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November 12, 2020 - No Comments!

What Teachers Really Need in a Remote Learning Product

The rapid switch to remote learning this past spring revealed major gaps in digital learning tools. Teachers often struggled to reach students working at different paces or levels within the same class. At times, educators even cobbled together three or four applications to ensure their students could access and understand high-quality learning content. The rise of the Zoom lesson also brought major dips in student engagement, since students felt less connected to their instructors and their peers.

Even if classrooms make a return to learning in person full-time, edTech designers now have an incredible opportunity to reflect on and meaningfully address these pain points. We surveyed our Teacher Council about the challenges of remote learning, then sat down for a roundtable discussion about their needs. By the end, we'd received numerous insights about what teachers are looking for in remote learning tools, including design ideas product owners can implement right now.

From mobile-ready design to adaptive learning technology, here's what teachers really need in remote learning products.

Teacher Pain Points: Where edTech Falls Short for Remote Learning Tools

Equity and accessibility

About 25% of our Teacher Council members report that their students don't have access to technology while working and studying at home. Most of the educators on our Teacher Council work in urban school districts. Even so, student access to technology is a nation-wide problem further exacerbated by the pandemic and socially distant learning.

While edTech will never be able to solve social inequality, there are strategies edTech designers can use to help ease this pain point. For instance, lightweight, mobile-ready designs make it easier for students to work on their parents' phones and other mobile devices, especially when using spotty or public internet connections.

Engagement

During distance learning, teachers have fewer opportunities to connect with students and support their social-emotional growth with the one-on-one attention that reinforces learning. When digital tools promote student engagement, students are more likely to stay focused, learn material, and retain complex subject matter.

edTech products should help older students understand the value of using the tool, promote learner agency, and facilitate group learning. edTech can also bolster products with SEL features to address the need for additional support.

Differentiation and adaptive tech

In the classroom, teachers are able to differentiate—or, quickly change their teaching style, language of instruction, mode, or medium—in order to reach every student.

Digital tools need to offer this kind of flexibility when a teacher can't work with students in person. This might mean providing additional language support for emerging ELL students, developing audio or video components to content, or using voice-to-text tools to help teachers meet students where they are.

Adaptive learning technology can provide additional support for teachers looking to differentiate content. In an ideal piece of software, adaptive learning technology would recognize a student's level of content knowledge and deliver additional content at the right level. Adaptive technology is especially important during remote learning, when teachers can't necessarily assess and reassess how students are performing during one-on-one interactions.

Ultimately, teachers are looking for tools that differentiate because they want to streamline the number of tools used during distance learning. When teachers are able to pick one digital learning tool that all the students in their class can use, regardless of ability, content knowledge, or language acquisition, they are better able to facilitate learning and ensure accessibility for all their students.

Professional development

Suddenly having to deliver an entire curriculum using digital tools was a challenge for most teachers, especially those who felt less confident using technology. Through onboarding and other forms of support, edTech products can do more to help teachers sequence their curriculum or guide those who find digital learning tools less intuitive to use.

When edTech product owners also switch their professional development content to flexible, mobile-friendly content like pre-recorded video, teachers are more likely to engage with and use content on their own time. Post-pandemic, flexibility and asynchronous content are key for busy, overwhelmed educators who still want to learn, develop, and grow.

75% of teachers reported that their students became less engaged in socially distant learning over time. 

How edTech can Lead the Way in Designing Better Remote Learning Tools

As leaders in the edTech industry, we have a unique opportunity to reflect on the successes and failures of digital tools in remote learning contexts. Now is the time to better understand the challenges faced by both teachers and students through more thoughtful UXR.

Whether you opt for low-hanging fruit, like mobile-friendly design, or go all out with new and improved remote learning features, we hope our insights deck provides you the road map you need to a stronger product.

When we take the time to learn from teachers about their needs and challenges as an industry, all edTech products become more useful—and more valuable—learning tools.

Download insights on remote learning from our Teacher Council below—and stay tuned for even more teacher takeaways you can apply to product design in the future.

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October 26, 2020 - No Comments!

How to Leverage Peer Learning Features and Foster SEL Growth in Remote Learning Tools

Peer-to-peer learning has numerous benefits for students. It provides students with practice collaborating and generates more opportunities for students to understand difficult subject matter by helping their peers learn, too.

While it's certainly easier to arrange peer learning activities in the classroom, students still benefit from these activities when they're offered digitally. In fact, peer learning and other activities that promote social-emotional growth might be even more important during remote, socially distanced learning.

