Lifelong Learning | Learner Experience Design

Team | Anna Boyle, Carol Ho, Gautam Yadav, and Tomo Nagashima

Weekly Reflections and Process Documentation

02.06.20–02.10.20 — Anna

This past week we had the opportunity to finally come together as a group and start working on synthesizing our interests and proposed problem space.

As a team, we are interested in exploring learning opportunities through the topic of lifelong learning and more specifically self-directed learning.

Self Directed Learning is “a process in which individuals take the
initiative without the help of others in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating goals, identifying human and material resources, and evaluating learning outcomes”

Knowles, M. (1975) “Self-Directed Learning”, A Guide for Learners and Teachers. Cambridge Books; NY.

Over the last 4 weeks of class, our group worked on developing the following three deliverables in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of our learners.

Excercise 1 | Stakeholder Map

Preparing college students for self-directed learning after graduation.

In this exercise, we identified 3 key stakeholders surrounding the question above?

1. Students
2. Instructors
3. Online Learning Platforms

We then identified fears hopes and asperations identified with each stakeholder around the question of preparing college students for self-directed learning after graduation.

Excercise 2 | Bridging Learning Gaps

In Exercise 2, Briding the Learning Gaps we took the three stakeholders we had identified and assigned current and preferred states of learning within the context of lifelong learning and self-directed learning.

After identifying the current states for each stakeholder we then identified the preferred state.

Our current states were mostly centered around student and instructor stakeholders, with the exception of one for online learning.

After identifying the current and preferred states for each stakeholder we developed ideas and concepts that could bridge the gap between the current state and the preferred state.

In the last step of this exercise, we tagged each current state with a color associated with the specific “learning gap” that the current state was addressing.

In preparation for our class presentation, we identified three key challenges that we would like to tackle over the course of our project.

1. Ineffective Blended Learning Approaches

2. Lack of Intrinsic Motivation

3. Lack of Human Interaction

Excercise 3 | Creating an Effective Learning Cycle

Teaching students the value of being curious.

In our McCarthy 4MAT diagram exercises, we were able to explore teaching students the value of being curious. Through this diagram, we were able to reinforce some of our initial ideas around intrinsic motivations and opportunities to build connections with other learners and increase human interaction.

Initial Ideas:

• Learning with or without the help of others
• Diagnosing their own learning needs
• Formulating learning goals
• Identifying human and material resources for learning
• Choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies
• Evaluating learning outcomes

To bring out the intrinsic motivation of life-long learning, our prompt of the 4MAT diagram is to teach students the value of being curious. We started by answering “why do we need to be curious?” As a group, we determined that those who are curious often gain new perspectives and have a better chance of exploring the different possibilities throughout life. After addressing the “why” we moved on to ask ourselves “what” it means to be curious. We ended up identifying being curious as “Not being afraid of failure” and an “Openness of Thinking”. Building on these answers, we moved to the next quadrant by asking “how” does being curious work. To make it work, we discussed the need for safe environments to explore and to look beyond the answers. We then extended the concept of being curious, to becoming inspired, building connections with people and concepts, and self-directed learning.

With these results, we found that our design revolves around “the interaction with other learners” and “setting personal goals”.

Moving forward our next step is to define which quadrant we should focus on, or how can we fulfill all four quadrants when addressing our design intervention.

02.11.20 — In Class

After our presentation on Tuesday, our group came away with some thoughts around shifting our direction from teaching within the university to informal learning outside traditional classrooms.

Although we were focusing on the university education setting given our target user group, there is interest among our group to explore the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Homepage - Osher Lifelong Learning Institute - Carnegie Mellon University

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute | University of Pittsburgh

After some discussion as a group, we decided to extend our research to explore this older demographic further with the assumption that an older demographic of people are maybe more motivated to engage in lifelong learning than undergraduate students. Over the course of the next week, we plan to try and connect with instructors and/or students at the institute at Carnegie Mellon or at the University of Pittsburgh.

02.13.20–02.17.20 — Anna

During class on Thursday Stacie talked with us and helped us clarify our direction. Although we received feedback around the adult learning space for older demographics, she steered us back to considering undergraduate students as our target audience. Because undergraduate students are already invested in structured academic learning it is even more important that we look into finding opportunities where they could engage in self-directed lifelong learning in parallel with their current studies.

In class, we discussed opportunities where this could exist through the Wiggings + McTighe Six Facets of Understanding.

1. Explain
2. Interpret
3. Apply
4. Have Perspective
5. Empathize
6. Have Self Knowledge

At the beginning, of this exercise we shared personal experienced where we had learned, applied or been involved in one or many of these 6 facets.

Many of our shared experiences were shared around the teaching and instruction space and how we had passed on our knowledge to others.

After our group discussion, we were challenged to develop a quick scenario that incorporated these facets.

For our concept, we developed an idea and concept around Instagram as a pre-existing platform that students interact with and how a student could follow an Instagram influencer to interpret a skill in our case “cooking” and be able to gain perspective and develop self-knowledge and apply different cooking methods and skills through this type of interaction.

In our scenario, we envisioned the student becoming so motivated and engaged with cooking that they would then create their own Instagram page and share their own knowledge. This would then provide them the opportunity to explain what they learned and empathize on a new level with there followers or learners.

Images from our scenario exercise.

Over the weekend Stacie asked that we explore ideas on how we plan to help our learners acquire the knowledge that we believe is pertinent for them to gain?

After class Thursday we each individually thought about how our learner experience could build on the 6 facets as well as consider what content we wanted to pursue and how we plan to motivate learners.

Inspired by the scenario that we had developed on Thursday using Instagram as an existing platform our team discussed opportunities where we could use Instagram to engage college students in self-directed life long learning activities through the University lens.

A few things we discussed:

• Engagement and Framing of Making Learning Fun: Bill Nye the Science Guy & Sesame Street.
• Student Influencers + Ambasssordors — creating a platform that is student-run/driven.
• Developing skills in goal setting, finance, cooking?
• Have the experience provide knowledge on life skills and academic content.

Next Steps (this week) :

• Talk with students and develop questions around Instagram as a potential platform/ entry point?
• Do undergraduate students still use Instagram? What do they primarily use it for? Do they currently follow the Carnegie Mellon Official Instagram or other school-affiliated platforms?
• Read Gautam’s papers on lifelong learning for Adults & Undergraduate Students.
• Research existing student & university Instagram pages.
• Reach out to departments on campus ie. Marketing Department — Management and engagement of the official CMU Instagram and
• Reach out to the Academic Coaching Department to know about how they help students plan out their personal goals/milestones over a period of time. What is their retention rate? Do they have any training materials which they use that they can share it with us?

