Our research scope and methods
đź‘ŹTeam SynchronizEd has wrapped up the research phase!
Project Hunt Statement: Through evaluating current for-credit products and identifying user needs in mobile learning, we will design a scalable mobile learning framework by leveraging learner-centered features, personalized techniques and mobile-friendly content strategies to improve Community College students’ learning success.
After three months of work, team Synchronized has finally wrapped up the research phase. In this article, we will give you an overview and recap of all the research that we have conducted.
Research scope
Our research focused on the following goals:
1. Understand intended users and landscape of online learning.
2. Understand how learners are engaging with the current content of MindEdge products.
3. Generate design principles to guide the ideation and design phases.
Research Methods
The research phase can be broken down into evaluative and explorative research.
Evaluative research
We conducted evaluative research to understand MindEdge products.
Cognitive Walkthrough
We conducted Cognitive Walkthrough by asking 5 users that are new to the MindEdge system to complete a set of tasks on the MindEdge For-Credit system and used a set of verbal probing techniques to uncover misconceptions that the students faced because of the design of the interface.
In general, users like the overall structure of the product (chunking the content into digestible modules); however, there are some issues such as nonintuitive interface design and non clear section titles that hinder user experience.
By evaluating the learnability and usability of the system, we generated design implications for our mobile framework design. We will follow these principles as we move on to the design phase.
Log Data Analysis
We received a dataset consisting of around 1000 MindEdge students’ completion rate, test scores and time spent on each module and conducted quantitative data analysis with it.
Through analyzing these data, we aimed at understanding how different variables are affecting test scores and final completion rate.
This helped us find opportunities for intervention to enable learners to achieve a higher completion rate and better learning.
E-learning principles evaluations
We analyzed MindEdge’s For-Credit courses using principles from Clark and Mayer’s E-learning and the science of instruction.
We highlighted some notable principles that we think can be incorporated into our mobile design.
Exploratory research
We conducted evaluative research to understand potential users and uncover their needs.
Literature review
We reviewed 31 academic papers in the domain of adult learner, mobile learning, and adaptivity to better understand our target users and the online learning space. From this literature, we synthesized insights and design principles to guide our ideation phase.
Competitive Analysis
We reviewed 13 mobile products to extract common features they have, elicited key insights and synthesized the results into a feature matrix.
These common features can serve as a design guide for the ideation and design phase.
Interviews
We conducted interviews with 5 students, 6 instructors, 2 faculty members, 2 administrators, and 4 MindEdge employees. We want our eventual product to fit the use cases for our stakeholders, and these interviews suggested important features that we need to keep in mind in our design.
With our interviews, we aimed to identify gaps and opportunities facing students, instructors, and school administrators in the space of online learning. After these gaps were identified, we evaluated these insights with the guidelines and principles within our hunt statement and scholarly research.
We conducted several working sessions to interpret what we got from the interviews and used affinity diagrams to synthesize our findings. From there, we generated 10 key insights that can guide our ideation.
What’s next
Moving on, we will consolidate all the research insights to generate synthesis models and personas that will facilitate our ideation process.
