Odeto: Online Class Toolkit
A framework to co-create and organize online design education
Design education is inarguably hands-on. The sudden shift to online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic was unanticipated, and many students would start college education entirely online, for the first time. The accepted behavioural norms that we follow in offline classrooms have been taught to us since childhood. But this is not true for online classes. Since the society that we live in is also fairly new to online classes, and many loopholes tarnish the experience of online design education. In this stressful time, simple tasks such as contacting professors or getting feedback have also become difficult. There would not be an occurrence where a student can shut their video off during an actual class, or make an appointment every time they wish to meet a professor. Such occurrences simply do not happen in real life. This was our primary motivation to design a tool that can establish these “rules” for online classes.
Primary Research
For our primary research, we conducted telephonic interviews with design students. These design students had attended more than two weeks of online classes. The design students interviewed consisted of both campus-based design school students and day scholars. These interviews were conducted with the help of a discussion guide.
Findings
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Day Scholars found the translation of physical classes and discussion timings directly into online timings convenient
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Specific digital tools defined for specific activities by the institute
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Lot of time and energy goes into trying out different platforms
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Time required to do an activity online is almost twice than physically
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Virtual fatigue is real
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Mimicking campus online reduces education life balance
Secondary Research
We started our secondary research by looking into various online Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Moodle, Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams. These LMS provide a common platform for posting announcements, accessing the course content, conducting quizzes and tracking progress of the students. But, they do not address or manage online classes.
We also looked at studies to investigate the effectiveness of online design education although no institute has completely adopted a purely online-based education platform. Fleischmann (2018) points out the advantages of online learning as being flexible and convenient but lacking social interaction and instant feedback, which are crucial to student growth.
Design Brief
Based on the findings from the primary and secondary research review, the final design brief was defined -
“To enable co-creation of a set of protocols, guidelines and best practices to make the experience of online design education convenient for students and faculty both.
This would be done keeping in mind the various touch points we encounter in design education including assignments, project work, coordination and presentation.”
User Persona
Next, we created a user persona based on our interviews and experiences to help us ideate and design,
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Ideation
Next, we created brainstromed a mind map where we listed and grouped the different aspects of online learning.
Content Curation
4 High priority actionable areas were identified in the mind map and we brainstormed different scenarios. Since we identified scenarios of different natures, we grouped them as Protocols, Guidelines and Best Practices. We defined Protocols, Guidelines and Best Practices as:
1. Protocols: These should be mandatory to be followed as a class.
2. Guidelines: These are good to have features as a class.
3. Best Practices: These are things to keep in mind, but need not be followed always.
Implementation
We considered different mediums for the execution of the project such as flashcards, posters, wiki, website, Google Sheet etc. We finally decided to go ahead with a Google Sheet as it was flexible and allowed editable parameters in the form of a drop-down list. It also allowed the framework to be printed and re-contextualised based on each module requirement. It was also the most easily available and accessible format which enables co-creation.
Usability Testing
We designed the final solution iteratively by incorporating feedback from peers and faculty such that it was inclusive and represented the best interests of all stakeholders. We designed to make it modular such that it could be adapted by students and faculty of different design disciplines.
Odeto was deployed and used by four professors from different disciplines (Animation, Interaction Design, Transportation Design) at the IDC School of Design. For recruitment, we sent out a Google form to all the faculty members, and whoever was interested to try it out, could download it. They used it before the autumn semester commenced for the incoming batch. Currently, we await feedback from them.
Final Outcome
The final outcome is explained in the following video.
Future Scope
Since Design Colleges have just started their courses, the validity and evolution of Odeto would be visible only at the end of the semester. We would want to reach out to more Design Colleges in India to evaluate our solution. Based on our feedback, we would also want to make the contents more exhaustive and detailed. Our focus is on academic activities for the time being. We believe that a large part of the education lies outside the classroom and would like to see how Odeto could fit ice-breakers and extra-curricular activities as well. Due to our exposure to the design field and user study of design students, it is reasonable for us to claim the effectiveness of this tool for Design Education. This tool should function for other departments as well, but at the moment we have not extended it for use and review, to other departments. We hope by introducing class roles, responsibilities are equally distributed and virtual fatigue is reduced by negotiating class and on-screen timings. However, we feel this area needs separate exploration as it is an unprecedented problem which has redefined old institutions.
Publication
Divya Padmanabhan, Deepika Tiwari, Jonathan Sawian, Raaghavi S. and Richa Agrawal. Odeto: Online Class Toolkit: A framework to co-create and organize online design education. In Proceedings of IndiaHCI 2020, November 5–8, 2020, Online, India, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3429290.3429303