02.17.20–02.21.20 — Carol

Based on the Ambrose and Dirksen models/theories we discussed, what ideas do you have for helping your learners acquire necessary skills to gain mastery?

This week we started to navigate through the Ambrose and Dirksen models/theories. The cycle of practice and feedback theory provided a sustainable cycle structure to think through when designing a learning experience. The designers should provide an appropriate level of challenge, regarding quantitative and frequency, to help the learner grow. The cycle structure is a helpful way of thinking learning as an iterative, and also a long-term process. The learning objectives diagram on the right defines what should be included in learning contents that accommodate the big ideas and core tasks.

The stages in the development of mastery theory help categories the type of learners by the conscious and competence. By identifying the type of learners, the designers can then design a learning experience for their need, which can also reference the 4MAT system by Bernice Mccarthy. From the first stage of unconscious incompetence, the goal will be arousing the conscious of the user by answering the WHY of the topic, which is related to the first quadrant of the 4MAT diagram. The conscious incompetence related to the HOW quadrant of the 4MAT diagram of acquiring skills. The conscious competence is related to the WHAT quadrant, in which the designers should help the learner integrate the knowledge into their practice. And for the unconscious competence, the designer should help the learner apply broadly of their existing knowledge.

The learning flow model is often applied to gamification learning experience design, as it pointed out the challenge throughout the whole process. The structured flow of goals is a great reminder for the designer to design an achievable smaller goal for the learner, but also connect to the whole, long term goal. As we’re targeting on life-long learning, the result of life-long learning might be vague for some of our learners. The models inspire us that it would provide great motivation to visualize the process of ability growth for the learner.

After that, Gautam and Tomo brainstormed “knowledge and skills” on Thursday. We were able to come up with many skills. However, we’re unable to think of the contents we what our learner to focus on based on the existing life-long learning context. Stacie suggested us to contextualize the concept of self-directed learning into a more specific context/example/situation to discover the type of knowledge that we let learners explore. We started to brainstorm the knowledge on Murual board, and plan to discuss it on Monday.

The Mural Board of the brainstorming process

Reach out to the Academic Coaching Department to know about how they help students plan out their personal goals/milestones over a period of time. What is their retention rate? Do they have any training materials which they use that they can share it with us?

https://www.cmu.edu/acadev/coaching/index.html

Academic Coaching is an organization under Academic Development at Carnegie Mellon University. It aims to help students achieve their academic success during their time in school. It provides continuous 1-on-1 consoling, and some workshops for students to attend.

The process of Academic Coaching

The coaches at 1-on-1 consoling are mostly undergraduate students who’re academically successful in their current degree and are passionate about sharing their knowledge with others. According to the data they provided, most students are suffering from lack of time management skills and procrastination. The goal of Academic coaching is to help the students become more self-directed by setting up a personal goal with personal learning styles and interest and keep track of the progress with the students.

Meeting on 2020/02/24

Based on the research paper of Self-regulated learning and its relationship with student-teacher interaction. Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research, 20(1–2). by Yen, N. L., Bakar, K. A., Roslan, S., Suluan, W., & Rahman, P. Z. M. A. (2005), students with Fine Arts degree are those with the highest self-directed learning skills scores, comparing to the students with Natural Science, Health Science, Social Science degree. And one of the reasons for this is that the study of Fine Arts requires more comprehensive skills, and encourage students to improvise and explore the situation. Whilst the study of Science requires the student to divide and conquer to reach specific successful results.

Moreover, for undergraduate students, the knowledge that most students learn outside the academic environments is career-related. With the experience of Confluence, we assume that besides designers, all undergraduate students need to learn to promote themselves to stand out and find the dream job they want. And creative thinking is the way to help them reach the goal. With the intention of preparing for the career fair, if we provide enough intervention and supports for students to engage and find the resource they need, they’re practicing self-directed learning within the context of the preparation of job search.

With the conscientious, we started to map out our ideas on the matrix.

The result of the discussion on 2020/02/24

02.24.20–02.26.20 — Gautam

This week we gave presentation to the class about the Knowledge and Skills involved in the project.

“Our mission is to assist students in becoming self directed learners so that they can diagnose their needs, seek appropriate help, formulate goals, identify resources and evaluate their progress.”

Core learning goal is still Self Directed Learning (SDL) and we want students to learn SDL skills through engaging with career readiness training/education. We chose this topic as it’s definitely one of the things undergrads need to learn and it’s a relevant topic to them

We also defined the skills and knowledge we are going to teach. But we realized in the previous meeting while that the knowledge we are going to teach depends on the domain we select. If we are teaching SDL by making them ready for career the knowledge needed for the students is using social media strategically, making a good portfolio, becoming good at public speaking, networking tips, etc.

After that, we looked at how do we plan to engage with our target audience. Putting in the context of career development preparation, the problem statement can be reframed as,

“ How might we enable undergraduate students to develop confidence in pursuing their future careers through creative expression and self promotion?”

There are two parts in our proposed intervention. First, we’ll encourage the learner to participate in individual practice to gain the knowledge of storytelling, sketching and giving feedback, with the intent for them to gain skills in verbal communication, creative thinking and so on. To increase their engagement in this context, we also proposed mentorship, alumni connections activities. After they’re competent about the skills, the learners can participant in student-led activities to teach other learners the skills and knowledge of career developments, and continuously engage in the life-long learning process through the engagement.

We are thinking of having 2 parts in the final intervention. We will encourage the learner to participate in individual practice to gain the knowledge of career readiness, with the intent for them to gain skills in verbal communication, creative thinking and so on.

To increase their engagement in this context, we also proposed mentorship, alumni connections activities. After they’re competent about the skills, the learners can participate in student-led activities to teach other learners the skills and knowledge of career developments, and continuously engage in the life-long learning process through the engagement.

Proposed Intervention (1st draft)

Forming an online community of students and alumni.

Alumni facing interface

Reasons it will work for alumni -

1. They get to reflect on their progress when they fill out the form after 1 year by contrasting how their approach has evolved over time and experience so they also learn something!
2. There is no cognitive overload, it’s not a demanding task for them to only fill 2 surveys.

Based on these surveys the final report will contain:

1. Actionable insights on how to define learning objectives and plan milestones to get that job.
2. Type of tasks they can engage in outside what they are required to do in academics with minimal guidance to get that job.
3. Since they are hooked (engaged and motivated) now, we will sneak in “How to form productive habits?” and “What is a growth mindset?” in order for them to become independent and active self directed learners.

