Recap of the spring research

Investigating and identifying how career development and learning fluencies prepare students for career success

Over the spring semester our team utilized user-centered research to explore these three categories:

1. Identify what and how career management and learning fluencies help students succeed.
2. Investigate the existing WGU experience and where it needs improvement relative to the key fluencies.
3. Design solutions that fit in the key elements of the WGU learning ecosystem.

Our research was guided by our hunt statement:

Design a service solution that reimagines the student learning experience within the WGU ecosystem by investigating and identifying how career development and learning fluencies prepare undergraduate business students for career success.

Overview of research areas and findings

Definition of the career development fluency:

The ability to create realistic and adaptive career goals by identifying one’s skills, values, and interests; having research skills to identify relevant information; exploring professional opportunities, and matching opportunities to one’s skills, knowledge, values, and interests; being able to implement an action plan by organizing time effectively, identifying pathways needed to reach a goal, and preparing contingency plans; being able to monitor and evaluate progress against specific objectives; developing professional networks and maintaining a sup-port network for advice and information; being able to promote own strengths in a convincing way; committed to lifelong learning for career development.

Definition of the learning fluency:

Understanding and having the motivation to learn, analyzing the learning context, setting and managing meaningful learning goals, determining which learning strategies to use, assessing whether the strategies are effective in meeting the learning goals, evaluating emerging understanding of the topic, and determining whether there are aspects of the learning context which could be used to facilitate learning.

Cultural Model:

Personas:

During our groupings, we were able to categorize WGU students based on their motivation, experience, and background. The students we talked to generally fit into one of the three categories in terms of their motivation for attending WGU and their career goals: the planner, the transitioner, and the explorer.

User Behaviors:
Although not every user fit neatly into these categories in terms of user behaviors, we wanted to represent the range of interactions students had regarding their career, learning, and the amount of social interactions they wanted in their learning and career development.

Career: The scale, “no career direction” to “clear career goal”, maps out how students were able to verbalize and talk about their goals. “No clear direction” refers to students who spoke about their goals in a vague way or simply said they did not know what they wanted to do after WGU. On the other end of the scale, were users that had very clear goals and were able to specifically talk about their goals and what they needed to do to achieve those long-term goals. “Need help with career development” represents people that explicitly said they needed help with figuring out what they wanted to do, either with help from WGU, their family, or their co-workers. On the other end of that scale were people who could manage their career on their own from their work experience in the field.

Learning: The learning behaviors represent a scale between “students who had effective learning strategies” and those that tended to stick with the same learning strategies or ineffective strategies. Another difference we found between students were those that had a consistent study routine versus those that would just fit in their studies whenever they could.

Social: The final thing we represented on the scale were students who wanted social interaction with their learning and career development and those that explicitly preferred to study alone and did not seek social interaction.

Three personas the emerged from our research

8 Key Insights

Insight # 1 Students have a long-term vision of their career goals, but they don’t necessarily know the pathways from their current position to their long-term career vision.

• Pathways are crucial for career success
• Students are not necessarily able to create career pathways
• WGU resources do not effectively support students to create the pathways

Insight # 2 Students are not aware of how learning to learn is related to their jobs.

• Self-regulated learning can result in better task management skills
• Students don’t mention they value learning how to learn
• Students are confident in learning strategy without perceiving strategy as the skill

Insight # 3 Students value soft skills like leadership and communication.

• WGU students feel leadership and communication skills are eventually linked to their career success, but fail to elaborate upon this thinking.
• More students are interested in developing leadership skills over communication skills.

Insight # 4 Students believe they have effective self-regulation skills

• SRL has particular importance for WGU students because of asynchronous, high learner control environment.
• Students use multiple study strategies — taking offline notes, highlighting relevant parts of the provided textbook, using the course’s chatbox to clear doubts.
• Students also use external resources, such as youtube videos, to strengthen their conceptual understanding.

Insight # 5 The user experience design of the e-learning courses affects how students learn.

• Ineffective design of the dashboard prevents students from regulating their learning
• Students have a hard time utilizing different learning resources, because learning resources are not organized in an easily navigable way.
• One-third of the students mentioned the learning resources being inconsistent across different courses.

Insight # 6 Student mentors take a larger role than expected. They also provide emotional and learning support to students.

• Students relied heavily on student mentors throughout their learning.
• Student mentors are doing a great job facilitating and motivating students in their learning.
• The dependence on student mentors may actually impede students from becoming self-learners.

Insight # 7 Students want social interaction with other students, and they seek interaction outside of WGU courses.

• The intensity and quality of social interactions are related to student’s academic success.
• Students go outside of WGU’s resources when they were having trouble within their course work.
• Students also view outside resources as more of a guide, informing what they should focus on within their courses.
• Students want more features than just the chat features provided within a course.

Insight # 8 Students are aware of the career services offered by WGU, but do not see the value in using the services.

• Students are uncertain of the process or do not think it would be helpful for them.
• Students view career services a way to fulfill short-term career goals
• There needs to be explicit connections between the curriculum and career services.

Our team in brainstorming sessions

Design ideas derived from our user insights

Moving forward, our focus will be on designing and implementing a solution that fits in with the key elements of the WGU learning ecosystem.

To achieve this goal, we have the following three-step plan:

1. Analyze and synthesize the current six pitch ideas, and systematically form a design idea. In this stage, we will reflect on our research findings, and identify the target user and key problems we want to address.
2. Conduct participatory co-design sessions with local WGU students to iterate on the design idea. We will con-duct face-to-face user testing with WGU students living in Pittsburgh area and further validate our user insights during the user testing.
3. Prototype the design solution, and implement key components of the solution as necessary. The prototype will be the high-fidelity mock-up and the implementation will demonstrate the key features of the designed system or tools.