Role Users Time taken Tools
Product Designer University faculty 4 week Figma
Curriculum mapping is the process of indexing or diagramming a curriculum to identify and address academic gaps, redundancies, and misalignments for purpose of improving the overall coherence of a course. Accrediting body responsibilities include a determination of whether the program is meeting its standards and how they are doing it. The accrediting body generally will do a full review periodically, every 5-10 years, and may also ask for annual reports.
As per the dean's guidelines towards mapping for the accreditation, the faculty's role is to ensure to make sure all the curriculum elements of their own course are appropriately mapped.
The major roadblock for the university is not being able to view courses as a whole or individually of how the courses and course measures contribute to meeting standards.
Understanding the process
Challenges
The focus of the research was to truly understand what mapping data is relevant as per the context that it is being viewed. While the research could help us learn about data that is repeatedly referred to, understanding the latent needs of the faculty was crucial, as it enabled decision-making. Uncovering these needs would help us establish data points that passively aid decision-making.
University
Each university has different ways to present the mapping of accreditation standards.
Understanding the academic gap is difficult and tedious.
Faculty
Faculty are not aware of the accreditation standards.
Mapping is considered an additional burden considering their responsibilities of teaching, assessing students, and administrative work.
Mapping can be done within course measures. For eg: Course goals can be mapped to Course objectives, and then mapped to CAPTE standards.
High-level mapping distribution of mapping of courses and standards.
Design Process
Focused on improving the usability, accessibility, and delight provided in the product interaction. Keeping the user in the centre of the creative process leads us to create designs that are clutter-free, easy, intuitive, scalable, engaging, and provide a fabulous experience to the users.
Meet for brief
Designer to conduct any additional research for clarity with external or internal users
Designer to request KPIs or business perspective if not given
Personas and other artifacts, if required
Conduct Competitive Analysis where appropriate
Provide User Flows
Meet with PM, UI, and backend to brainstorm ideas
Meet with the team to verify limitations/solutions together
Designer to meet with engineering team and PM to discuss requirements and gain technical perspective, even brainstorm on solutions
After user flows are agreed upon, the designer to give UX estimation time frame (this should include user feedback)
Provide rough mocks
Meet with the UX team to get feedback on initial designs - to validate any patterns, ensure consistency, share and get feedback
Can even get some initial feedback from internal users to just double-check and see if there are any other requirements missing
If new requirements arise, note them in the ticket but let PM decide on validity and what phase to add the new feature in
Mocks should be in InVision or prototype form
Can meet with UI team to get feedback or inputs - feasibility check
Involve the Tech Writing team in copy requests
Mocks should be in a solid-state
Create a ticket and meet with the TW lead to give context
Get user feedback
Meet with external, and internal users, and PM to get feedback
Make sure to do this step, it not only socialises that something new is coming but gives internal users a say in what they want to see
Can provide a word or excel doc of feedback, if this is a big project
Finalise designs
Revise any designs from the feedback received
Finalise copy with TW team
Meet with the UI team to discuss new components needed
Handoff to dev with functional requirements
Meet with PM, UI, and Backend to go through designs, make sure nothing is missing and all states are thought through – Ex: Error states
Be sure to provide functional requirements for developers – within the ticket, in InVision/ Marvel notes, or in word doc
List out the Usability Success Criteria with PM in the ticket
Design QA
Request UX QA ticket and a CI environment to test designs
During QA, test with users and get feedback early on
Share feedback with PM and work with them to see what is in scope to fix or add to the next phase
Measure the success of the product
Tag items to track
Create a (ticket?) to track the success of the feature and share it with teams
List areas doing well, and areas where it can be improved
Continue to get user feedback
Attend training sessions
Be proactive and get feedback from users after the feature is released
Conduct Observational / User testing
Mission statement
Enhance the mapping to provide all the vital and relevant information to the primary user(faculty) in a single glance so as to help him make an informed decision.
User analysis
Focus group
Methods used to get a better understanding of the user on how faculty were using the curriculum mapping process, what was their work about, and what are their daily tasks and procedures along with pain points. There were 2 people from different locations were tested. I participated as a facilitator as well as an observer.
Guerrilla research
Understand and review data that a university would refer to for a mapping process
Review the mapping process from the faculty perspective
Review and study documentation of different accreditation standards
Key findings
University
The mapping of standards with different courses is scattered across the system. It is not easy to contextualize it around a specific time.
It is difficult for the university to review the mapping process as a whole with connections being done internally for a course.
Tracking important aspects of the curriculum is arduous
Faculty
Lack of knowledge about standards makes it riskier even before the mapping process
Mapping is considered an additional burden considering their responsibilities of teaching, assessing students, and administrative work.
Transpose view of Curriculum mapping and course measures would allow faculty to understand the bigger picture
Building the design brief
Focus areas
UX Approach
The objective was to create a simplified snapshot of the curriculum mapping vital details for an assigned course so as to enable the faculty to process it in a short time and complete his intended action. We had to ensure that the faculty was more focused on the academic gaps instead of overwhelming data.
The idea was to create a mapping tool for courses and a mapping dashboard for a program that is actually a source of assistance instead of a source of intimidation.
Usability testing report
The findings were compiled in the Usability Testing report, and the final design direction was based on those results.
Prototype
Transforming the wireframes and prototypes to actual images with themes, components, and styles applied to them.
Dashboard
Highlights
Courses mapped with standards
An overview of the total courses that a curriculum needs to offer is shown which are mapped to the accreditation standards.
Course data distribution
The graph explains for different courses, how many course elements are defined in order to do a gap analysis.
Mapping distribution of standards and course
Heat-map representation of an abstract view of high/low-level mappings for every course per standard.
Curriculum mapping of a course
Highlights
Selection process
University selects the set of standards that are likely to be mapped with course elements/measures.
Additional information
Information such as narratives, documents, and tags allows the university faculty to explain the motives behind the mapping process.
Conclusion
The curriculum mapping is implemented to create efficiencies in workflow, recognising academic gaps in courses and course measures. Quick access to mapping overview improved faculty decision-making.
