Designing education around students
At the heart of every education system is the student. However, due to the fact that the buying power in schools resides with those higher up in the hierarchy, products don’t always fully consider the experience of students. In most cases, though, the end user is still the student.
The problem with this is that students don’t always want the same things as others in the hierarchy. For many products, this leads to a lack of engagement as they are not fundamentally built for their users.
At Stairway, we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the user experience for students.
Learning is hard
Learning is challenging. It takes a lot of planning and organisation to sit down and commit to learning something, especially considering how many things are competing for our attention at every moment.
Many of our current tools for learning do little to make this easier. Students are overwhelmed by information and find it hard to know what to focus on.
We believe that this friction in the process of learning prevents people from making the same progress they could if it was removed.
Learning can be made simpler by focusing on the experience
Although learning will always need some self-motivation, through Stairway, we want to make the process of learning as simple as possible for students, so that they can focus on what actually matters. This is something that personal tutors are really good at, by remembering all of your progress, recommending your next moves and keeping you engaged at every step. This takes away the necessity for the student to do this themselves, and is something we aim to emulate.
Creating a platform which can do this involves solving some central problems:
- Maintaining the attention of learners and helping them to focus
- Moving at the right pace for everyone, regardless of their level of experience
- Designing a content curriculum which can support the two points above
I want to talk a little about how we have approached these problems at Stairway over the next two articles. For the rest of this post, I want to focus on the first point, keeping people engaged as they learn.
Constant interaction
One thing we’ve noticed with paper resources and recorded lectures is that it is very difficult to make them interactive. I, and maybe some of you, have a short attention span, and struggle to keep focused on things without lots of effort!
This is also true of students, particularly when they are learning things for the first time. We think that learning is an active process, and students are more engaged when they are participating.
We prioritise interaction at every step of the learning journey. As a result, users take the steps to solving problems themselves and learn by doing, rather than simply learning and reproducing.
This also allows us to understand why a student is going wrong, by creating a constant feedback loop, similar to a personal tutor. Interaction is a two-way process, and we seek to provide as much clarity for students as possible.
Minimal User Interface
Most resources can cause students to feel overwhelmed while using them, and make it difficult to focus on the material.
When we first started designing Stairway, this was something we considered closely. To solve it, we decided to use a system of blocks, containing short bursts of information. This allows content to be digested in small chunks at a pace chosen by the user. We then housed this in a stripped-back interface with minimal distractions, which gives all the attention to the current concept.
Though this is still an early version, we think we have gone some of the way to creating an interface which helps learning!
Getting rewarded for learning ⭐️
We all like to be rewarded for hard work! We wanted to recognise when users make progress with their learning, so we created a system of XP which is awarded as lessons are completed. We think that this acts as an extra bonus when you are learning something new, and acts as a reminder that you are making real progress.
In addition to this, we wanted to recognise when students are committed to continuing their learning. Therefore, we award ‘streaks’ for learning on consecutive days. We think that this helps students to keep accountable to themselves and serve as a reminder to keep going.
Overall, we are super focused on making Stairway a really engaging product to use. In doing this, we hope to make learning more enjoyable and more effective for everyone, and open up opportunities by improving outcomes.
We’ve got many ideas for the future to make our platform more effective, collaborative and enjoyable, which we’ll be sharing over the coming months.
If you want to join us on this journey, then head over to Stairway and sign up to be notified when we launch! 🚀 We are also giving away a free month of our premium subscription to everyone who signs up before we launch.
If Stairway resonates with you, we would love for you to help us get the word out by sharing, tweeting or giving us some claps! Alternatively, you can follow us here on Medium, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. We appreciate it! 🙌