According to Education Week, the only way to address learning loss from remote learning last spring is to focus on SEL growth—even if it's not a normal part of the curriculum. "This may very well require a shift in thinking for some school leaders," writes contributor Arianna Prothero. "[Social-emotional] development is not in competition with academics, but rather a prerequisite for success."

While students are isolated from their peers and teachers, they need increased opportunities to practice SEL skills, including collaboration and delivering peer feedback.

But when remote learning means logging on and zoning out, students disengage from one another—and the material they're supposed to learn. Used in an engaging way, digital tools can counter the mental exhaustion of the Zoom classroom. They can even give educators new ways to reach students with social-emotional distance learning.

How Technology-Based Peer-to-Peer Learning Encourages SEL Growth

Our collective remote learning experiment from the spring exposed everything digital learning tools currently lack. Without preparation, teachers found it difficult to translate classroom strategies for small-group learning or collaborative projects into the digital realm. With a new school year underway, teachers are still looking for solutions that will boost student engagement and foster SEL growth during distanced learning.

Now is the perfect time for edTech leaders to transform their digital tools to incorporate more project-based or team learning features. We can also find more innovative ways to add collaborative features to products that weren't designed with team learning and SEL growth in mind.

Thankfully, digital products and edTech software lend themselves well to project-based, peer-to-peer learning moments that foster SEL growth.

  • Digital products slow down and record real-time interactions in a way that promotes student reflection. This gives educators more opportunities to talk with students about digital citizenship and the interactions they notice online.
  • With structured student participation tools, digital tools can level the playing field and allow all students to participate in the same way. It's no longer necessarily about who's first to respond, or who's loudest—it's about who contributes ideas and what those ideas are.
  • Practice using digital tools and collaborating in digital environments helps students develop digital relationship skills that will be important for the workplace and in other contexts.

Here's how you can continue to build on the collaborative features in your edTech product to foster SEL growth.

Design Features That Foster Digital Citizenship

As edTech designers, we have new opportunities to help teachers examine how students interact with one another and use SEL skills in digital contexts. When teachers have more opportunities to use student interactions as teaching tools, they're able to foster digital citizenship skills that are at the heart of SEL growth. These skills are also broadly applicable to real-world interactions, from social media to remote work.

Because digital products track evidence of student interactions, teachers can use this data as a valuable teaching tool. By working one-on-one with students to improve student behaviors or SEL growth, teachers have opportunities to promote better digital citizenship. edTech designers can support this work by offering constructive ways to resolve conflict, including templated interactions or AI that alerts teachers to problematic interactions.

Digital tools also facilitate ways for students to develop and support their own opinions while making room for the ideas of others. Threaded discussion features are intended to house and promote many different ideas, while bite-size prompts from teachers can offer guidance throughout class discussions. By encouraging students to examine their process and explain how they arrived at an idea, digital tools foster reflection and tolerance in ways that reinforce good digital citizenship.

Teachers—and edTech designers—should expect social challenges to emerge in digital tools used by groups. The more we proactively design tools to address and mediate these challenges, the more edTech can support teachers who are attempting to address SEL growth in remote learning contexts.

Features That Engage Students Transform Class Participation

It's challenging to keep students highly engaged during remote learning. Students can check out easily on Zoom, and teachers can't necessarily inspire the same level of attention and passion when they can't read student body language or interact with students one-on-one.

edTech designers can do more to create learning environments where students feel comfortable in their participation. In order for students to have a successful learning experience, students must feel motivated to participate and engage with the material and their peers. Participation fuels collaboration skills, personal empowerment, and many other key components of SEL growth.

Inevitably, teachers and parents of younger students experience heavier administrative lifts during remote learning. They must monitor student access to online environments or help them accomplish tasks. For younger students, digital experiences must be more self-contained in order to be engaging. Reading logs, positive votes, and directed positive feedback all create more evidence of a student's thinking. These features can even be designed to help younger students learn from one another.

Educators of older students can bring in a variety of media and encourage students to respond in a medium that inspires them. In digital contexts, drawings, infographics, and video are all fair game. Because of the evidence of participation, peers are also more motivated to engage with one another. As the way that they think of their audience changes, older students begin to see one another as peers learning together. These feelings of learner agency are the key to motivation and engagement, bolstering SEL growth.

