as the curriculum develops) gave us a very big surprise during the course pilot, after the school leadership demanded that everyone should take the PD courses as part of their "certificate" program. Had we interviewed them at the user research phase, we could be more prepared to serve their needs.
I was very happy to see that new teachers are generally tech savvy when it comes to personal electronics and internet experience. However, there are a few claims that they avoid using technology in their classroom and that "everything done in [his/her] class was purely on paper". Given the fact that all Ross faculty and students are given a MacBook when coming onboard, the delivery of such courses through a digital solution should not be a problem from a hardware's perspective, but it would be highly risky to assume that every new teacher coming on board will be have the same level of tech fluency. A hybrid course with long-term supporting roles can better guarantee a successful delivery.
Looking back from the pilot, we should have interviewed yet another group of potential users (although they were not our target users at the time) - Ross School faculty who have taught here for a long time. Their lack of familiarity with internet (mainly the senior faculty avoid using technology when they didn't have to) and with the most up to date Ross Curriculum (some have taught at the school for 20+ years and refused to adapt as the curriculum develops) gave us a very big surprise during the course pilot, after the school leadership demanded that everyone should take the PD courses as part of their "certificate" program. Had we interviewed them at the user research phase, we could be more prepared to serve their needs.
Landscape Audit
The ID and UX team did extensive research on existing MOOC platforms and Learning Management Systems (LMS), and listed the strength and weakness on each platform. The team realized that an LMS can be a complex system and developing a brand new one was time consuming and not cost efficient. The team suggested that the Big History Project's way of handling the similar need is a preferred path for the PD project, as it provides the core functionalities and at the same time eliminates the need to build a set of customized editing tools and admin functionalities. If full LMS functionalities were a must for the PD courses, the team suggested using exiting products such as Moodle or Sakai in order to minimize production cost and time.
Design Process
Requirements and Constraints
The design team had been facing quite a few challenges from the start of the project.
- Professional Development was visioned to be a custom-built experience and was already part of the contract with vendor developer, so we were instructed to build a new one, despite the fact that some exiting platform can provide a similar experience.
- We were also given an aggressive timeline, forcing the team to work on content and design tracks simultaneously.
- In addition, stakeholders of content (Academic Council) sometimes found it hard to synthesize their feedback, due to the lack of consensus on content and low level of tech fluency on technology.
- Courses were required to accommodate fully online learning experiences.
- Vendor was working on development of other Ross Learning System components at the same time.
SitemapsThe first thing the design team needs to create is a sitemap of how the pages connect to each other. Being aware of the fact that the Ross School Curriculum is constructed in a 3-layer format - Course, Unit and Learning Experience - The team decided to mimic the same structure to not only offer a sense of familiarity to the Learners, but also allow the stakeholders to work in a comfortable context that in a way cancels out the tension created by unfamiliarity in technology.
It took a few iterations of sitemap to finalize the basic structure of the site we were designing. Each version was focusing on the native relation between the PD pages, as well as the possibility to take advantage of the other tools being built inside the rest of the Ross Learning System. |
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Key PagesDuring reviews of the sitemaps with key stakeholders, the team was able to read deeper into the needs posted upon us and identify the key pages of PD section that will attract most traffic. Constructing these key pages first before expanding to other pages would help the team define the essential functionalities and find optimal solutions first, and build the rest of the site around these key pages' established experiences and UI elements to keep the design consistency.
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Course & Unit Page WireframesWhile most of the information displayed on a course page is quite general and easy to accommodate (such as profile video, instructor info and syllabus), a challenge presented itself when the team started designing the navigation towards the second layer of the course.
The team had decided to use the same structure (course-unit-learning experience) as existing K-12 Ross Curriculum, a lack of unit level information made standalone unit pages a waste of time and effort. With a few testing, the team decided to revise the plan and display both second and third level on the course page and navigate learners directly to third level learning experience, making the unit level a container of LEs. Due to the complexity of the learning material, the team also decided to use an infographic, individually designed for each course, to replace a list of units and LEs as navigation on the course page. The infographic would be not only add to the visual variety of the page, but also strengthen the learners mental model and deepen their understanding to the key concept of the course. |
LE Page WireframesIn the first version of LE page, the UX and ID team experimented on a icon-rich page that hosts all the learning activities in the LE, and opening each activity in either a page or through an overlay. The rationale behind this design was to guide the Learners through a scaffolded learning experience and make sure that the Learners possess the required prior knowledge in the previous activities (for example, video lectures and readings) so that they can perform well in subsequent ones. In one of the early versions, the team even tried to make the subsequent activities unlock only after prerequisites have been achieved.
