Crafting the 360° Learning Experience for Online Professional Courses
Learning Environment & Managing System (LEMS)
2017 - 2018
Learning Environment
Course Managing Module
Quick Links:
What is a 360° learning experience?
The LEMS is a platform to learn professional courses with all learning modes and components. The platform offers three modes of learning as a 360-degree learning concept :
1. Self-paced learning
Videos, Quizzes, Community learning, etc.
2. Live virtual classroom learning
Instructor led live online classes
3. Hands-on learning
Projects, Labs, Tests, etc.
Project Objectives
The umbrella objective was to make our customers more satisfied and reduce the company’s effort in customer support by enhancing the platform capability and launching the blended learning methodology with the aim of achieving high-level learner engagement.
To enhance the platform's user experience, several sets of features and modules needed to be designed and redesigned for better usability and value propositions. Some of them are as follows:
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Restructure & redesign the TOC (Table of Content) for a blended learning experience
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Registration workflow for Instructor-Led Online Classes
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Redesign the dashboard for Master Program as a micro-degree learning path
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Course update feature for corporate learners
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Automate the exam-booking feature for B2C customers.
Design Process
As a team, we were on a mission to do continuous improvement every quarter towards the set goals. Started with understanding the objectives and the problems, conducted user research, designed & delivered the solutions to dev, then validated the design and learned about user behaviour, and used that knowledge in next design cycle. This process was followed for multiple cycles of design iterations.
The design process was based on Lean UX that states three steps: Think, Design & Validate. Here’s how that should look if we laid it out on a timeline.
An approach of continuous learning & improvement
Here are the details of the process steps:
Users & Influencers
Primary Users
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Individuals who determine to upskill themselves
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Purchase the courses and programs by themselves
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More focused on getting a certificate than learning
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Weekend learners
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Tend to lose motivation:
Self-funded Learners
(b2c)
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Employees get the course assigned to them by their companies L&D managers.
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Need an extra push to finish the course.
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Weekdays & weekend learners
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Comparatively, have low motivation to learn:
Corporate Learners
(b2b)
Influencers
Course creators could be an external or internal subject experts who would need a flexibility on the platform to divide the course content into some odd sections as per subject delivery concerns.
Course Creators
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Instructors are subject experts who deliver the course in live online/offline sessions.
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Teaching assistants are moderators in LVCs and in different social learning groups.
Instructors & Teaching Assistants
Learner Journey Framework
A user’s learning journey was carved out for different personas to understand the areas to focus upon. Below, we have a b2c learner’s journey framework which is typically broken into four major steps.
Ryan is working with a business consulting organisation and has gone through realisation to skill-up himself for taking his career to next level. He chose Data Science with Python course which is offered with Live Virtual Classes.
His goal is to get certified soon so that he can find a Job as a Data Scientist or get the promotion with switching the team in the same organisation.
Knowing Learner’s Behaviour
1. Through testing & analysing the released features:
Collecting the user stats is very important as this data helps in deciding the priorities and design solutions. Following tools & methods were used to evaluate the effectiveness and accessibility of the design, as well as how users interacted with it.
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Platform event analysis
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HotJar click analysis
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AB testing
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Surveys and feedback
HotJar Session Recording
Screenshot of a HotJar Video Recording
The collective data indicated that users are facing difficulty to find the projects.
Understanding the Learning Trends
Biggest apprehensions about online learning:
Screenshot from a survey data
Gained the knowledge of many other important stats like: Average time taken for completion of the course; Avg learning time per week; No. of learners studying multiple courses; etc.
2. Catching up with customer-facing teams
To get updated on learner's pain points and to validate the data received from other resources, I got involved in interactive sessions with some of the customer-facing teams:
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Teaching Assistants (TA) (weekly sessions)
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Enterprise Customer Success Managers (B2B)
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Customer Delight and Support Team
3. User focus group sessions
Focus Group session as a first step of the qualitative user research is carried out with seven learners. It enabled the learners, design and product team to sit together for discussing deep into the issues.
Planning, questionnaire & conclusion
Key Insights
Users who take the self-paced learning mode of the course, tend to focus on getting certified more than learning the course.
Users face difficulty understanding the sequence for the things to do towards finishing the course.
The most common challenge the learners face is finding time in their busy schedules to learn the course. Even managing Live class attendance becomes problematic.