Finally, digital tools can also give teachers the ability to introduce thought-provoking prompts when a student gets stuck or leverage more advanced, "smart" grouping features. Software should support teachers in the strategic grouping or prompting they would use to facilitate participation in the classroom. With support from digital tools, teachers have more instructional time to check in with the students who need it most.

Collaboration and Reflection Features At the Heart of SEL Growth

Remote learning has asked teachers and students alike to explain, model, and reinforce good digital etiquette. When designed well, edTech tools help students build connections and reflect on their interactions with their peers.

Digital tools record entire interactions, slowing down real-time communication in a way that's helpful for learning. Teachers can use evidence of student interactions to identify misunderstandings or prompt reflections on the outcomes of these interactions. This way, students continue to learn important collaboration and communication skills from real examples.

Teaching the importance of positive peer interactions also shifts the focus away from group output. Instead, teachers can emphasize successful communication, collaboration, and reflection alongside mastery of the material.

The ability to slow down and review a record of interaction may only be applicable to digital environments. But students need and use these skills already—on social media or in group texts with their friends and family members. Students will need these skills in the future, too, as they graduate to additional remote learning or work opportunities.

When edTech designers create more opportunities for students to examine interactions with their peers, we build the kinds of digital tools teachers need to address SEL growth. After all, social-emotional learning isn't something that only happens in a classroom. If we want to prepare students for the workplace and the world, ensuring positive digital interactions and continued SEL growth online is a good place to start.

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September 29, 2020 - No Comments!

What’s Your Baseline? How to Make UXR More Valuable for Your Next edTech Product

UX designers in the edTech space are specialists who participate in a community of educators. To design well, they must have more than a working understanding of best practices in UI. edTech UX designers also need a background in learning science and user research. These specialties help UX designers accurately identify and design for the specific needs of the teachers, students, and parents who use their tools.

With a specialized background in UXR, edTech designers establish a baseline understanding of their users over time and quickly identify gaps in understanding during each new client project. These user baselines also allow designers to use the UXR phase more effectively, scaling research to fit a project and investigating tactical ways to quickly improve a product for its intended users.

This is especially true when designing for a specific subset of edTech users. edTech designers then start with a research baseline and use it as a framework to re-examine their assumptions. Foundational knowledge of user needs accelerates the development process in these cases and creates an even stronger framework for the user research you conduct.

Here's a quick breakdown of common research baselines you can use to ask better questions during the UXR phase of your next edTech product.

The Key to Designing edTech for Teachers

To meet the challenges of an edTech product for teachers, edTech designers must understand the foundational needs teachers have—their challenges and pain points—and be able to further narrow their focus to specific subject needs. They must also understand the entirety of a teacher's world, whether a teacher works with underserved populations or is gearing up for state assessments.

When you talk to real teachers throughout the UXR process, you're able to look beyond the needs of a fictional persona. Throughout surveys and interviews, you'll refine your understanding of how teachers navigate digital and offline tools. Once you know what a teacher's pain points are, you can prioritize them and establish their relationship to your business goals. You'll discover whether your tool will work in their classroom and likely make tactical changes to your product.

By working with edTech specialists throughout the UXR phase, you'll be one step ahead. edTech UX designers already know enough about the needs of teachers to work from a specific user baseline—even if we test those assumptions throughout the process. Here are the baseline assumptions about teacher pain points you need to know to design more effective UXR sessions:

Teachers conduct their work on mobile devices.

Understanding how and when teachers are likely to use edTech products on their phones is a must. Most likely, you'll need to simplify sequencing and processing for mobile design to make the product easier to use on the go.

For example, if you had a product centered around student assessments that could only be completed on a desktop, you might consider a professional development component to your product that worked well on mobile devices. We know that many teachers want to access this kind of content outside of their own classroom environment. Mobile-first professional learning content is a great baseline assumption to work from as you design your user experience research for a teacher persona.

Teachers are looking for more ways to address SEL growth.

Teachers recognize that technology plays a role in mitigating isolation during remote learning. edTech tools that help teachers reach students more effectively and build SEL skills will become ever more valuable. Research suggests teachers are more optimistic than ever about the ability of digital tools to facilitate one-on-one connections at times when those are not possible.

Teachers use edTech tools for instruction in one of three ways.

There are three different modes of instruction: whole group, small group, and individual instruction. We know these are consistent modes, especially for teachers of younger students.

Teachers with high school-age students tend to adopt individualized instruction modes when using edTech products. This is often because students have their own ChromeBooks issued by their school, which means teachers can depend less heavily on shared resources.