After some user testing sessions, and more importantly, after trying to learn the content myself as an instructional designer, I realized that the content requires the Learners to constantly reference back and forth while taking an LE. Furthermore, different learning style also mandates that we give Learners more freedom to take the course in way they feel comfortable with. In a few test cases, Learners were frustrated when they learned that it is not possible to jump ahead and see what's out there, and the experience discouraged them in subsequent performances during the test. We eventually settled with an LE page where each learning activity consecutively occupies an almost-full-screen block on the page, allowing Learners to access previous/subsequent activities while maintaining focus for the activity on hand. A progress bar was adding floating on the page, indicating the Learners' progress on the page and simultaneously serving as a quick navigation option. Floating icons were added on the side of the page to provide Learners with constant access to essential learning tools (notes and discussion forum). Draws will open upon clicking the corresponding icon, allowing quick actions without navigating outside the current page or disrupting Learns' streams of thoughts. |
Prototyping and UsertestingUXPin was used as the collaboration platform for prototyping and user testing. UX team constructed a serious of interactive activities to demonstrate Instructional Designer's concept and did further user testing directly through the platform. Challenges surfaced when we found that certain situations required conditions and variables from the prototyping platform, but was not available at the time. We eventually found ways around the obstacle. See some highly interactive prototypes in one page from this link.
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An early prototype has been made available through the link on the left. It is an export from UXPin, a prototyping tool that supports complex interactions and conditions. However, export is glitchy and you might experience some bugs. Hint: try to interactive anything that looks clickable. |
Handoff
To Developer
Wireframes and prototypes were handed over to developers with annotations after a walkthrough for their opinions of current design and whether it creates development blockers with certain functionalities. There were often followup meetings to address any questions or concerns that came up. Below is an example of annotated wires that was handed to developers. Please not that for confidentiality reasons, it is an older version that was revised later.
Pilot
PD platform was planed to be developed in 3 sprints starting February, 2017. Unfortunately, due to serious backlog on other RLS components, the development team had to push the schedule to a later date, making the hard deadline of delivering PD pilot on August impossible. The PD team had no choice but to take the matter into our own hands. We eventually hosted our course content on a third party platform without the experiences we designed for the learners. Moodle became our go-to solution due to its open source nature, easy customizability and rich documentation. We transferred most of our design philosophy to the new platform as much as possible, and piloted PD courses with 60+ faculties at Ross school in summer 2017. User feedbacks were collected, analyzed and accommodated, not on the original user experiences we designed, but on learning content and experiences. Currently, the PD designs are sitting at the end of the backlog, waiting to be developed.
Reflection
Lessons Learned
This is a special and interesting project for me in many ways. It was my first project joining the organization; I was leading both UX design and learning content development at the same time, and learned the content as the teachers would while on the job; there was existing solution available yet decisions were made to build our own and I was not in the position to sway that decision at the time.
A few lessons I learned from this project:
A few lessons I learned from this project:
- Agile process is extremely important for the success of a project. The design team followed the process to get instant user feedbacks and adapt rapidly. In the meantime, I witnessed the developers on the rest of the RLS project going through a waterfall process on a huge scope, and it was one of the reasons they eventually fell behind on schedule and made PD development impossible.
- Achieving a minimal viable product and push it user quickly is beneficial. Even if user testing were being conducted every step along the way of the design process, pilot on a large scale still revealed a few surprises. Collecting data from real users and iterating upon it could save time on development in a long run.
- Requirements from stakeholders shifts constantly. It was important to dig deep between the lines of the stakeholders and find their real needs buried under their words. My later attempts to engage with them turn out to be much better when I realized what they really needed despite their sometimes conflicting expressions.
- Do not expect too high a level of tech savviness from users, especially when designing a large system with complex interrelated components. When sometimes the complexity is necessary to the success of the project, always plan for tutorial and training material beforehand.
Tools Used
Other Projects
Curriculum PagesA redesign of existing curriculum pages to encourage daily uses by solving the UX and data structural issues. Responsibility in the team: UX designer.
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Senior ProjectA web app design to improve the workflow between mentors and students on Senior Projects at Ross School. Responsibility in the team: UX designer.
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Other RLS ComponentsA bird eye view of other RLS components I had worked on in 2018 as the UX designer.
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Evolution of ConsciousnessAn example course produced under Professional Development project that consists interactive and innovative activities that facilitates learning. Responsibility in the team: lead instructional designer, UX designer.
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Interactive GlossaryAn interactive glossary that facilitates the learning in Professional Courses and highlights the connections between related concepts in the same contest. Responsibility in the team: UX designer.
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GMAT All in OneGMAT courses completely redesigned for E-learning environment and online community. A complete commercial project with full and successful implementation. More than 5,000 students enrolled up to Dec, 2018. Responsibility in the team: instructor, instructional designer, content developer, UX designer.
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Step-by-Step ExerciseBuilt from scratch, this application is designed specifically to help Chinese GMAT test takers prepare and practice Reading Comprehension, and in the meantime, facilitate students from All in One courses to internalize what's been taught in class. Single-handedly designed and developed the application. Responsibilities include: data tidying, system architect, UI/UX designer, developer, user testing.
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