Student facing interface

Reasons it will work for students:

1. Students will learn if they want to learn but a compelling answer to the “what’s-in-it-for-me” question is a powerful internal motivation.
2. Telling them to just try harder or they don’t have a growth mindset can be problematic. Students need to understand why they should put in effort and how to deploy that effort.
3. Learning that evokes strong emotional responses (realistic scenarios that reveal cause-effect relationships) create powerful experiences that are not forgotten easily.
4. They learn best when they know that the knowledge has immediate value for them. Sometimes they have the self directed learning skills but they are just not using them effectively, so we will help them make connections, perceive relevance, and derive inspiration in how SDL can help them after they graduate.

To learn more we decided to meet some of the stakeholders like Academic Coaching and Career Professional Development Center we identified that will have relevant information related to this. We split up to divide the interviews.

Based on the feedback we got, some of the things we need to do,

1. Revise the mission based on Nick’s feedback and how might we statement based on Matt’s feedback.
2. Read Stanford design lab book on Designing your Life suggested by Corina and think about how to focus our intervention on some specific instance of the student’s life.
3. Narrow the focus on teaching soft skills to the students that will make them appreciate learning more.
4. Analyze this feedback by Ema, “Online communities tend to work when paired with services that people actively use otherwise very difficult to get people coming back.” which was really insightful to us.
5. Fill the disconnect Stacie mentioned in the knowledge and skills.
6. Think alternatives to forms which everyone seems to hate!!!

We will make it more clear on our next presentation on how to help the students to be more cognizant of lifelong learning as opposed to just seeing it as a way to get a job and earn money.

Interview #1

Gautam completed the interview with one of the Academic Coach to learn more about what are the student needs for which they seek academic coaching. Here are some of the insights from the interview.

1. The academic coaches help the students with setting goals, building efficacy, having a growth mindset, having productive habits (sleep, eat, food, healthy habits), and planning (excel, check list, calendar).
2. The main reason people achieve academic coaches are due to time management, and low performance. But when he will sit with them and dig more into it, the reason will be actually because either they are not planning at all or it is somehow aggravated by their peers. Let me clarify them.
3. First when he tries to ask them about how they spent their time completing any assignment recently it will show a lot of unproductive habits so they will help them by telling importance of sleep and planning which is setting goals and using some sort of planner to track progress.
4. Secondly for most of the folks when they don’t get enough grades or get rejected by a job they don’t lose confidence immediately but it is aggravated by their peers like peers will say always I don’t sleep I work so much and complain how they are not doing good. So the students will relate with that thinking oh I am feeling the same and I am not alone who is working a lot. But after getting low performance even if they feel a little sad/anxious they are still doing okay until they start comparing themselves to the same peers who were complaining but got high grades or even a job before them. They start thinking their might be a fault in them or that they are not capable (which indicates fixed mindset).
5. What the academic coach tries to do is hold them accountable not as an authoritative figure but as a peer who went through the same experience. There is this openness to peer which makes them comfortable and honest answering questions like “Are u proud of your daily work?, Do u think u did enough work today, Did you do everything you planned out to do after our lost session?”
6. The approach taken by AC based on his experience that works is to assign some assignment on first one-on-one session asking them to record their planning, time spent, and approach. Then on the second session he will evaluate their process and if it’s not productive or doesn’t reflect that student took it seriously at all then he will talk about more concrete stuff like what do you want to do in life and what kind of things do you like doing.
7. Motivations and long term goals: Sometimes it happen that students even change major while talking about their aspirations for which they applied and enrolled in CMU for. AC said that as they will talk about the specific skill and responsibilities they need to be doing in their dream job and how they are struggling in the course (which is a requirement for that job) not because they are incapable but because they don’t enjoy doing that, it will turn out that they had this flimsy view of working in some big company but like doing something else which requires them to shift their focus or sometimes even major to something else.
8. The AC also tries to explain about growth mindset and will put in his own testimonial on how he didn’t believe in it at first which makes it relatable to the student. Then explain how the brain is malleable and neurons make connections. Even if it seems like a lot of biology talking that much to an undergrad will convince them more than just telling that you can do anything which might work for younger children. Even if you don’t like the professor or feel frustrated with your peers in the class, just learn mindfulness like appreciate the class, cherish the opportunity to practice skills and learn things so even if you don’t think it’s useful to in the future just lower your expectations and anxiety about it. Think of it as a learning experience and try to get something out of it.
9. While some ACs always go to performance and only help students to get a grade or prep for finals week, the AC interviewed here doesn’t think it helps the students in the long term.

02.27.20–03.02.20 — Tomo

Teaching self-directed learning through “contextualization”

Preparing for and giving the knowledge-and-skill presentation was useful in that it helped us think about our overarching learning problem once again, but it looks like that the discussion among us was not enough. Stacie pointed it out in the feedback spreadsheet:

“You mention challenges in time management, procrastination, etc. but then highlight communicating and crafting knowledge and skills. There seems to be a disconnect here but maybe I’m missing something.”

She was right that there was a disconnect here. We thought that each of us did not fully understand our approach (primarily because the idea partly came from the class session where only Gautam and Tomo were present), so we discussed again to make sure that we are all on the same page on our approach. Our approach is to help learners learn Self-Directed Learning skills by contextualizing them into career development, something that undergraduates would be interested in learning about. This approach is based on an instructional principle called Context Personalization (Walkington, 2013), in which learning contexts are personalized into the context/example/situation that the target students are familiar with. The following framework may help understand it visually:

A framework for our “contextualization” approach.

In our approach, SDL skills (our target skills) will be introduced in the context familiar to our target audience (career development). For example, for the SDL skill of “setting achievable goals”, we create a contextualized target skill, “setting achievable goals in getting prepared for the job search”. We use the content/knowledge in their familiar context such as “Improving Your Creative Skills” to teach the contextualized target skills (e.g., examining their own strengths and weaknesses, plan what to learn and when to learn it while considering how to manage time and tasks). Ideally, engaging in the activity will help learners gain the target SDL skill.

We think that this approach would be effective since we assume that it is hard for students to practice SDL skills when SDL skills are introduced in a de-contextualized way. Our next step would be to talk to our target audience to explore if this approach would really be potentially effective.

Learning vs. performance

During this past week, we also discussed how we could apply models proposed by Ambrose et al and Zimmerman et al to our topic:

Among these two models, we particularly found it useful to use Ambrose et al’s model as a lens for investigating our problem. Although what we have in the model is all still hypothetical, de-composing motivational aspects in learning SDL skills helped us discuss further which aspects of these we want to focus the most.

