COURSEe
Empowering First-Time College Instructors to Design and Prep for Their Courses
2023
COURSEE is an innovative web-based design tool aimed at assisting first-time college instructors in the process of designing, preparing, and planning for their initial courses. This comprehensive platform combines user experience (UX) principles with educational theories to streamline the course creation process. The primary focus of COURSEE is to help instructors develop course outlines, schedules, assignments, and syllabi while integrating teaching theory, specifically Bloom's Taxonomy.
Feel free to experience the prototype here.
COURSEE's intuitive and user-friendly interface ensures that instructors can effortlessly navigate the tool, even if they have limited technical expertise. The design of the platform caters specifically to desktop usage, as the process of course preparation is typically performed in a desktop setting. The website's responsive design guarantees a seamless experience across various screen sizes and resolutions.
By combining cutting-edge UX design principles, educational theory, and seamless integration with existing systems, COURSEE empowers first-time college instructors to design and prepare their courses with confidence and efficiency. With its emphasis on user experience and comprehensive feature set, COURSEE is poised to become an invaluable tool in the arsenal of educators and institutions dedicated to fostering exceptional learning environments.
KEY FEATURES
SYLLABUS BUILDER
The syllabus builder simplifies the process of developing a well-structured and informative course syllabus. Instructors can customize the syllabus with essential information, course policies, learning objectives, and required resources. The process is broken down into digestible forms making the task of collecting and organizing information easy for the user!
Course Outline and Schedule Builder
COURSEE provides a guided process for instructors to create comprehensive course outlines and schedules, ensuring proper sequencing and organization of content. Developing schedules is one of the most challenging tasks of planning a course. The Schedule Builder uses the outline to develop a comprehensive schedule including daily class agenda with suggested reading and assignments. Users can edit the schedule in real time to make adjustments as needed.
Bloom's Taxonomy Integration
The platform incorporates Bloom's Taxonomy, a widely recognized teaching theory, to guide instructors in structuring their course materials and assessments, fostering higher-order thinking and meaningful learning experiences.
Assignment Building Tool
COURSEE offers a dedicated tool for designing and managing course assignments. Instructors can easily create assignments, set deadlines, and define grading criteria.
LMS Integration
COURSEE seamlessly integrates with popular Learning Management Systems, allowing for the easy transfer and management of course materials, grades, and student information.
Educational Blog
COURSEE features an educational blog section where instructors can access articles, tutorials, and guides related to teaching philosophy, skills, techniques for the classroom, and navigating academia. This blog not only serves to educate users but also acts as a valuable SEO tool to attract new users to the site.
Motivating Moments
COURSEE wants to make the task of course prep as fun and easy as possible. In order to motivate users, a celebratory page will pop at certain points of the process.
PROCESS
NEED FINDING
It all began with my own experiences. I teach product design at the University of Colorado Boulder. When I started teaching, I had not a single idea of how to teach. I was lucky to have a colleague allow me to use her course design my first semester. When it was time to make my own course the following semester, I searched for any resources online to help but came up empty. I dug into my old computer to find syllabi from similar courses I took in undergrad and grad school to help guide me and managed to cobble together a course. It would suffice, but I did not feel confident in my work.
I later learned that this is not an individual experience at all. All of my colleagues felt overwhelmed and ill prepared to design their first course. College professors are experts in their field of knowledge, but often have barely any formal knowledge of teaching. My program leadership was constantly working towards a system to help onboard new faculty and adjunct instructors, but never seemed to develop a strong long term plan. The university has also recognized this issue, as I was paid by my the university to take a course in designing courses offered by the university. Clearly, there is a systemic issue in the university setting with under prepared teachers.
This led to the idea for COURSEE.
INTERVIEWS AND RESEARCH
I asked myself how I could provide new College instructors with a tool that would teach them how to design and prepare a course as easily as possible. I interviewed my colleagues to learn about their experiences as first time college instructors. I asked about the features they would want to see and the control they would want to have in addition to the control they would love to relinquish. I studied Blooms Taxonomy and reviewed the content from my course design class. I searched online for resources or tools for college level course design and only found articles and blog posts.
Then, I began to prototype.
PROTOTYPE + TEST
I started with a basic site outline and moved to hand drawn wireframes.
As soon as I felt ready I moved over to FIGMA to create digital wireframes.
Throughout this part of the process, I met regularly with a UX designer mentor to get professional feedback and learn how to improve my work. Once we agreed that the digital wireframes were 95% finished, I brought it to my colleagues to have them offer input and feedback. I took all the feedback I received and moved towards stylizing the site.
STYLE
Next step was to create a style guide. I am a playful person and I wanted to create a playful design. I find that a lot of academia takes itself a bit too seriously and my goal was for this site to be a space where new comers can feel safe and welcomed. I decided to take inspiration from primary colors as they are the building blocks of color, and this site is the building blocks of a course. I picked a display font inspired by varsity letters to indicate to users that this is for a college setting.
From here I applied the style guide to the digital wireframes across each page.
PROTOTYPE + TEsT PART TWO
Finally, I used Figma’s prototype tool to create a working prototype. Please feel free to review the working prototype here.
I shared this link with my colleagues and observed while they navigated the site. I noted a few points where they were not sure what to do next and adjusted those areas to be more explicit. I took their feedback for features the wished they saw, features they felt were redundant, and features they felt needed to change. I adjusted the site accordingly.
THE FUTURE OF COURSEE
The platform caters to both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) models. Individual instructors can engage directly with the service to create and refine their course materials. Additionally, universities and educational institutions can adopt COURSEE as a faculty support tool, providing it to their instructors to enhance course preparation. This B2B integration allows universities to standardize their course design process while empowering their faculty with a powerful, user-centric tool.
COURSEE was designed right before ChatGPT was released. Several of my colleagues have mentioned using ChatGPT to organize a lecture or write an assignment. If I continue to work on this project, I would like integrate AI on a larger scale (beyond the schedule) across the site.
I know that COURSEE would have been a huge help to me in my first years of teaching, and could help me continue to develop course materials. I hope to learn how to develop this product further.