Designing the Digital Classroom Experience: An Interaction Design Exercise with CIID
What happens when an interaction design institute has to move its educational offerings online overnight? Here’s how a mindset-first, tools-second approach can quietly revolutionize remote learning.
By Tori Campbell with Amit Aggarwal and Davi Magalhães
The Covid-19 pandemic caught much of the world — including our team at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design — by surprise. Overnight we had to answer an essential question: Would it be possible to adapt our in-person learning experience to a digital setting? Throughout CIID’s 14 years of existence, one of the most strongly held beliefs was that our form of education, which emphasizes hands-on prototyping and peer-to-peer learning, could only happen in a physically present context. Bringing our teaching online — both for our year-long Interaction Design Programme in Costa Rica and for our three- to five-day workshops, which take place in Copenhagen and around the world — would be a massive leap of faith.
How might we transition our educational model that pushes the boundaries of both physical and digital interactions to a purely digital setting?
We decided to approach this as a design challenge we would iterate on, in keeping with our “Build Test Repeat” mantra at CIID. And who better to lead the initiative than a pair of interaction designers: IDP 2019 alumni Amit Aggarwal and Davi Magalhães. As technologists versed in the newest tools and platforms and designers who pursue solutions through a human-centred lens, the two were well equipped to transition CIID’s educational programmes to the digital sphere.
Amit and Davi started with intensive research — observing how the current IDP students in Costa Rica and their instructors were adapting to remote learning, and surveying through desk research how other educational institutes around the world were dealing with the sudden move online. Then, to design the new CIID Digital Learning platform, they mapped what the experience would look like for the stakeholders: workshop participants, faculty, and CIID staff. By focusing on the stakeholder journey first, the designers found the right tools to support the experience, instead of allowing the experience to be defined by the tools themselves. This was key to maintaining and translating the core features of CIID’s unique form of education.
The Framework
The two designers created mental models for each group of stakeholders: students, faculty, and staff. This gave the Digital Learning team an overview of potential issues early on in the process. Our online workshop registration process, for example, would be the first time each week’s participants would interact as a group; how could we design that touchpoint to be smoother and less awkward for everyone involved?
The Tools
Once the mental-model exercise was completed, Amit and Davi chose the core digital tools for the Digital Learning platform. (Because CIID does not adhere to a formal academic structure but rather focuses on a learning-by-doing practice it was possible to look beyond the traditional Learning Management Systems that other institutions might need to consider.)
Notion
The designers wanted a one-stop destination for faculty, students, and staff to coordinate programming and share information. More than just a place to store files, it needed to act as a virtual studio space with all the necessary information about courses, assignments, faculty, networking activities, and additional resources. Notion became our shared workspace for its smooth integration with digital tools and its ability to build a library of knowledge throughout time — allowing students, faculty, and staff to populate their own Wikis with content from various workshops.
Miro
Collaborative hands-on brainstorming is core to CIID’s educational philosophy. It was crucial to find a digital tool that allowed students to work in real time with one another and their faculty, as seamlessly and intuitively as possible. That’s where Miro came in: the platform enabled teams to collaborate from afar with a surprising ease.
“The tools CIID used, like Miro, made it very interactive, especially with design brainstorms. The collaboration online felt almost person-to-person even though we were in very different places.”
— Priscilla O., CIID Digital Learning Participant
In coordination with CIID operations lead Electra Marinopoulou, the two designers implemented a plan to hold group onboarding sessions for faculty and participants before the start of each workshop week so that everyone could learn the functionality of our chosen tools and begin with a baseline digital fluency.
What We Learned
After several months of prototyping our 5-day online workshops and iterating on each version, the CIID Digital Learning team met to debrief and discuss our learnings. (Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, for the digital transformation of IDP 2020 in Costa Rica.)
We have become adept at identifying the pain points of live online instruction and have multiple ways of addressing them. To reduce the cognitive load of hunting down information across various platforms, for example, we use Notion as a central destination. To keep students’ attention sharp during a workshop lecture, the two faculty members take turns narrating the presentation and switching every few slides. The instructor who is not narrating will then observe the participants to ensure as much comprehension as possible. As a rule of thumb, no Digital Learning lecture goes on for more than an hour.
We know that there are some things we just can’t control — like the inevitable WiFi issues that come with a global roster of faculty and participants. So we ask our Digital Learning faculty to create a comprehensive daily workshop schedule with all presentations, exercises, and tutorials available online (lectures and meetings are recorded and shared with the students). Keeping a digital ‘paper trail’ means that if someone loses connection, even for just a few minutes, they can easily pick up what they missed.
We know that screen time is exhausting, so we encourage our faculty to come up with physical artifacts and activities that can support the learning offline. (One pair of faculty sent out printed booklets to students to complement their digital lectures; and in the Designing Across Biological Scales workshop students are instructed to find a design mentor in nature to emulate.) Our challenge to ourselves at CIID is to design a holistic experience for Digital Learning that takes the whole person into account. Thus we’re creating microbreaks for meditation sessions and experimenting with recipe ideas for healthy lunches and quick cooking demos. Many of these ideas have come from watching the students themselves and how they relate to one another in a digital setting.
“I’ve seen many icebreakers in physical classes or workshops, but I’ve never seen people dancing in the room before. It seems that learning at home makes people more comfortable.”
— Davi Magalhães, Interaction Designer
The most positive result of CIID Digital Learning thus far: the ability to bring our education to a wider range of participants. In addition to crossing countries and time zones, our digital learning has enabled, for the first time, the participation of those who may have otherwise been unable to take a full week away from home, like new mothers. It’s a wonderful phenomenon to see participants from around the world across that Zoom screen.
The Road Ahead
Thus far we have not been creating new digital tools — we have been working with existing tools to create a new digital learning experience. This means that we are limited by the current offerings, and we may have to work around these limitations to provide the experience we want.
Currently, most remote collaboration tools are designed for people to complete work tasks, but they do not focus on other important aspects of working and learning: for instance, building empathy among remote colleagues. Now that remote working and learning have become a new normal, we need tools to address a wider range of emotional needs. (See here for one example: Borderless Portal, a prototype for a remote work platform that Davi Magalhães created for his final IDP project at CIID.)
So what’s next? The CIID team is continuing to experiment with (and brainstorm ideas for) new tools and practices to meet the needs of our faculty and participants. We’re playing with a new definition of blended learning: how might we get even more creative with screen breaks, tangible experiences, and a hybrid form of education? Most of all, we are pursuing a goal of growing greater interpersonal connectedness within an entirely digital setting. The time spent creating our CIID Digital Learning experience has been a true gift — an education for ourselves, as well as for our students.
For more about CIID Digital Learning and a full list of our 5-day online workshops offered in various time zones: ciid.dk/digital-learning/