One thing that was interesting for us to explore was the distinction between learning and performance in Ambrose et al’s model. Because our topic is about acquiring skills, we thought that, when assessing whether our approach is successful or not, we would be focusing on assessing learners’ performance. As we also want to know if learners learn something, not only to see how well they can perform certain tasks, we discussed some other ways we could use to assess both learning and performance. Here are some examples:

• Perform certain tasks to demonstrate acquired SDL skills
• Peer-evaluation — evaluate and acknowledge each other’s learning
• Self-reflection — look back what they have learned (and discuss how different it is from what they had expected)
• Assessing skills before and after our intervention (to see learning gains)

It might sound too early to explore the assessment plan — but we think that it is important to always be mindful of our specific target learning objectives, as we learned in previous weeks.

Interviews

Through exploring different models, we came to think that we should talk to our target users. We plan to meet undergraduate students (as well as a few more “provides” — e.g., career development services) in the next couple of weeks. We are planning to ask about their current status (needs), challenges, and aspirations using the following questions and others. We hope the user interviews will help us move forward especially in deciding which aspect of the problem to focus and generating concrete design ideas.

1. What is your dream job and why?
2. What resources do you use on campus to help in your job/summer internship search?
3. What services have been the most helpful?
4. What are some of the anxieties or fears you have around finding a job or internship?
5. What kinds of difficulties do you (or do you think you will) experience in the job/internship search?
6. Do you know your strengths and weaknesses? Do you think the classes you have taken have helped you improve/overcome them? How do you improve/overcome them?
7. Do you use any specific resources for planning ahead or goal setting to set deadlines for yourself?

03.03.20–03.08.20 — Tomo

The class activities we did each week since the beginning of the group project helped us move forward and explore more opportunities, but we had a feeling that we did not have a chance to fully digest them. This may be partly due to the fact that we have shifted our focus several times. The last face-to-face class before the spring break gave us an opportunity to think about our current topic, self-directed learning, through applying the models and frameworks. We continued the discussion during the break, finding it really helpful to see the big picture of what we have done so far.

The thinking process is detailed in this Google doc (a less structured text-based tool we love):

We used the nine questions that were given in the last physical class to guide our discussion. Here’s the very quick summary for five of them:

1. Who are your learners and stakeholders? Why?: We focus on undergraduate students as our learners, and alumni and career development service professionals as important stakeholders.
2. What have you identified as important learning gaps to tackle?: Skill gap — many undergraduate students are not equipped with SDL skills, Motivational&environmental gap — limited opportunities for learning SDL skills, Environmental gap — students have lots of things to do (they can’t devote themselves to learning and practicing SDL skills), Communication gap — limited active communications between learners and stakeholders.
3. What skills do you aim for your learners to acquire and how might you effectively foster their learning?: Self-evaluation and Goal-setting skills (both are important SDL skills)
4. What knowledge do you aim for your learners to acquire and how might you effectively foster their learning?: Not just knowledge such as how to create “good” goals and knowing who you are but also the idea that your goals can be flexible and adjusted (many of our interviewees mentioned this in their responses
5. What might serve as an appropriate and effective learning context(s) for your experience(s)? Why?: We use “career development” as our context for learning SDL knowledge and skills.

Of those that we have discussed, one significant step we made was in identifying our target knowledge. Over the past few weeks, we have interviewed several professionals who provide career development services to get insights into what is meaningful to focus in our project. One theme that we found through these interviews and other feedback we received is that many undergraduates do not realize that they can change their interest and career direction (e.g., change their major, go to health industry from tech industry).

This theme can be considered as knowledge (students need to understand that they can change their career direction) and seems very important. Because we found that this theme/knowledge is relevant to our target skills (self-directed learning skills), particularly several sub-skills such as Self-evaluation and Goal-setting skills, we started to explore how we could integrate this knowledge with the skills to create a meaningful learning experience in which students can learn that there is a lot of flexibility in choosing and changing their career while learning some essential life-long learning skills.

We continue to discuss these questions and also start reaching out to our learners — undergrads. We are also thinking about making a survey so that we can gather information remotely.

03.08.20–03.15.20 — Gautam

We have been discussing potential approaches to addressing our knowledge and skills while trying to answer the remaining questions (engagement, effective structure, attention, and memory).

Some ways of holding the learners’ attention:

• Could students start a goal learning page/mood board at the beginning of their college career. Mood Board — Visualise Your Goals
• Could this visualization portal aid in student engagement and participation with on-campus resources like the Career Development Center and Academic Coaching
• Making a digital mood board that helps visualize your goals could be fun and you could share it with your advisor’s classmates and maybe even add it to your LinkedIn? This type of visualization, flexibility, and accountability to keep something like this update throughout your academic career could encourage goal setting and self-evaluation.
• Also — being able to show a visual representation of who you are and where you want to go is an easy way for peers, advisors and on-campus resources to understand who you are through a visual aid — as opposed to a general conversation — i.e. “ Hi I am Sam — I am a student-athlete and business student.” (But did you know Sam also really enjoys cooking and traveling?) Tips and information about students’ extracurriculars outside of what’s on paper could really inform opportunities for their future or career outside the traditional — Business Major with an emphasis in Marketing. Sam also enjoys cooking and traveling…could there be opportunities to possibly pursue internships with restaurants in the future v.s. pursuing banking and fortune 500 companies.
• Students already engage with flagging things they are interested in on Social Media with hashtags, follows, pins, and saving collections or creating albums — could we leverage this habit to help students identify their personal interest and goals?

Proposed Intervention (2nd draft)

The learner experience is for computer science freshmen and will take place online but there will be mentors/advisors present in case anyone gets stuck or has a doubt.

The entire thing is supposed to take one hour and can be broken down into 4 sessions:

Assess yourself (20 mins): You have 15 minutes to select pictures for each of these columns about where you are right now.

You will select pictures of all the things written in the columns of skills, interests, values, etc from a large open source picture repository.

After that, you have 5 minutes to add a new column of where you want to be after 10 years. Select the pictures from here which describes where you want to be after 10 years. The activity is time limited so students don’t try to make some perfect collage but just jot down their honest unfiltered thoughts and what catches their attention.

Get Recommendations (15 mins): Explore the 3 jobs recommended to you based on what you selected in the last session. Read the interactive testimonials of what people do in their day to day life, what they love, what they did to reach there, and what is something they wish they knew sooner.

Make your choice now for your career based on the information available to you. If you are not sure about which one you want to choose just select the one that seems more likable to you right now and later you can revisit the other one on your own time.