But individualization features do more than facilitate adaptive learning for individual students. They also aid adaptive learning in small groups. Work with teachers to discover how individualization features for your product will also affect full-class teaching.

Why Designing edTech Software for Students is Uniquely Complex

Designing edTech software for students is a much more complex task than solving for the common needs of educators. One complicating factor is age and grade level—the differences between K-2 are vast, and the jump between K-2 and 6th grade is even bigger.

Designing tools for students in higher ed is a different story altogether. All students are now adults and data and privacy concerns shift completely—just to name a few moving targets.

Even though designing for students comes with its own unique set of challenges based on age, grade level, task, and access to school technology, there are still a few baselines you can always work from when you're conducting UXR for your product. Here are three assumptions to work from:

Age affects independent learning with your edTech product.

The younger a student is, the more their teacher or parent needs to be involved in their interactions with your product. This will affect how you design everything from log-in screens to interactive features.

When you design edTech tools for older students, on the other hand, they're able to be more independent within your product and complete tasks on their own. It's also easier for a teacher to assign a group project to older students. Students and teachers alike may come to expect these types of instructional features from your tool.

Students expect consumer-like design patterns.

For most students, the context for interacting with edTech tools will be consumer products or games. These products have a high production value and plenty of digital media for kids to peruse. What are the patterns of consumer media that might apply to your product? Whether it's well-produced video instruction or complex game-play, the features in your edTech tool will be held up against the best consumer products on the market.

Students will use your edTech product at home.

Digital learning products always extend from the classroom to the home. Even during our pre-pandemic era, edTech products were regularly used in the home on shared computers or mobile devices. The better you understand a student user's home environment, the more successful your tool will be in the market.

For instance, if your product is designed to improve reading and literacy skills, you already know there's a good chance it will likely be viewed on a mobile device at home. You might even be able to assume that your student users will need more help figuring out next steps since they're out of the classroom and no longer receiving one-on-one instructional support from a teacher.

With these baseline user assumptions in place, you could instead focus your UXR efforts on finding the right balance between rigid sequencing and designing for students agency within your product. You'll want to ensure that your software directs student progress from the moment they log in without taking away elements of student independence, engagement, and discovery. It's a tough balancing act to get right—which means it's the perfect contender for your UXR efforts.

Designing Software for edTech's Fastest Growing User Base—Parents

Parent users have always had a facilitating role in edTech tools designed for younger students. When most students started remote learning last spring, parents took on even greater roles in learning technology. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. In fact, we think parents users are here to stay.

Here are a few of the baseline assumptions you need to make about edTech's next big user:

Parents are looking for easily digestible insights.

Parents with younger students have a co-working relationship with their children within a product. Parent users will facilitate, guide, and troubleshoot as their young children complete tasks.

As their children age, parents play less of a role in how students use a learning tool. Instead, they begin looking for insights into their child's performance. Parents of older children may want a dedicated portal that displays data on how their child uses a specific product.

What administrative data captured by your tool might be valuable to a parent user? Everything from how long a student session lasts to engagement or achievement rates helps parents get more involved in their child's education.

Parents want to weigh in.

Now that parents are more involved in remote learning with digital tools, they're looking for more ways to interact with their child's teacher and provide feedback on tools. They're become more savvy than ever about everything from ease-of-use to integration. The more opportunities you provide that open the channels of communication between parents and teachers, the more valuable your edTech tool will be.

As you can see, the assumptions you begin with when designing edTech products shape the kind of user research you conduct. With the right research and evidence base, you can build off of user assumptions and conduct ever more meaningful UXR sessions.

UXR is always valuable—but it's even more valuable when you can work off baseline assumptions and truly scale UXR to the most unique aspects of your product.

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August 6, 2020 - No Comments!

Remote Learning Puts Teachers in the Role of UX Designers. What’s Next for edTech?

Teachers have always recognized how valuable in-person instruction is. In fact, they rely on these relationships to help students succeed. This dynamic is central to how they learn to gauge student progress—even without formal assessment.

When at-home learning made one-on-one instruction next to impossible, teachers had to pivot. They immediately reached for new ways to foster crucial relationships with their students using technology. They created sophisticated versions of their curriculum using stitched-together technologies, digital platforms, and online resources.

In many cases, teachers haven't even chosen or purchased the classroom technology they've now come to depend on. Districts or school administrators buy tools and product licenses, while teachers coordinate responsibilities across teams or grade levels. Sometimes they even share user responsibilities within a single account.

