DePaul Course Online System Re-designed
Sep. 2018
Role
UX Researcher
UI Designer
Tools
Stormboard
Sketch
Affiliated Course
EXP 441
Learning &
Experience Design
Instructor
Denise Nacu
Overview
This individual project re-designed the DePaul Course Online System, a website-based channel for online student watching in-class lectures with playback mode. Through the contextual research and observation from 6 participants, I have a general overview of students’ online learning experience especially for their behaviors of watching online lectures. Some critical problems have been identified by affinity mapping. The user interface of COL System can be designed in any kinds of styles, however, choosing appropriate methodologies to generate students’ intrinsic motivation thus increasing the learning engagement is the challenge for this project. The final deliverable is a hi-fi prototype of re-designed DePaul COL System, the prototype reflects my interpretation of how to design an online learning environment.
COL System
COL System has been designed for online students who do not live in Chicago area or want to have a more flexible schedule, online students have same opportunities to access all learning materials as in-class students. Every in-class lecture will be recorded and delivered through the COL System, online students not only can see everything in the class but also the instructor’s note from the whiteboard. This innovative design breaks the geographical limitation and traditional in-classroom teaching method.
Problems
Online students cannot fully engage in watching online lectures because of the remote learning setting. Compared with the traditional learning environment, online students lack instructors’ supervision and easily get slack and distracted. Moreover, they are unable to have opportunities to constantly communicate with classmates and instructors when problems prompted.
DePaul COL System is not well-designed, the arrangement of three sections (slides, in-class environment, teacher’s whiteboard) leaves much-wasted space that causes the user interface not being fully utilized. The 3-hour lecture has been roughly inserted to the interface without post-editing, which gives students much pressure to finish, most of them only choose a tricky way to finish by only watching the part that has been covered in the homework.
Solutions
In addition to online lectures, I created 2 sections “Message Board” and “Question Board” providing opportunities for online students to have communications, students can post questions waiting to be answered by other students or instructor on Question Board, discuss issues anytime on Message Board while watching the online lecture. By this mean, students do not need to jump out of the COL System, which makes learning procedures more fluent.
I adopted three vertical sections to cover “Online lecture”, “Message Board” and “Question Board” separately to make layout compact and easily distinguishable. “Message Board” and “Question Board” shared one input box, when students prompted a question, they just input a prefix “Q:” then following by statement, the system will automatically “send” this statement to “Question Board” not “Message Board”. In this way, students do not need to switch the input box back and forth between two Boards while watching online videos, thereby reducing the interaction cost.
A 3-hour online lecture has been split into 4 sections, each section is around 45 mins, finished video sections have been marked. The new designed system can record where students watched last time. Online students could feel easy and relaxed while facing 45-min videos, if they haven’t finished, they could come back anytime to finish the rest of sections.
Full Prototype
Research Process
Contextual Inquiry
Affinity Mapping
Conceptual Design
Reflection
Observation
Since every online lecture lasts more than 3 hours, which means one observation will cost the researcher the same time to finish, it’s impossible to observe many students independently. Therefore, I conducted only one observation as the pilot study, on the one hand for roughly understanding the student’s behavior toward online learning, on the other hand for getting some insights for interview questions.
One computer science graduate student has been observed for 2 hours at a closed meeting room. The observation has been encoded by AEIOU Framework. Even though one observation cannot be representative for most circumstances, it gave me a better understanding to see how a student watched the online video on the COL system. In this pilot study, the result shows that online learning may not provide the same learning experience as traditional situation, most of the time the participant didn’t watch the video but just heard the instructor’s voice, moreover, the participant didn’t watch the video from the beginning to end, sometimes jumping to important parts, sometimes playing back to difficult parts.
Personas
Interviews
The interview has consisted of two sections, 8 warm-up questions for inquiring students’ behaviors of watching online lectures, 6 deep-focused questions for inquiring students’ online learning experience compared with in-class learning situation, 4 wrap-up questions for understanding students’ perspective about the COL system.
6 full-time students, covered 5 graduate majors, have been interviewed, the average time is around 15 minutes. Five students come from College of Computing and Digital Media and one student comes from Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, each of students has finished at least one online course. Considering the various background of participants, the recruitment was successful, and the data gathered from interviewees can sufficiently reflect the real situation. After interviews, notes have been interpreted and summarized into the Excel, each row contains one question with all participants' answers, each column contains one participants' answers for all questions.
Affinity Mapping
Mapping Procedures
Transferring the Excel data to the Stormboard, each sticky note represents one answer.
Organizing and linking sticky notes with similar semantic meanings, then labeling each group.
Looking through each group, targeting problems frequently mentioned by interviewees.
Mapping Results
Findings & Thinking
All participants mentioned that they only focus on important sections of assignments covered rather than watch online lectures from the beginning to the end, for saving time. Some participants major in computer science or data science usually playback to watch some sections for several times in order to fully understand what instructors taught, however in a traditional learning environment, students have to learn step by step following with instructors, some students could easily leave behind.
The way of students watching online lectures intrigued me to consider what if the purpose of selecting online courses for students is just expecting to save their time and spend less time to finish the course?
Maybe we cannot expect every student to watch whole online lectures, but we can still improve their learning engagement to enhance learning efficiency.
