Product Design: Designing Alexa for Education

Designing the Alexa offering to aid education using the CIRCLES framework

Comprehend the situation

• What do we mean by education? K-6 education, in homes with parents
• Are we looking at mainstream school subjects or supplementary subjects? Supplementary, an additional learning tool for school subjects
• Which location is it for? India
• Why do they need it? A mechanism for quick concept strengthening, and a smarter system to solve problems before adult/parental intervention

Identify the personas

Case 1: Students

Demographics: Tier 1&2 cities, tech-savvy households, upper middle income

Behaviors:

• Curious about some subjects, wants to learn
• Despondent, doesn’t like going to school
• Restless, easily bored
• Kinesthetic approach — learns by doing

Needs and goals:

• 1-on-1 Engagement, attention while learning
• Want to know the impact / real world examples of what they learn in school
• Need a way to self-study to improve marks without getting bored

Case 2: Parents

Demographics: Tier 1&2 cities, tech-savvy households, upper middle income

Behaviors:

• Understand importance of education, value it highly
• May not have the time to address child’s doubts
• Worried about children’s marks, keep a constant tab on their progress
• May not have the answer to their children’s doubts

Needs and goals:

• Someone/something to make education more intuitive and interactive
• Something from which even they can learn
• Something to track their child’s progress

Case 3: Teachers and Schools

Demographics: Primary school teachers, tech-friendly, Tier 1 and 2 Cities

Behaviors:

• Overburdened with checking of assignments, as well as admin work
• The admin effort takes away time for organizing and planning each lesson properly
• Relatability gap between textbook knowledge, teacher’s methods, and reception by children

Needs and goals:

• Need something to help with improving the classroom experience without increasing their effort
• Need something to streamline their administrative work and checking of assignments
• Need something to increase discussion level in class, which may extend outside of classroom

Report the customer’s needs:

As a student, I want quick concept clarity in an interactive manner so that I may understand things before having to approach an adult

As a teacher, I want to tailor the course content to students’ real time learning and reduce my evaluation overhead so that I may improve the in-class experience while also reducing my effort

Cut, Through Prioritization

List Solutions

Educational content

• Delivery method and lessons customized to class standards, geographies, and individual student’s understanding level. Eg: Puzzles for Math, Rhymes and Pronounciation for English
• Alexa tailors the content and delivery to the interests she gauges from her interactions

Student evaluation and evaluation material

• Creating T/F type, Short answer type questions that the student can answer orally, after every lesson plan. Adaptive testing — level of difficulty of questions increases upon consecutive correct answers
• To give concept feedback on incorrect answers
• Teachers to receive report of after-class performance and metrics of all students

Doubt Material and Gauging Student understanding

• Phase 1: Students query Alexa for doubts, in case of non-redressal, students have the option to post doubts to their teacher via a discussion forum
• Phase 2: Alexa has context of the classes being taught (by listening to the teacher in-class), to enable automatic bucketing of the doubt questions received by the teacher
• Alexa creates detailed reports to gauge understanding levels and presents recommendations to teachers to present the next day’s lesson. Eg: 60% of class had a similar question on chlorophyll in biology; centers discussion around that in the next class
• Leads to a creation of informal discussion forum

Must-haves:

• Alexa’s accent should be crystal clear to the students
• Alexa should be mapped to the school systems, every students’ respective teacher should be mapped on to Alexa for quicker referencing

Metrics

General

• % increase in interaction with Alexa per unit
• % increase in interaction regarding educational queries
• Number of devices sold per school; % increase in adoption

Feature-wise

• Month on month increase engagement in educational content
• Hours of content uploaded
• % increase in student performance on comprehension and applicability levels, based on evaluation levels
• % increase in tests created by teachers
• % increase in evaluation reports created
• % increase in doubts queried, queued in discussion forums