Goal Setting (10 mins): Identify goals and plan ahead. Write down things you need to do, courses you need to take, extra-curricular activities or internships that will help you get more familiar to the kind of responsibilities.

It might happen that you need to change your major or some courses you took were not that important to you. Don’t worry a lot of people figured it out after graduating you are way ahead of the curve.

Plan (15 mins): Write an action plan. How you will keep track of your progress. Check-in from time to time. Schedule your short term and long-term goals. Putting most of the self-directed learning tips here like how they can revisit this from time to time to track their progress, be flexible, set new goals, refocus and other things.

03.16.20–03.23.20 — Anna

In-Class

This past week was our first week back in classes and starting our the rest of our semester classes online — due to the impact of the COVID -19 Pandemic of 2020. Due to this unforeseeable change, we started this past week’s class on Thursday and have moved to work exclusively online with our group members via Zoom and attending online classes via the same platform.

On Thursday Stacie introduced us to the learning Theory of Blockbusting where we were challenged to think about objects and our associations with how we interpret the form of an object such as a tree or a t.v. and how we often don’t include elements of the form that are key components to its functionality — i.e. roots on a tree or the electric cord on a t.v.

Over the course of multiple exercises, we explored the following concepts below.

1. BLOCK: Problem-solvers often have a STRONG TENDENCY TO DETECT WHAT THEY EXPECT. In this case, you have similar expectations for what these objects should/shouldn’t include. It’s important to be aware of this block as it can guide and limit thought processes.

2. BLOCK: Problem-solvers often have DIFFICULTY ISOLATING A PROBLEM effectively. The scale of the problem frame may be too narrow, which may cause them to prematurely eliminate ideas, or too broad, which may cause them to misplace the focus of the challenge. Therefore, it’s often valuable to move among levels of scale to uncover innovative yet logical approaches to problem-solving.

3. BLOCK: Problem-solvers often have a TENDENCY TO LIMIT THE PROBLEM AREA. As a result, some facets are deemed essential when they actually are not. Instead, they’re just common.

4. BLOCK: Problem-solvers often encounter an INABILITY TO SEE TASKS FROM VARIOUS VIEWPOINTS. Taking on the perspective of various stakeholders frequently helps us see challenges that were missed during the initial pass.

5. BLOCK: Problem-solvers often CAN’T RECALL ESSENTIAL CONTENT DUE TO SATURATION. As a result, information that is encountered often is assumed to be easy to recall. When, in fact, the opposite is often the case.

6. BLOCK: Problem-solvers often encounter a FAILURE TO UTILIZE ALL SENSORY INPUTS when tackling a challenge. This approach tends to cause learners to become overwhelmed and bored. In contrast, leveraging multiple senses spreads the cognitive load among inputs and is often more enjoyable.

This classroom exercise got us thinking about different ways we can engage in changing perspectives to develop and uncover rich problem spaces and areas for intervention.

Outside of Class

After class Thursday we worked as a team to finalize questions for our survey for undergraduate students in addition to recruiting classmates and professors to share the survey in an effort to better understand our learner’s motivations and challenges.

After finalizing our survey we then worked as a group to further identify the following areas.

1. Motivating learners to engage;
2. Holding their attention; and
3. Aiding their memory of key knowledge and skills, while leveraging the learning theories we’ve learned to date.

As a group, we talking through the proposed ideas and strategies of the concepts that Gautam outlined in our previous post in addition to some additional concepts and developed a group concept.

After agreeing on our rough concept direction we worked together to develop the framework of explaining opportunities for our learners to engage with motivation, attention, and memory. After identifying these different concepts for each we assigned learning theories to each concept to show why these concepts would be effective. The learning theories associated are outlined in the black box.

We will be presenting these concepts and ideas to the class on Tuesday and look forward to receiving feedback and seeing if our current direction is on track.

Project Next Steps After We Present

03.24.20–03.26.20 — Anna

After our class presentations on Tuesday Stacie posed the following questions for our teams. We gathered as a group and talked through each question.

How are you leveraging blockbusting in your thinking?

Moving forward we are hoping to leverage these two blockbusting methods of thinking. As a group, we felt like these two were the most relevant to our project and how were are working towards shifting the mindsets and perceptions of students' thoughts towards their own careers and career planning.

3. BLOCK: Problem-solvers often have a TENDENCY TO LIMIT THE PROBLEM AREA. As a result, some facets are deemed essential when they actually are not. Instead, they’re just common.

4. BLOCK: Problem-solvers often encounter an INABILITY TO SEE TASKS FROM VARIOUS VIEWPOINTS. Taking on the perspective of various stakeholders frequently helps us see challenges that were missed during the initial pass.

What are your goals/ aspirations for your project and the class moving forward?

As a group, we are collectively invested in developing thorough and relevant research while leveraging the design methods outlined in this class. However, we agreed that we find the importance of form and testing equally important and that the form is especially important — if it's serving the purpose of getting the results we need.

We’ve outlined some additional concerns below.

1. Limitations to developing physical experiences.
2. Originally Stacie said in class she will bring users for testing… will that happen?
3. How will we be testing, evaluating, applying & testing theories during this time?

What do you hope to learn and achieve

Testing and using our design methods while also learning how to test, evaluate and apply testing theories to learning experiences.

How do we foster the learning theories and methods we have learned to instill self-directed learning within our specific learner experience?

Also, we hope to design an intervention that is fun and engaging for students — something they would be excited about.

03.27.20–03.31.20 — Tomo

We discussed the feedback we got for our presentation on proposed strategies — they were really nice comments! Moving forward, we have some challenges:

• How to keep learners motivated and engaged? — keywords: the sense of achievement, small-step activity, small victories
• How to make sure that learners gain self-directed learning skills, but not just career-related skill/knowledge? — keywords: learning objectives, contexts, short-term goal vs. long-term goal
• Withholding vs. providing assistance: How much support is optimal for learners to gain our target skills while also being kept engaged?
• Required effort/time vs. learning: How much effort can we expect learners to put into our learning experience? An activity that takes too much effort and time should be avoided, but one that expects a minimal amount of effort and time would not yield learning.

Since Gautam has been sick and Carol is traveling to Taiwan, Anna and Tomo discussed how we could use learning theories and models to inform our learning experience. Stacie helped us at the beginning of this (during the class). We are primarily interested in leveraging three of the theories that we have learned:

• Structured Flow of Goals
• Cycle of Practice and Feedback
• Ambrose’s Motivation Model

Structured Flow of Goals: our target goal is self-directed learning skills, which are broad and not something that can be learned in a short period of time. We want to use this model to show that we are focusing on one or two sub-skills/goals (self-evaluation and goal-setting). We also acknowledge the possibility that each of these sub-skills could also be broken down into more granular skills/goals, so there could be more than two layers.

