In Fall 2022, our Processes & Perspectives class was given the assignment to explore design methodologies as applied to a particular focus. Our team of four students set out to investigate the problem space below.
Urban-Rural Divide and its impact on Education
course project
aug - dec 2021
ux & visual designers
business strategists
design strategy
problem
High turnover rate of rural educators
1:5 U.S. students attend a rural classroom. Despite so, the Urban-Rural divide creates a huge gap on educational attainment within rural areas. One factor that leaves a lasting effect on student success is the high turnover of rural educators.
solution
Mitigate teacher retention issues
A centralized hub platform that will provide support, resources, and professional development to retain rural educators.
task management
Keep track of newsfeed updates, course progress, and reward points on a personalized dashboard
career development
Browse courses of various topics and promote professional growth
community
Get connected to rural educators with similar interests
well-being
Find rural-related resources organized by features
research
What’s the smallest problem that makes the greatest impact?
Teachers are the gatekeepers to unlock information access and student potential
By investing in teachers, we in turn invest in students.
However, rural teachers have a comparatively lower educational attainment than their urban counterparts. These same teachers struggle in classrooms of combined grade levels due to school consolidations.
Understanding the Urban-Rural divide means recognizing that government policies to students themselves are all contributors to the imbalance. Our team went on to do individual research before we reconvened. To facilitate research, I asked myself the question:
If the biggest proponent, WiFi, was accessible across America, will that ultimately change education for rural students?
Keeping this defining question in mind led me to discover the sphere of teacher retention x community retention which I pitched and redirected our team’s attention to.
How Might We encourage and incentivise educators to work in rural communities?
ideate
Feasibility, Desirability, Viability, Accessibility
Our team came up with three unique perspectives on the struggles of rural educators, deliberating each based on how radical and realistic the idea is.
magic school bus
A traveling remodeled school bus that visits rural communities to offer professional development for rural teachers
+
central hub platform
A feature-focused digital web-based platform that acts as a centralized hub for all educational resources
+
civic forum
A digital platform to award real monetary amounts based on “points” earned to online forums centered around policy change and other challenges rural teachers face
Design opportunities to bear in mind
After digressing into an assortment of ideas, we fixated on the central hub platform as the most viable solution. The resulting solution was an evolution spin-off to meet these guidelines:
1
Ease of digital access
Cultivate a sense of community
2
Avoid going down a rabbit hole in search for resources
3
Scaling a blueprint for an MVP
As one of the designers, I was responsible for fleshing out a user flow to divide the breadth of our product features between community, career development, and well-being and to arrange the depth of pages our users will navigate through. Visualizing the mapping of the product helped the other designer and I work synchronously to inform sketches of page layouts and eventually materializing a web platform.
the mvp
summary
Solve for one, solve for many
There are more than 450,000 rural educators who struggles with the economic disparity experienced in rural communities. The goal is to help these educators recognize resources pertinent to their success without distraction from their students. The most notable step of all is to take the prototype into rounds of usability testing and iterate upon the relevancy of certain features. Given the limitations of the scope, usability testing should have been prioritzed each step of the way.