The Education Hub

DES100 GROUP PROJECT

Eduspace
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Eduspace is resource sharing platform which allows teachers and educational researchers to create share and discover educational content. It aims to bridge the gap between educational research and teaching practice, and foster collaborative innovation.

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PROCESS
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Project Brief

Identify a social innovation case study and find opportunities to improve it

Chosen Case Study:
The Education Hub, a New Zealand-based non-profit organisation committed to bridging the gap between research and education. The Education Hub primarily runs digitally through its website and has three main initiatives:
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1. Capture and share research evidence
2. Support teachers to engage with research evidence
3. Facilitate teacher-led innovation and inspire debate

System Map of The Education Hub

The Problem and the
Opportunity
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One of the problems we identified was the limited capacity for teacher involvement on the web platform. As shown on the diagram on the bottom left, the information flow is primarily one-dimensional, with a narrow window for teacher input. Teachers can suggest topics, however, all resource material is curated by the EdHub team.
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We aimed to tackle this problem by lowering the barriers for teacher/researcher involvement. We aimed to create an additional space where teachers and researchers can actively engage in discussion and share their learnings and innovations. In doing so, this creates an opportunity to build an educational community, and encourage a synergetic relationship between educational research and practice, as shown in the diagram on the bottom right. By doing so, we aimed to improve The Education Hub’s performance on their two initiatives of engaging teachers with evidence, and facilitating teacher-led innovation.
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Solution Breakdown

We designed a Website Extension (and a corresponding app) for The Education Hub called "Eduspace."

The Idea Network consists of a few key components, including an open discussion space, a lesson plan "Pinterest", and a project creation tab. The space will be open source, to encourage the sharing, implementation, and evolution of new teaching pedagogies. It allows teachers to find further motivation to improve their teaching practice and find a greater purpose in work by contributing to better education for everyone.
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We have decided to create both a website and an app (with similar properties to the website), to increase the accessibility and ease of use. For example, capturing and posting videos can be done easier through the app, and the idea boards will be more efficient when using the website. Everyone in my group brainstormed off this original concept, as shown on the Miro Board:
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Narrowing Down the Options

Since we had so many overflowing ideas, there were clashes between our concepts. Ultimately, we decided to gather around a table and use paper prototyping to resolve this. This method allowed us to raise questions and exchange thoughts more collaboratively and constantly. Figuring out the functional aspects was the most challenging part of this project, as we had many issues and considerations to take into account. This included the potential problem of the app being overwhelming for teachers (who are of an older age demographic), due to the many features we wanted to include. As a result, we had to reduce the app to its essential parts, and really focus on our main objectives.

Concept Gaps

With any new system, new problems and gaps will continue to arise; and we had headaches putting everything together, because creating an educators' "social media platform" comes with many complications. Listed below are the main issues we had identified with our concept - and how we intended to solve them.

Development phase

As the technical lead of my team, I led the app/website prototyping. Below are two diagrams representing the navigational flow for the app and the website. Our group of four proceeded to split into two teams, each focusing on a different prototype.

Final Product

Introducing EDUSPACE! We decided to make the website extension in the style of a Web app that can also be accessed from the desktop. This allows to personalise the educator's experience. Through looking and successful precedents, we realised that one of the important features of this web-app would be the categorisation of data. We want teachers to be able to find the specific information they need because there may be a plethora of posts and discussions to browse through. As a result, you will see that we have added filters and category "spaces" to the bundles and discussion spaces. This contributes to the development of closer-knit teaching communities.