How Might We

Encourage online community and collaboration in education in remote and hybrid education

My ROLE

Member of a three-person design team (with Mia Drury and Giovanna Boyle). Conducted user research, insight analysis, ideation, brainstorming, prototyping, and implementation.

CHALLENGE

Our client, the supervisory board of a K-12 school district in rural Vermont, faced several challenges – budget constraints, declining student enrollment, and pressure from the community to meet standardized testing goals.

In hopes of modernizing instruction and classroom curriculum, our client asked us to design an externship program for teachers at local businesses, hoping to help teachers better understand various careers and industries. Ultimately, they hoped teachers would be inspired to adapt curriculum and instruction to better prepare students to succeed in those careers and industries.

EMPATHIZE

To better understand the community we were designing for, we kicked off the project with primary and secondary research.

DEFINE

From the information we gathered over three weeks, we defined key insights to help guide our design process.

Insight #1

The district has experienced systemic structural change recently which has added challenging complexity. Our solution must be flexible and sustainable to work.

“There have been a lot of changes in the last few years. This district is in real transition and not everyone is on board with any initiative.”

– English Teacher

Insight #2

Teachers already juggle several responsibilities and lack available time to accomplish everything they'd like to. A new initiative would have to justify the use of limited resources.

“We have a lot of great ideas, but it’s scary to implement something new because you don’t want to put students at a disadvantage for standardized tests.”

– Math Teacher and Academic Coach

Insight #3

Students feel a greater sense of urgency, pride, and ownership over their education when their work is shared with the greater community. Our solution should strive to promote community visibility.

“There’s a huge need for school and community partnerships. It helps students to see how the community functions and shows the community how the schools are preparing students to be worthwhile community members.”

– Music Teacher and Parent

REFRAMED CHALLENGE

From our research, we determined that the externship program proposal would be ineffective because of limited time resources and teacher skepticism of the benefits. After presenting our findings to the client, we worked together to reframe the challenge:

Design a digital experience that enhances education and promotes collaboration through community-wide visibility

IDEATE

With our new challenge in mind, we dove back into our insights and research. We conducted some additional research and went to the whiteboard to ideate on potential solutions.

Our favorite idea was an online portfolio system.

Mrs. Pearlman, a 10th grade social studies teacher, presents her class with a deeper learning experience exploring and modeling modern architecture.

If she is teaching remotely, she can also present this lesson online over a Zoom class.

Mrs. Pearlman's class spends the term learning, creating, and documenting their process.

The students use that documentation to create portfolios, showcasing their work in an online platform that can be shared with the whole community.

The community is now able to see and engage with student work. They can praise students and teachers for their progress and be inspired by finished projects.

A local architecture firm sees the class' work and reaches out to partner with Mrs. Pearlman to connect her students with real-world architecture experience.

PROTOTYPE

To prototype our online portfolio system, we used the blogging website Medium because of its simplicity and low barrier to entry. Then, we created sample portfolios for fictional individual students and classroom projects.

Mock student portfolio

Mock class portfolio

ITERATE

We shared our prototypes in 16 follow-up interviews with teachers, students, and administrators, and we received tons of valuable feedback, both positive and negative.

Moving forward, we asked ourselves:

How might we capture the feeling of excitement when walking through the physical school hallways filled with colorful projects?

SOLUTION

Digital Hallways

Digital Hallways is an online platform that gives community members visibility into the amazing projects and creative lessons going on inside the classroom. Through a district-wide landing page, community and school members can view student and teacher portfolios that highlight projects and accomplishments.

We designed three major components to ensure that Digital Hallways can be implemented successfully:

Landing page accessible from the district’s website that highlights recent projects, promotes opportunities for community partnerships, and also serves as a directory of student and teacher portfolios

10+ resource guides consisting of articles and instructional videos to help teachers and students navigate Medium and share projects

8+ example portfolios that can be used as templates or inspiration

SUMMARY

Our proposed solution meets the project requirements and insights:

Flexible and sustainable (digital and applicable to various scenarios)

Low barrier to entry (simple and free)

Emphasizes community engagement

Works in remote and hybrid education scenarios

We presented our project in June 2020 and shared our work in a digital project board and detailed project report. See them below.

Presentation recording

Project board

Project report

In the future, we hope that Digital Hallways will be used to help influence school and community members to contribute towards a larger conversation to provide students with deeper and more meaningful experiences both in and out of the classroom.