Cycle of Practice and Feedback: it would be important that learners get timely, targeted feedback so that they can realize what they are learning and why they are learning it. One of our ideas for this to happen is to design step-by-step activities.

Ambrose’s Motivation Model: one big challenge is how to make our activity fun and engaging. Undergraduate students do not have time. The key to having our learners actively participate in our learning experience would be to design something that is fun and engaging. We want to leverage Ambrose’s model and the recommended strategies.

Here are some of the visualizations we have developed. We are planning to discuss these with Gautam and Carol later this week:

We consider self-evaluation and goal-setting as short-term goals (or mid-term goals?) under a bigger goal of self-regulated learning.

An integrated model draft 1: we integrated Ambrose’s motivational model with the cycle of practice and feedback model by simply inserting the latter into the former.

An integrated model 2: We also realized that the motivation part and the skill-acquisition part (cycle of practice and feedback) in the first model would not be connected through a sequential relationship. Rather, the two parts should be integrated more so that learners can be kept motivated while practicing important skills.

In this second integrated model, (one idea is that) we hope to use strategies mentioned in Ambrose et al’s reading during the main activity (practice-feedback cycle) so that learners can be kept motivated and engaged. Here are a few examples of the recommended strategies for enhancing expectancies and values mentioned in Ambrose et al’s reading:

• Provide Authentic, Real-World Tasks
• Connect the Material to Students’ Interests
• Identify an Appropriate Level of Challenge
• Provide Early Success Opportunities
• Provide Targeted Feedback

These strategies are essentially those that educators would use during the instruction/learning but they would not use these before instruction/learning takes place (e.g., encouraging learners to participate in the activity). In fact, “Provide Targeted Feedback” is one core component of the Cycle of Practice and Feedback model. We could see using these specific strategies to keep learners engaged. For example, we could give scenario-based (real-world) tasks (e.g., a scenario illustrating a CMU undergrad’s daily life). Another idea may be to begin with a relatively easy task using a worked example to provide early success opportunities. Perhaps the idea may be clearer after we refine the details of the proposed activities.

References:

Walkington, C. A. (2013). Using adaptive learning technologies to personalize instruction to student interests: The impact of relevant contexts on performance and learning outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(4), 932.

04.1.20–04.10.20 — Carol

1.Overview of this week

We started to brainstorm the ideas to prototype based on the frameworks structure last week, and go through the result from our survey together. After the research synthesis, each of us worked on a prototyping idea and proposed 4 ideas internally in the first round, and revise from the feedback to come up with the final 3 idea for our speed dating presentation.

2.Refining the structured flow of goals model

The structure flow of goal. The yellow one is the interaction with our system/service, while the red one is the action beyond our system/service.

After several iterations, we had a more concrete learning experience when applying the Structure Flow of Goal. For the first short term goal, the learners will engage with the system/service by evaluating themselves and setting their goals. After they act on the goal they’ve set, they’ll reflect and check the process of the goal. After the learners finish their short term goal, they’ll keep working on the short term goals to reach their long term goals. By continuously act and reflect on their action, the learners will learn the self-evaluation and goal-setting skills, as well as reach their long term career goals.

3.Research Synthesis

We collected 9 responses from undergraduate student in school of design. And we generate 3 key findings from this survey:

a. Although all of them believe their skills learnt at school is related to their career and most of them already have plans for career, 55.6% of them have thought about changing the major and career.

b. Though think about changing their career, 66.7% of them never visit career service at school. And the main reasons includes now aware of what services does career center provides, or what the career center provided doesn’t fit their need.

c. When being asked about what they need for career planning, 44.4% of them would prefer to learn from the alumni’s experience, especially a more personal sharing.

With the findings, we brought about 3 key insight for ideating our prototypes:

a. Students still have a fix mindset toward their career: The students know generally what kinds of job they can get with the skills they’ve learned at school, but the concept of long-term career planning is vague for them.

b. Students need cross disciplinary skills to advance their career: Based on the answers, 66.7% of the students believe that the cross disciplinary skill is the most important when looking for a job. Providing a way for them to explore and learn other interest could help their career as well as tie back with the life long learning topic.

c. Connecting with Alumni could help the students evaluate themselves: we believe that the reason is because the alumni shares similar background with the students, they’re more welling to reference their experience with the alumni. Also, the stories of people with similar experience could resonate with the students more.

Some key answers which help us synthesize our research

4. Idea Generation

We started to generate prototype ideas based on the insights, and also listed down the skills we are emphasized on in our learning experience prototype. In this phase, we focus more on the form and the contents we want the students to interact with. Therefore, most of them are in a wireframe format. On the right of the picture are some of the reference we are looking at, including different planning interface, pie charts and progress tracking interaction, as well as how to prompt the users to fill in the SMART goal.

Speed Dating

For our speed dating, I will introduced the scenario of the story board and the feedback we received for idea1,2, and 3.

First, let’s started at introducing the key concept. Our overarching concept involves undergraduate students who have a basic understanding of what job they’re going to get with the skills and knowledge they’ve learned at school. However, they still want to explore different areas of interest and plan for their career based on these interests.

Our service system could help them self-evaluate interests, achieve their goals and open their minds to a variety of different opportunities or career paths. We plan to go over 3 different concept directions that could be embedded in our main service idea and would love your feedback on all three.

Storyboard which helps explain the overarching idea.

Idea 1: how might we provide a framework for student to evaluate their career with a more creative and flexible mindset?

Skill: self-evaluation / Knowledge: to realize the importance of using multidisciplinary knowledge for solving complex problems, and exploring other interest areas

1. Scenario

The student heard that her friends is using this platform to explore other areas of interests.She looked up and found that the platform connect her knowledge at school with a broader problem solving statement, she reads the problem her friends created. Since she’s also interested in the topic of making education accessible to all, she pins this problem statement to her board. The platform encourage the student to reflect what knowledge she needs by referencing the learning goals of her peers, and connect her with alumni. The student set the goal to learn with the problem statement in mind, and continuously learn and record the progress on the platform.

2. Highlighted Feedbacks

• How to connect with the Alumni, what would be the incentive for Alumni, and what’s the next step after connecting with alumni?
• Might be better not to rely much on alumni connection. Rather, we should address learner (intrinsic) motivation
• Would love to see more specific info about what kinds of knowledge and skills the system recommends based on the problem selection

Other positive feedback includes:

• I like the idea of pinning different attributes seems “cool” and “fun”.
• Being able to visualize your interests is interesting.
• It exposes me to long term goals which are meaningful that i didn’t even knew i wanted to make

Idea 2: how might we encourage students to be a better independent learner while also helping them gain transferable goal-setting and self-evaluation skills?

