Casestudy:
InfoCademy
What's more stressful than having trouble learning in school? Being bored about it.
InfoCademy is a site that makes art history more accessible through pop culture, and makes the information stick.
Role:
Project Manager
Researcher
Web Designer
UX Designer
Team:
Self-Directed
Clients:
Christopher Newport University (potential)
University students (potential)
Professors (potential)
Time:
Spring 2023
(2 eight-week sprints)
Design Challenge!
As I previously focused mainly on app design, switching to web design made me change my thinking of page layouts, information architecture, and flows.
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What Was the Agenda?
1
Story & Introduction
2
Problem
3
Research & Development
4
Next Steps
1. Story & Introduction
Sarah Student has been struggling at Local University in her art history classes because she's having trouble focusing, the professor is dry, and there's too much to memorize. InfoCademy gives her hope again, and she's actually excited to use it in her classes' future units at LU.
So why am I qualified to research and solve problems like Sarah has? Well, I used to be in Sarah's shoes. As an art historian, like Sarah, I have experienced many of the problems mentioned in the video.
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Because I struggled through the pain points, I wanted to come up with a way to help other students like me who wanted to learn but were encountering preventable roadblocks along the way.
2. Problem
Problem Statement
For years, students have had issues remembering everything they have learned in their classes. Even in higher education, students are faced with large amounts of information to learn. This higher cognitive load causes challenges to effective learning such as comprehension, retention, and paying attention. Even with long hours of studying and cramming, sometimes the information just does not stick. Students need other methods than the ‘traditional’ model of teaching to help them.
How might we make art history more easily understood & accessible for college students?
Pain Points
Being overwhelmed by the information.
Solution: Make information more easily digestible by breaking it into smaller chunks.
Information not holding the students' attention.
Solution: Use interesting and fun content to hold the students' attention.
Problems comprehending the information.
Solution: Use plain language and bulleted/outlined information to teach lessons.
Students not seeing information as relative to their lives, degrees, and jobs.
Solution: Express that art history is not just one field, and use pop culture to make the information relevant to several fields such as biology, politics, theology, social sciences, etc.
3. Research & Development
Timeline Milestones
Original Assumptions
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Memes are readily understood by most (memes are different for everyone due to different languages, countries, and cultures).
Confirmed! Memes can be edited and translated to be accessible and understood globally.​
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Students would have access to the Internet (I understand that there can be inequity in Internet access, so I have to keep this in mind).
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Plausible! For students with limited Internet access or little data, keeping a 'simple' version of the site allows for more access for these students. ​
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There are not many sites like the one I have in mind.
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Confirmed! After doing a competitive analysis, there were no other sites trying to teach using pop culture.
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There would be researchers and scholars that would want their research on the site.
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Plausible! Due to the small sample I received from one professor and positive responses from two other professors, I cannot say this is definitively confirmed. I would need a larger sample size of researchers and scholars.
Unrealized Assumptions
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I had assumed students knew how to analyze art.
I thought that students already learned how to do this in their high school experiences, but that was me not keeping in mind that everyone has had a different education and that not all places teach the same thing,​
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I had assumed students knew how to properly read textbooks.
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After Covid, and after speaking with several professors on this topic, I came to the realization that education has suffered due to just trying to push students to graduate. Many students are lacking the foundations that students pre-Covid have such as reading a textbook with purpose, analyzing as they are reading it, and knowing how to pick out important information from what they read. ​
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I had assumed students knew how to study and memorize.
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Similar to the previous assumption, Covid has negatively affected education. Students don't have the core education skills they need in their college years. They do not know how to study: they do not know how to use memorization tricks to help themselves, do not know how to pick out important information or patterns, and do not know how to actively learn and make connections as they study.
Many students' schools were focused on passing them just to get them to graduate in addition to simply teaching them to take standardized tests.
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I had assumed students could connect to the material more easily than I had thought.
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Due to my own bias as an art historian, I should have realized that not all students share the same passion for art history as I do.
Survey Responses
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I was surprised to see there were a large number of students (46%) saying they would not take another art history class.
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It was encouraging to see that 50% said maybe. This was towards the beginning of the semester, so learning more from their class may have changed their answer.
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Of all 52 responses, 36 answers had to do with memorization.
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Struggling with memorization increases the cognitive load on the student.
4. Next Steps
Forums
Forums so users may talk with each other, offer advice, and study.
Playlists
The ability to make playlists so users may group whatever videos, memes, and games together that they want.
Bibliography
A bibliography section that can be searched by specifications such as author and subject.
Games & AR
A games and augmented reality (AR) section so users may interact with information and make fun and engaging connections with what they learn.