The most frequently raised problem is lacking communications for online students. It involves the communication between online students with instructors, and the communication within online students. Most participants mentioned that email is frustrated - “teacher cannot give me feedback immediately by email, sometimes I have to wait for it for a day.”. Some participants feel that they are learning only with the computer - “I feel alone when I was watching the online lecture, I didn’t feel any sense of belongings in the learning community”, “In the online course I selected last time, there is no team project, I didn’t have any opportunities to communicate with other students”.
Distraction is also an identified problem in online learning. In the traditional learning environment, instructor’s supervision and invisible environmental learning stress can push students to keep eyes on learning following with instructors. But for online learning, these extrinsic stimulations are gone. Online students easily get exhausted and distracted while facing the tedious 3-hour online lecture on computer screen. One participant said that “When I open the online lecture and saw it lasts 3 hours, I just want to give it up, I feel so overwhelmed.”, the other said “I usually study at home, but home is so comfortable, I often get distracted by other trivial matters.”. Someone even said that “even though I enroll the online class, I still attend in-class session because I don’t want to watch such long online video at home, I can’t stick to it!”
This problem is like driving on a long straight road, drivers may lose concentrate after a while, on the contrary, drivers barely get sluggish on some crooked roads, because they need control steering wheel precisely to keep cars follow the path. In this project, we cannot control environmental distractions, but we can add proper stimulations to keep students focus on learning.
Discussion Board is a function on the Desire2Learn System, students can start a thread and post anything waiting to be replied. All participants mentioned that the only way for online students involved in learning community is Discussion Board. Instructors heavily rely on the Discussion Board, some encourage students to post questions on it, some make it as a tool for assigning homework, they usually ask online students to post a summary as the proof of watching online lectures. One participant said - “Most students wrote something on it just for getting a grade, they didn’t care about what others wrote on Discussion Board at all”, the other said - “There is too much text, it’s so bored to review all posts. I won’t read others’ unless writing comments is mandatory.”
I hope interviewee’s opinions can give DePaul instructors some thoughts about how to motivate online students to get involved in the learning community by other teaching methodologies in addition to online Discussion Board.
In addition to inquiring students about online learning experience, I also asked some questions related to user experience of COL System. All participants mentioned the resolution of online lectures is pretty low, they cannot see instructors’ facial expression, sometimes they minimized the online lecture’s window and just listened what the instructor said. Moreover, most of participants mentioned that online lectures contain some teaching content which is designed for in-class students, however, online students want to skip these parts but don’t know the precise timestamp on video progress bar, they have to drag the indicator several times to skip these parts and continue to watch.
Frequently clicking on progress bar or dragging the indicator also can be considered as a learning distraction to some extent, because unintentionally increased interaction cost could easily get out of the learning flow.
Functions in Use
In the COL System, slides are recorded as a video and following with instructors teaching steps, students have to minimize the COL window and switch to the PowerPoint to see other pages.
Re-designed UI makes slides interactive, students can click on three buttons to turn pages, Page Down, Currently Displayed Page and Page Up. Through this design, it doesn’t need students to jump out of the COL System, reduces unnecessary interaction coats, makes online learning experience more seamless.
The video progress bar has also been improved in this study. By using red indicators to imply every teaching step, online students can easily pinpoint the specific teaching content and skip unimportant parts, thus saving their time. Moreover, the video frame can record the watching history, when students reopen this page, it will automatically play the next part.
The drawer menu will be shown when clicking the hamburger button. It contains all online lectures from this class, every lecture has been split into 4 sections, each section is around 45 mins. The check mark indicates the finished part. Originally, if students switch to other lectures, they must close the current window, go back to the D2L, then open the other one. This new design optimized this task flow, students can select any lectures on the same window, no need to jump out.
Message Board provides a platform to let online and in-class students communicate with each other. Because online students can watch the video anytime, instant messaging is impracticable. Therefore, Message Board was designed to be like a bulletin board, one student leaves a message, this message will be wrapped up with the video. If the other one is watching the same lecture, this message will be popped up.
Same as other time-sensitive messaging applications, identity information and timestamp are necessary for Message Board. Timestamp can not only record the time when the message was sent, but also increase the credibility of the message calling others to respond.
Traditionally, email and Discussion Board are only two ways for online students to ask questions from instructors. Question Board gives online students a third way to ask questions while watching online lectures by typing “Q: Question Statement” on the textbox, all students are free to answer. When the question prompted, they can immediately type and send it.
This new design allows students to ask questions without jumping out of the COL System. Also, it encourages students to help each other, creates a sense of belongings for the online learning community.
The number on the right side of the question card indicates how many responses the question got. Other students’ responses will be shown below the question statement and organized in chronological order.
Reflections
The hi-fi prototype illustrates my conceptual solutions for improving online learning experience. In further study, I will code this hi-fi prototype to a real learning tool and then will conduct the usability test to evaluate whether it can improve the learning engagement. Before the next step, some questions may need to be solved included,
How to reduce the influence of irrelevant variables such as online lectures?
Every participant may come from different major, how to select appropriate online lectures to learn?
How to measure the learning engagement, can it be interpreted by other measurable data?
Since a 3-hour video has been split into 4 sections in this prototype, how long should I take for conducting one usability test?
I hope my current study of this project will give DePaul some inspirations for how to strengthen the usability of COL System thus improving students online learning experience.
Special thanks to the instructor Dr. Nacu and all classmates in the class of EXP 441 Autumn 18-19. There will be no this project without your encouragement and support!
