digital learning
during a pandemic

SECTOR
Education

PARTNER
artop Institut, Bianca Franz, Maja Cerning, Pia Braun

ROLE
UX Researcher

TOOLS
Contextual Inquiry after Karen Holtzblatt

back story: let's tell it like it was; the end of our education at the artop institute coincided with the beginning of the global pandemic. the original plan to ask pub owners and event oganisers about their registration of music licenses in the corresponding portal suddenly felt very wrong and irrelevant.

in the new 100% remote situation, we met between zoom calls, bridging help forms, homeschooling sessions and virtual wine tastings, threw our original topic out the window and decided that our final project should be a contemporary documentation and analysis of the user group whose experience at that time, apart from short-term praise in the headlines, remained completely unnoticed: the teachers.

we did a mini-workshop to find our central research question:

how do teachers get knowledge about the actual and individual knowledge of the students during th lockdown?

PHASE 1: Recruiting

once we had our research question, we narrowed down our user group. We assumed that students in grades 4 to 6 are on the cusp of digital independence, so we focused on teachers in grades 4 to 6 across all types of schools.

then we started recruiting the probands. with a screening questionnaire, we filtered the teachers who were relevant to our research question. biggest learning: teachers are very sensitive about privacy and were worried about being put in a bad light in this context.

PHASE 2: Interview Guide

in the meantime, we worked to gain a common understanding of the issue. we assumed that the biggest pain point was the new situation of asynchronous communication.

also we created the interview guide. we focused on workday during lockdown, technical requirements, actual teaching and experiences with the new way of communicating.

PHASE 3: Conducting Interviews

we conducted 4 remote interviews of 60 minutes each.
the participants gave us a tour of their daily work and told us more about the context of their teaching.

our first quick learning was that every teacher has to design digital learning individually and the participants were very grateful to have someone just listen to them for a change.

PHASE 4: Interpretation Sessions

via miro and zoom, we conducted interpretation sessions after each interview to consolidate contextual information.

each

60min interview

resulted in

2h

interpretation session

in total:

390
Post its

PHASE 5: Affinity Diagram

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CONCLUSION

as a conclusion of our contextual inquiry we drew 5 hypotheses, which we see as fields of action for potential social design:

Hypothesis 1

teachers prioritise the curriculum responsibilit over the pedagogical
responsibility.

Hypothesis 2

there is zero investment in the digital transformation of the teaching profession.

Hypothesis 3

the school headmaster does not understand her- or himself as a leader.

Hypothesis 4

the ministry of education is not enabled to react to crises.

Hypothesis 5

digital learning during a pandemic