Because they now have to rely heavily on digital tools for instruction, teachers have also started to think as designers of digital learning experiences. This has prompted deeper and richer teacher engagement with digital learning tools. From integrating the tools purchased by their districts to sequencing activities, teachers are thinking like UX designers, striving to create the best possible experiences for their students.

But if teachers have started thinking as UX designers, where does this leave edTech?

How edTech Can Support New Demands on Teachers as Designers of Digital Learning Experiences

With new demands on teachers come new demands on UX designers. As you roll out digital products or update existing ones for the fall, here are four elements that will support the work teachers are already doing during at-home learning.

  1. Develop product integrations.
    edTech solutions that integrate easily with other products or platforms have always been valuable to busy teachers. Now, they'll be even more important. In addition to virtually instructing students, teachers must also address the technology needs of both students and their families. With so many new responsibilities to balance, teachers will avoid using products that make it difficult for students or parents to log in, complete assignments, and share work. Products that function as their own islands aren't as useful in at-home learning scenarios. The more you design for product integration or use common UX patterns, the more you will facilitate how teachers already integrate products all on their own. Easy-to-use integrations give teachers back the one thing they care about most—time. When teachers save time by using your product, it becomes an even more valuable tool.
  2. Facilitate communication.
    In addition to product integration, teachers are also looking for communication platform integration. Real-time and asynchronous communication tools facilitate class meetings, peer-to-peer learning, and teacher feedback. Digital platforms are more than places where teachers can communicate with their students and vice versa. They're the tools teachers depend on during at-home learning to facilitate the student-teacher interactions that are so important to student success. When you support this crucial component of classroom instruction meaningfully in the digital space, teachers will turn to your product again and again.
  3. Provide "meta" onboarding support.
    Teachers are packaging disparate digital tools, platforms, and resources together to support and deliver their curriculum. One of their challenges is making it clear to students and their families how all of these products work together in a meaningful way. As UX designers, we can do more to support this new technological ecosystem. Whether you provide templates, video demonstrations, or infographics for your digital tool, you'll also need to provide a new vision for how to integrate your tool with the solutions teachers already use. UX designers can create more product support and "meta" onboarding experiences for teachers. These proactive features will support teachers as they onboard their own students to a digital classroom, cutting down on the amount of time they need to spend in a "tech support" role.
  4. Design sequencing tools and suggestions.
    During at-home learning, teachers are no longer standing in front of a classroom to give direction. Instead, they must now write clear, step-by-step instructions for using digital tools, so students can complete assignments at home.In the virtual classroom, teachers think even more carefully about the sequence in which they want to use digital tools. This sequence of events must be set in motion in order for students to successfully complete and submit work or interact with one another online. As teachers integrate edTech tools into the curriculum, sequencing suggestions informed by learning science and pedagogy will become even more important for student engagement. Like UX designers, teachers are always iterating. They reflect on what works well and what doesn't. They constantly receive real-time feedback that strengthens their instruction. When an assignment is easy or interesting for their student to complete, teachers build engagement and see results. With the right sequencing support, your edTech tool can become even more indispensable to this process.

When "Easy to Use" Becomes "Easy to Integrate"

When surveyed about the qualities of an edTech product that influence buying decisions, teachers always place "easy to use" in their top two or three responses. Teachers are simply too busy to figure out how to use challenging products.

In our new reality, we expect teachers to now add considerations like "easy to integrate." The way teachers value good UX design won't change, but their experience using many edTech tools has given them new expectations. The most valuable edTech tools will be those that integrate easily into their current suite of digital tools or into their curriculum.

Even after the need for at-home learning fades, we hope teachers will shift from casual edTech users to users who rely heavily on digital platforms for instruction. We hope that edTech products will transform from supplemental to core instructional tools.

Teachers Are Poised to Become edTech Super-Users

As teachers become more sophisticated consumers and users of edTech, complex features will be vetted in ways they never have been before.

In the long run, this is great news for edTech. Sophisticated users engage more deeply with products and help designers create more powerful, user-friendly tools. In addition to designing key features with teachers in mind, brands now have an added incentive to reduce the UX threshold of their products for their new super-users.

The baseline student data teachers collect in the fall of 2020 will give UX designers a better indication of the challenges and successes of at-home learning. We'll know whether UX designers have done a good job of giving teachers the right tools—and the right support mechanisms—to reach and engage with their students.

Teachers now understand how the most sophisticated digital tools work within their technological ecosystems and support their existing curriculum. Our hope is that they'll never go back.