Overview
Async Classroom is a web app that allows students to watch recorded lectures as a group, with chat features and scheduling, fostering a classroom environment for international students unable to attend live during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Key actions
- Conducted contextual inquiries and created storyboards to find and understand user needs.
- Iterated through multiple User-Centered Design loops to improve the final design solution.
- Performed user interviews to evaluate effectiveness of design solution.
- Explored multiple design "hills" and created multiple lo-fi prototypes using Basalmiq.
- Created mid-fi prototype using Figma for the final design solution.
Motivation
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of my international student friends were forced to return to their home countries. As school transitioned to an online format, many of them were now forced to adapt to a new schedule dependent on a location on the opposite side of the globe, taking classes late at night or waking up extremely early to attend lectures, leading to significant stress and exhaustion. I decided to design something that would make their lives easier.
Design Process
Designing for this problem was difficult because these challenges have not been faced before. The idea of taking online classes at night has never been something possible or something people were willing to do before the virus. Thus, there is not a lot of research on the effects of online learning when living in another time zone. Hence, there aren’t many prior examples of attempts to solve this problem that one can learn from or be inspired by, and effectiveness of solutions may not easily be predicted.
Contextual Inquiry
I began the design process by performing contextual inquires on my friends who were attending online class in another time zone, and observed how they went about attending/watching lectures and what their daily schedules looked like.
Interviewee 1 attends Columbia University SEAS majoring in Applied Math. She lives in China Standard Time (CST), and Columbia is in in EST. We zoom called at around 10:30am CST and I observed that she seemed very tired.
The process she takes to watch video lectures is a s follows: she went to address bar and typed Courseworks which autocompleted to the Columbia Courseworks page. She then clicked on the courses tab on the sidebar which expanded, and then clicked on the link to the class Courseworks page. She had to move cursor around a bit to find the menu for the “zoom class sessions” link. I have noticed that the location of this link on the menu varies a lot between classes. At this page, the zoom page was showing a loading page with “Cookies are blocked or not supported by your browser. If you cannot launch LTI pro please Click here”, and she clicked on the “Click here” link. It took a few seconds for the zoom page to load. She then had to click on the tab “Cloud Recordings” to see the recordings. She then had to click on a session link to see the available files, and she then had to choose between the audio only file or the video file. This was a significant amount of clicks just to watch a course video. Also, I noticed that the date and times on the page was all in EST.
During the interview phase, she told me she no longer takes any synchronous courses apart from one that requires it. She had tried to adjust her sleep schedule to match EST times but it was too tiring. Now she mainly watches recorded lectures and usually all in a row. She said she does not have a set schedule for watching recorded lectures. She was also behind on watching lectures at the time of interview and was seeking a leave of absence. When asked about additional problems she faced, she told me that working with friends used to be something she does often. Now due to time zones she talks to her friends less. She also said that studying used to be more fun due to interactions with friends, and now she spends less time studying. Also, she also finds it hard to meet her friends who are also taking online classes and in the same time zone due to the fact that each person has a different class schedule and organizes their personal schedule differently. Further she said that attending live classes was helpful for keeping track of work because in class other students may talk about upcoming work and hence, she would be reminded of it. She says that she keeps track of a todo list on her phone with the default iPhone todo list app. She also said that a lot of stress comes from needing to keep track of what work to do. She wants to be able to not care about keeping track of those things and simply focus on doing the work itself.
During the interview, a particular interesting moment was about the reasons for why she was more stressed. She said a possibility is daylight and its role on human physiology. Light suppresses melatonin production which makes it easier to stay awake. Another interesting moment was that she told me that she used to eat with her family, but when she shifted her schedule for classes, she was no longer able to do so and she said she felt isolated.
Interviewee 2 is attending Arizona State University while living in Pennsylvania. He is living in a time zone that is 3 hours ahead, a relatively small time zone difference. He is a mechanical engineering major.
During the observation, he showed me how he accessed each of his courses. For the synchronous courses, he went to the ASU portal, which had a button for “Attend via Sync”. He also said he could access those links via Courseworks, but due to that needing more clicks to get to the links, he always uses the ASU portal button. For the asynchronous courses, there was a dedicated website for that course with assignments and videos. To access this website, he used the address bar and the autocomplete feature.
