USYD

LEARNING

HUB

An application to improve students learning experience and increase student success through workload structuring.

Ruiwen and her team was engaged by the Educational Innovation Team (EIT) at the University of Sydney (USYD) to propose a solution on how to improve the student educational experience.

Project Overview

Students' level of motivation declines between 6-10% in the first seven weeks of the semester (Alex et al., 2021) and start falling behind as the workload increases. Students are overwhelmed by all the responsibilities that are posed in the life of a student, with social and work responsibilities in addition to their full university workload being very difficult to handle.

  • One of the product designer:

    · User Experience (UX)

    · Interaction (IxD)

    · User Interface (UI)

    · Visual Design

  • · User Personas

    · System Narrative

    · Data Flow Diagram

    · Wireflow

    · Low-fidelity wireframes

    · High-fidelity mockups and prototypes

  • Durations: 6 weeks

    Tools: Figma, Miro

    Team size: 4 ppl (project manager, data engineer, 2*product designers

THE PROBLEM

Students struggle to maintain consistent and effective learning behaviour throughout the semester.

Student Motivation Declines by

6-10%

during the first 7 weeks of the semester

Information gathering for students is

Complex

HOW TO SOLVE

WHY

The University of Sydney already has systems in place that have structured information about the units, however, there is a need for even greater workload structuring to increase efficiency for students to ensure they achieve the best possible results in their studies without burning out. Therefore, the Education Innovation Team at The University of Sydney has invited young designers to pitch an ideal solution to this issue.

to access learning information

  • · Define learning preferences at the start of the Semester

  • · Gain support and motivation from peers

· Understand the true value of the unit

Identifying jobs to be done is

Inefficient

to access learning information

PROPOSED SOLUTION

  • USYD Learning Hub will help students gain motivation and determination throughout the semester to maintain consistent and effective learning behaviour.

USYD LEARNING HUB

· Have an overview of all assessments from all courses

· Break down each assessments to small and specific tasks

· Display detailed information for each assessment

· Provide a clear guide with a calendar view

· Tasks are colour-coded for different courses

· Easy to track each day’s tasks

· Allow students to form their own peer-learning group

· Enough freedom to control personal privacy by hiding features

· Encouraged and empowered by peers for a better study atmosphere

· Allow teaching team to share more information with students

· Allow students to access quality learning materials and reflect

· Opportunities to engage with senior students and learn from them.

WireFlow

USYD Learning Hub - Student & Teacher App

Please try out a clickable Figma prototype of the USYD Learning Hub

Note: Not all the functions of the app are clickable in this prototype

Classification of User Groups

Research by the University of Melbourne (2022) stated that there are several causes of student disengagement. Generally, Two generalised causes of disengagement can be developed from the research. They are key individual (societal) factors and school factors.

Key individual (societal) factors

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Developing User Personas

School Factors

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Both students and teachers will be the users of the problem. However, students will be divided into several types based on the two most significant factors affecting disengagement in school, namely achievement and attendance. Different groups for these students are high-achievement high-attendance students, low-achievement high-attendance students, and low-attendance students.

The four visual pillars help us understand the personas' differences, but more importantly, what features we envision our information system to focus on to help students succeed in their studies and become more efficient learners.

  • The level at which a student is able to focus during their academic studies

  • How do students feel, choose and act with academic knowledge in and beyond the classroom.

  • How fast a student is able to take in academic knowledge and understand it.

  • The level to which a student is able to create and complete tasks efficiently and at a high standard.

Personas' Interest in the unit (Strategic Marketing)

The student personas created in the report are designed in a scenario that all students are taking the same unit by the same lecturer persona. The personal interest to a unit triggers student's learning motivation. Hence, this line graph is created to show how a student's interest towards the unit is changing throughout the semester by using the information system.

Design Iterations

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

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High-fidelity

Wireframes

Iteration 1

Following some inspiration from existing information system applications, and the creation of our BPMN and Data Flows, we started jotting down some rough screens on Figma.

Iteration 2

After the creation of Iteration 1, the team conducted some internal user testing and received some valuable feedback, including colour-coding units.

In this iteration, we mainly focused on how the "set up" questions part looked and felt, experimenting first with sliders for the questions and ended up with a multiple choice question format.

Iteration 3

Following iteration 2, we conducted some further internal testing.

Some of the key changes we made include:

  • changing the navigation tab titles

  • making the "home" tab the "learning" tab

  • changing the layout of the "learning" tab

The screenshot on the right shows our latest final iteration.

NEXT STEPS:

There are several improvements required for a better information system in the future. They include the following:

  • The ability to view peer learning tasks, duplicate peer's learning tasks and edit personal learning tasks with relevant reasoning so that students can share the same experience while executing similar tasks.

  • The ability to add prioritisation to the tasks based on students' preference; therefore students can allocate their effort and expectation toward the result.

  • The ability to view students' timetables so that all student's schedules are integrated with one application and students are not required to visit multiple websites at the same time, allowing their time allocation to be more efficient.

  • Conducting user research, usability testing and validation of the onboarding questions to ensure that the developed information systems are representative and capture the end users' latent needs.

  • Involving content creators to voluntarily help the teaching team to upload the required information, re-edit content and/or break down tasks and assessments