Skill: goal-setting/ Knowledge: to use available resources from learners with similar problems

1. Scenario

Students can do a self-assessment survey to figure out the jobs recommended to them. In each recommendation, they can see things like common majors, courses, how to stand out and also read alumni stories that have a similar background as those who got this job. In each alumni story, it will be distributed over 4 cards where they can see the challenges they faced how they overcame it to get the job. After the learners deciding on a job, they will start with goal setting and planning on how to get that career with each goal having several subgoals. For defining each goal and subgoal, they will fill in the information related to it and get feedback from the system based on past data on how it can be defined better based on past learner data. For adding subgoals in a goal the system will also give them feedback on what subgoals other learners with the same goal as you find useful. They will also be paired up with a peer after initial goal-setting who has a similar job and goals as them who they will be meeting monthly. They will get a checklist to make sure they have a constructive discussion.

2. Highlighted Feedbacks

• How to handle failure if students are not able to keep up with what they planned?
• Not sure how can you plan for up and coming fields so what is the motivation is it longer term foundational skills helpful no matter what the job is related to your interests or is it for an immediate job because if it is for a job which will be after 4 years then it might pigeonhole them to this one thing and not let them explore this wider interests.
• Seems overwhelming, competitive, and intimidating
• Privacy concern: are we assuming that students want to share their goals and progress?
• Students might not have time to use a new platform. Can it be integrated with other platforms such as Trello or Asana?
• How will you scaffold the learning experience for students to learn to set goals?

Other positive feedback includes:

• If you can help me break my long term goals into short term goals and how to reach them it will be helpful.
• I like the first wireframe, especially the common courses, it’s super useful.
• This was my preferred option because it had specific questions.
• I like how users can set their own goals and reflect and connect.

Idea 3: how might we encourage students to explore interests while also helping them gain transferrable self-evaluation skills?

Skill: self-evaluation / Knowledge: to realize the importance of exploring other interest areas

1. Scenario

Learners will first do a self-assessment in which we ask about their “current status” — things such as their interests, job type, industry type. Based on the assessment data, the learner’s “interest map” will be generated, which shows their current interests. Learners can also edit the map to reflect their current status. Each week, learners will receive an email from our system, which briefly shows a career story of one alumnus. The alumnus will be chosen based on the data from the assessment. The alumnus has at least one connection with the learner. If learners are interested in learning more about the introduced alumnus, they can click on the link in the email and visit the portal, which describes the story more in detail — both using texts and visuals. Since merely reading this would not be very meaningful, we have some prompts asking the learner to find similarities and differences between the alumnus and the learner. Through answering the questions, the learner will be able to relate the alumnus’s experiences to themself. Answering the questions will then help the interest map “grow” — the system will add and edit interests while the learner will also be allowed to edit them and draw connections. Learners will repeat #17–19. They will be getting stories from many different alumni, which the system will intentionally choose. For example, the first story could be one that has a strong connection to give an early success opportunity. The connection can gradually become weaker — to encourage learners to open their minds to different possibilities. By engaging with this experience, learners would be able to gain the skill of evaluating their interests, an important component of life-long learning skills.

2. Highlighted Feedbacks

• Could the interest map connect to social connections?
• Seems passive
• Could the Career Journey Map connect with the interest map through a specific node?
• One extension is to not only connect with alumni but use the interest maps to form a network of like minded people in the campus which might serve them well.
• One user prefers doing it on the platform because at that time that is their main goal of engagement and will most likely ignore or get annoyed from the emails. One prefers doing it on the email as she will likely forget but like the idea of getting emails which might engage her again if initially she got disengaged for some reason.

Other positive feedback includes:

• The interest map can be an interesting feedback/visual form.
• This idea seems most developed because it’s ease of use, straight forward, self-contain, singular and tailor
• Liked the Alumni Journey Map — Could the users also develop their own journey map over time.
• Seems fun — (From Nick, an undergraduate student)
• Like the graphical interests map based on interaction with the system which might map some unconscious decisions that you didn’t even know you liked or wanted to pursue. It feels a lot less effort even though you can do self evaluation initially you can develop over time if your perceived goals are your actual goals.

04.11.20–04.18.20 — Gautam

Seeing that all our ideas got some positive and negative feedback we decided to make the prototype on a new idea on the basis of what we have learned in our speed dating session, survey data collection, and learning theories. Gautam made this affinity diagram so that we can try to incorporate as many insights as possible and try to address as many problems as we can in the solution. Keeping in mind that the main problem we have is students having a lot of things to do so we don’t want to add on their time and main insight as providing a way for them to explore and learn other interest which can help their career as well but importantly tying it back to the lifelong learning topic.

Affinity Diagram

Based on the affinity we came up with a general flow for our prototype: The students will download our app then finish a self assessment which will generate an initial interest map. Then the students can go through the alumni stories marking down things of interest which will in turn grow their interest map which will recommend more alumni stories similar to what they like but each one offering new perspectives for the students to reflect on and add to their interest map if it resonates. By clicking in the interest map they can explore different places outside their classes they can engage in on-campus, off-campus either online or in Pittsburgh.

Initial wireframe screenshots:

In the self-assessment prototype, we want to ask personal interest of the users as well as their academic interest. For the flexibility of exploring their interests, we provide input box for them to key in, but the users can still choose from the option belows the input box.

After the learners finish the self-assessment survey, they’ll reach the interest map page at the left of the slide. Each circle represents an interest, when they click into the circle, they’ll see the place we encourage them to engage with, the knowledge they might find interesting, and alumni with the same interest. The learners will receive weekly email of the alumni story to encourage them to take action to explore. After the users graduate, we planned to send them the notification at working university to help re-assess their interest to grow continuously.

For the alumni stories we want to make it as engaging as possible so we tried to get inspiration from a variety of sources. We tried to design it in a way so that it looks like that students are going through an instagram story or spotify year round stats. In the last page they can reflect on what parts of the story inspired them which will help in their interest map growing out. The information we are looking from the alumni are:

1. Basic Info like name, year of graduation, program, image.
2. Career History with position title, company and year.
3. If they can give one advice to the students right now in CMU.
4. Top 3 skills they find useful. One course in their program that they liked the most and one course outside their program that they liked the most.
5. Q & A prompting them to reflect on SDL/lifelong learning skills
   “What do you wish you knew or had done as a student at CMU?”
   “What will differentiate you from every other person having doing same work as you in your field? What unique viewpoint do you have?”
   “What do you enjoy most and least about the work that you do and why?”