For keeping track of office hours, he uses Google calendar and inputs events manually. He said he did not have too much trouble keeping track of deadlines due to how regular assignments are. However, he has a course that has a bi-weekly deadline and he said he has forgotten about them due to its infrequency.
For work, he says that he usually does work with friends but now due to time zones this time is shortened due to him having to leave early to sleep. To meet friends, he also has to plan in advance and text them.
One interesting moment from this interview was him noting the fact that Arizona uses Mountain Standard Time which does not use daylight savings time, which is unique from the majority of other states in that they do not observe daylight savings time. This makes date and times extra confusing when the time switches. Another interesting moment was how he accessed password protected recorded lectures. He had to copy down password to spotlight manually by typing, since the password is displayed on the button and the text cannot be selected.
From this initial inquiry, I summarized three aspects I could try to solve:
1. The lack of daylight makes it difficult for students who are attending lecture at night to stay awake.
2. Time zones makes it difficult to keep track of deadlines, especially if there is daylight savings time.
3. Different schedules for everyone else in the class causes isolation and a lack of classroom "feeling" or other social aspects that would be present in a live classroom.
To try to solve these problems, I decided to explore various design solutions by storyboarding them out.
Solution 1
The first solution I came up with uses blue light at set times to reduce the student's tiredness when working at night.
The greatest strengths of the first design are that it attempts to help the student change their “mental time zone” to their school’s, hence making work, live classes, and socializing with classmates easier; and also that it attempts to adjust the user’s biological body clock to their schools time zone, hence possibly making the effects of the current time zone’s day night cycle on the user’s body clock less severe.
However, one weakness of this solution is that not all users in different time zones may need or choose to adjust sleep schedule. Another weakness is that the effectiveness of blue light in keeping people awake may need more scientific study, and that the user may not be able to see this blue light all the time (e.g. working away from the computer screen).
Solution 2
The second design solution focuses on the difficulty of students in different time zones to keep track of schedules as well as day night cycles (especially when taking classes in opposite time zones), and having to convert due dates frequently which led to confusion and stress. From my contextual inquiry, I realized that information that students need were scattered in many different places, leading to difficulty in organization and keeping track of tasks.
Interviewee 1 had said that she felt that she had to constantly keep track of what tasks to do next and at what time in each time zone, which she did not have to do previously. Further, other students in physical classes could remind her during casual conversations before or after class (e.g. “Do you know what we have to do for the homework due tomorrow?”) so she doesn’t have to stress about forgetting things. This inspired me to do a similar thing by using browser extensions to remind users about tasks, and to convert time zones automatically.
The strength of the second solution is that it reduces the need of the student to keep track of what they should be doing and instead offload that to something that does the decisions for them. Another strength is that it reduces the mental load caused by having course resources scattered in different websites and location and allows the student to quickly get files and get to submission locations.
However, it is unknown if the student will follow the tasks assigned by the extension, and also the student may have different workflows/course processes and not all of it may apply to the browser extension, hence making some tasks not organized in the extension, and thus it may not be able to take those things into account when telling the user what tasks to do at what time.
To evaluate this design, I decided to lo-fi prototype the design in Basalmiq and show it to my interviewees, as well as other members in my class.
Unfortunately, many people I talked to did not think they would use this design solution. Due to how unusual taking classes in another time zone had been, each student may have adapted differently, and may have different needs. This design solution was too limiting for those users and did not allow user agency in scheduling tasks and actions. Thus, it would be a challenge to make the tool flexible enough for each student to modify to make it useful to them specifically.
Solution 3
From the suggestions of my classmate, I think that I have underestimated the importance of the social aspect of problems faced by my user population. I feel my solution could be adjusted to solve those problems in order to make my design solution more useful to my target population. I conducted two more contextual inquiries. An insight I gathered was that in most of my interviews, users cited the lack of a classroom atmosphere and difficulty in social life as pain points in living as an asynchronous student. Hence, I decided to try to set it as the design problem I would focus on.
A significant difficulty faced by these students is the lack of a class atmosphere due to having to mostly rely on recorded lectures, which does not allow interactions with other students. Therefore, I will be trying to find ways to make asynchronous lecture more socially engaging.