Design Tenets
For crafting a tailor-made experience for LEMS, we set our focus on following UX design principles:
Recommending, not forcing
Need to essentially recommend what to do next after each activity but no need to force to follow. The platform needs to be a natural extension of an individual’s professional learnings.
Cohesive experience
Learners should travel within or outside LEMS as little as possible while performing any learning activity.
Scalability & Modularity
Need to design the platform which can cater to a wide range of professional curriculums made by a variety of content creators across geography, languages, streams, individual ways of teaching, etc.
Wireframes
for conceptualising 360° learning
For crafting a tailor-made experience for LEMS, we set & focused on following UX design principles:
E-learning
Instructor-led live class
Practice assignment
Project with labs
Quiz & Assessment
Course resources
Design of Learning Environment
Watching video content
& interactive course content
Taking notes
during watching the content
Interactive Table of Content
The revised design of TOC solves three different challenges:
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Easy navigation to different levels of course components
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Helping the user to understand and explore the sequence and levels of course modules
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Displaying the status of completion
Live virtual class registration
Learners can choose multiple classes to register at their convenience. Classes for each course keep coming up and learners can choose between weekday classes or only weekends.
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Check attendance status
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Download sessions recording
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Attend current session
After registration learners should be able to do:
Enabling Labs for Projects
Supplied the design for integrating Nuvepro & Doselect labs in LE through iframes.
Design of LEMS Dashboard
The dashboard is designed majorly for the following features:
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Browsing the Courses and programs list
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Progress status in details
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Study planner
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Course updates
Design of course cards
A snippet of study planner pushes the user to follow discipline by tracking study Hrs and displaying the the date to finish
Weakly tasks are suggested as per the planned study hours a week
Master Program as a micro-degree learning path
Master Program is a learning path consisting of multiple courses, projects & many other learning components. A page is designed for MP details to monitor & manage learning progress.
Many More...
Many more features were designed & revisited for LEMS to enhance the learning experience.
Course update feature
Updating any course curriculum when you already have made some learning progress, may lead to a change in your progress status. Because of this, most of the learners used to skip it to upgrade the content. This challenge was tackled beautifully by highlighting the new amendments in TOC and navigating the learners to quickly learn and finish it for levelling up the progress.
Gamifying the group learning
On the community platform of LEMS, I supplied the concepts and the designs for the gamification of the group learning with the aim to engage b2b learners by applying game principles like:
Scores,
Progression,
Competition, etc. towards learning activities.
Request for study extension
Extension feature was designed for the learners to make a request for extending the course duration. The basic challenge was to design it for enabling the user towards finishing the course but should not devalue the importance & competitiveness of the course.
Physical exam booking feature
Some courses from project management and many other categories had a provision of final test /exam from some other authorised organisations. Providing the exam pass to the learners was being handled manually outside the LEMS . The feature is designed to automate the functionality of booking physical and online exam on the platform to save logistic cost and management.
UI Style Guide
Glimpses of solution explorations
Figuring out the best suitable layout
Regrouping the information
Concept of LEMS 3.0
Concept for course competition criteria
Impact
80%
Reduction in a turn-around time of receiving exam voucher
The exam booking feature automated the process where online exam booking happens instantly.
18%
Improvement in NPS rating
(Measured in: Jan 2018 to Mar 2018)
35%
Improvement in learners engagement
After the release of new TOC design for Blended Learning Exp, the avg. study hours per week increased by 27% and number of avg sessions per week were increased by 32%. It indicated a better engagement of learners on the platform.
55%
Reduction in support tickets
One of the KPIs was a reduction in support tickets raised per week due to find-ability and other usability issues. This was achieved beautifully. (Measured between Apr 2017 to Jun 2018)
30%
Increment in certification of self-funded learners
New design for lab integration and LVC registrations brought a huge impact on the stats of project submissions and completion of the course.
My Roles
I led all design activities at each step of the process along with managing a team of fellow designers at the client’s place. I have been hands-on doing user research, reaching out to different internal teams regularly to be updated on users data, creating solution wireframes, putting design rationales and presenting the design to stakeholders, etc.
I crafted visual communication and UI style guidelines for LEMS platform with a focus on info hierarchy, intuitiveness, easy use and aesthetically pleasing interface.
I have been responsible for reviewing the dev-outcome to ensure the pixel-perfect conversion of the proposed design.
Thank you for your time.