We know that filling out form is kind of tedious so we are exploring alternatives for various ways or resources through which we can build out these stories.

Learning Theories on which our app is based

This is the third model which we combined on the last two models proposed earlier combining the motivation part so that we are thinking of motivating learners both the times when entering the learning process and during the learning process.

Outcome expectancy: Learners’ self-efficacy (the feeling that they can do things) level may be low — our activity is nothing difficult, we don’t ask to do many things

Intrinsic and attainment values: learners may be satisfied from doing the task itself, and also by seeing the outcome (a growing interest map)

Instrumental value: learn about alumni’s journeys and career planning

The cycle of practice and feedback: Learners will be prompted (weekly?) to engage with alumni stories and with prepared questions. Each task is designed so that learners can see the outcome with a minimum effort (~20 min)

Practice — learners will practice the skill of evaluating their own interests (which is an essential lifelong learning skill)

Observed performance — we give learners several small questions/activities to help them engage with the content

Targeted feedback — each time learners complete the task, they will see their interest map “growing”

We integrate some engagement strategies:

1. Memory: visualizing outcomes in the form of interest map
2. Attention: use of their habits (e.g., email notification), recommendations, alumni engagement
3. Motivation: familiar context (career readiness/planning), real-world task (based on real stories), provide early success opportunities (start with alumni who are more “close”, gradually make the connection “weaker”)

By continuously engaging with the task, learners will learn the skill, and the importance of evaluating and exploring their own interests (that they didn’t know before) — they will understand how to compare themselves with others and how to find new interests.

Testing Methods that we are exploring:

• Think-aloud + semi-structured interviews
• Compare-and-contrast strategy (Having multiple prototypes that differ in core aspects of our design would help learners notice and speak about the difference)
• Semantic differential method (if we get more than 3 or 5 participants)

Critical feedback we got from our presentation:

• The idea of story collecting is fascinating. I wonder if this could be leveraged as a benefit for the storytellers — perhaps there is a value exchange if this learning experience includes some form of workshopping to help alumni learn how to tell their own story concisely. This kind of soft skill comes in handy for things like jobs or media interviews.
• Unsure how the interest bubbles link to the classes enjoyed?
• Courses could be tricky because they change pretty often (for alumni) — maybe which skills that they found most valuable that they learnt at CMU, not applicable now.
• If nothing inspired me from Ted’s story how do I show that? Maybe Ted isn’t right for me — gives chance to learn more about them -> ‘none’ option. Inspiring vs interest is different
• How do they add interests? Is that through the alumni stories? Can they see interests in any other way?
• I think it would be interesting if- on the subject of incentivizing alumni contribution- alumni could build connections with promising students in some ways as a conduit for recruiting. Handshake integration?
• Thinking about the ecosystem and how stakeholders can be “rewarded” for participating. Could alumni also keep wanting to learn and network? Can this be useful beyond the transition moment?
• I’m also curious about how to motivate or invite alumni to register in this platform? What would be the incentives or gain by sharing these stories? I was doing a similar project with yours, so we’ve thought about how to let alumni got access to other senior professionals or increase their recognition within the industry. I read an article written by a google pm talking about skill exchange — professionals provide their suggestions while students can pay efforts to do something for them, (ex. help with editing videos) but it’s in Chinese. I would love to share if you wanna take a look at it.
• For Alumni Stories — could you link to LinkedIn so they don’t have to fill it in manually (i have had a lot of jobs, so it’s a pain). Do you imagine creating the profile from the Google Form? or is there a step in between?
• I could imagine it also be useful to provide the learner with a description of WHY you are asking those questions. What do they afford you, as the maker, or them, as the learner? The same goes for the alumni questionnaire. How can you make transparent the reasons why you’re asking the questions and how it may help them too? How might self-reflection be useful for them too? Your steps are very logical and well-grounded throughout. I just think you can improve the transparency of the relevance of those steps for the learners. This is the WHY?.
• I’m curious to see the actual structure of the testing and questions you plan to ask. I want to just further emphasize the importance and value of being explicit about the potential value of your project for everyone involved.

04.19.20–04.27.20 — Anna

The last week was a busy one for our team as we worked towards flushing out our screens and scenarios in Figma to test with our classmates on Thursday 04.24.20.

In preparation for our testing session, we developed different scenarios for the self-assessment, interest map, and alumni stories that to test specific form and language variations.

Open-ended version

Version with recommendations

Interest map form variations

Interest map — Options for engagement. Alumni Stories vs. Student Stories and Alumni Stories

End of Alumni Story options.

In addition to the tests, we developed we also designed some variations of some different branding directions and color schemes for our service, which we have decided to call Intersect.

Unfortunately, while we conducted our testing sessions we ran into some challenges receiving feedback on all the elements of our slide deck. Most specifically the Alumni Stories and Branding Session.

However, even though we weren’t able to receive feedback from each section equally we received some really strong feedback and were also able to conduct a quick poll on the color schemes in Slack after class.

With the feedback, we received from our peers we each individually added our insights to a spreadsheet that corresponded with the questions we had decided to ask. After adding all of our insights we synthesized key themes or points that stood out to us as a group.

This method proved to be effective as we moved on to refining our wireframes in preparation for Tuesday’s class. Some of the key insights that stood out to us included.

• Many individuals preferred a combination of being able to input their own answers as well as choose from pre-populated recommendations.
• Many individuals preferred the cluster format of the interest map without the percentages.
• There needed to be additional thought considerations involved in the communication and hierarchy of the different interests represented on the interest map.
• The language and tone of the content in our service needs to be consistent, engaging, and representative of developing lifelong learning skills.

Since Thursday and after our synthesis of insights we have been working on refining the flow and representation of our UI to reflect the feedback we received. Tomorrow we are hoping to receive some more specific feedback from Stacie on the content, tone, and branding reflected in our updates.

04.28.20–05.08.20— Anna

Over the last two weeks leading up to our final presentation, we worked diligently on refining our final prototype, finalizing and recording our presentation, and putting together our final case study which you can review here.

Intersect — Case Study

This past Tuesday, May 5 we had the opportunity to also test our final prototypes with our peers and community members via a virtual Zoom Science Fair. In this last round of testing, we conducted a survey and analysis of our final design; final insights and reflections can be reviewed in our final case study!

A big thank you and shout out to Stacie Rohrbach our instructor, our peers, our interviewees, our user testers, and survey participants!

Thanks for following along!

— Team Lifelong Learning aka Team Intersect