I came up with the idea to create a group watching program to allow students to watch asynchronous lectures together with other classmates with a chatroom akin to zoom, thus allowing a classroom “feel” for students watching lectures from another time zone, and to an extent equalizes the experience of asynchronous online students with the synchronous online students.
This solves the third problem, while also solving the two previous problems -- staying awake when watching lectures at night and forgetting deadlines. Interviewee 1 had said that they often were reminded by others in their class about upcoming deadlines during casual conversation (e.g. "Did you finish the homework due tomorrow yet?"), hence this solution allows students to remind each other about deadlines naturally during conversations. Also, being socially engaged may make students more engaged in the recorded lecture as well, as students in a chat room may help draw attention to things that one may not find when watching alone. There is, however, a risk that the social aspect may act as a distraction.
Solution 3 Comparative Analysis
I decided to perform a Comparative analysis on products with similar functions, and try to see what elements could be adapted to my design solution.
One product with similar functionalities is “Netflix Party”, which allows a group of people to watch videos from Netflix simultaneously from their computers. The video feed is synced between all users so they are all experiencing each moment of the video at the same time, and hence they can discuss each moment with each other as it happens. This solution is good at allowing videos to engage users as a group as the chat feature facilitates conversation around the video in real time, as opposed to each user watching the video on their own and possibly discussing the video at a later time, at which point details may be lost and users may only remember different parts. Hence the chat feature is something I would likely incorporate into my design solution.
Some things that make this solution not work in solving my user problem is that it is limited to certain sites. Netflix party and other similar services limit the videos that can be played down to sites such as YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc., hence it would not be able to play recorded lecture videos easily. Further, Netflix party mostly works as an “impromptu” tool that is generally used irregularly, group watching lecture sessions may have to take place at regular times. Hence in order for my solution to be effective it would need to include a regular scheduling feature and also easily play videos defined by the user.
Another design solution with similar goals is Panopto. This system puts recorded lectures in a easy to access and play format, and so students could easily watch recorded lectures on it. One particularly effective feature is the fact that the speed of the video playback can be adjusted. This is especially important for students who may be short on time. Panopto also keeps track of discussions during live classes and puts it in the Discussion sidebar tab, hence allowing easy access for students.
While Panopto is good at its purpose of playing back recorded lectures, asynchronous students often lack a feeling of “being in class”. Hence, my solution should try to alleviate those feelings by improving on the lecture playback experience.
Prototyping the Final Design
Thus, in Basalmiq, I lo-fi prototyped a web service that connects to Columbia University’s Panopto CVN network and allowed for scheduled group watching sessions of lectures. This prototype will allow for social interaction between students in asynchronous time zones and create a sense of classroom environment even when not attending the live zoom classes. Further, such a system would build atop existing infrastructure and hopefully easy implementation. From user feedback, some students said that this was a solution that they would likely use. Hence, I decided to implement a mid-fi prototype of the design solution in Figma.
To summarize, my final design solution ended up being a group video watching website that allows students to watch recorded lectures with their classmates. These group watching sessions would be scheduled at regular intervals and adjustable by the users. While watching recorded lectures, students in the group watching session will be able to turn on their cameras or chat in a chat box in order to discuss the currently playing lecture materials.
Another benefit is that such group watching sessions will not limit users into groups of the same time zone, but rather allow students in a larger range of time zones to participate together. For example, while people in the Americas are at night, students in Asia, Oceania, Middle East where it is daytime (but not exactly the same time of “day”) could participate in a group watching session.
Such a system could still preserve the benefits of recorded lectures, such as watching as faster playback speeds, rewinding or pausing to take notes, while creating a greater sense of a classroom atmosphere. This solution even benefits people who are in correct time zone, but are pulling an all-nighter watching lectures.
Design Process Post-Mortem
What went well during the project is the amount of feedback I got. I think the feedback from different people helped me think about the project in different ways and provided inspiration for ideas. However, I didn’t feel like I explored enough “hills” for the social aspect, and if I were to undertake this project again I would try to explore more possible solutions and narrow down later. Another thing I would do differently is to interview more people since even though I interviewed 4 people in total, this number isn’t really enough to fully understand the design problem and the usefulness of the final design.