top of page

BOERD

Building open education resource infrastructure for LMS in german education

The Problem
Due to the corona pandemic, a rapid switch to digitization has forced the relocation of teaching and learning to the digital space in Germany. Although some services were sustained, the situation resulted in a large number of technical and content-related challenges and made access to education more difficult.

The Opportunity

So with digitization push of the education sector, the idea of a National education platform (NBP) was formed to

  • create a centralised infrastructure hub for educational platforms and establish common standards and access to education.

  • nationwide linking of existing and new educational platforms across all educational areas

  • comply with existing competencies of the federal education system.

“As the Federal Government, we want to make it easier for everyone in our country - from school children to pensioners - and thus improve access to digitally supported educational offers. The digital education initiative, which I started together with the Federal Chancellor, is thus taking shape,” said Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek.   Read more

Almost 60 organisations took part to propose different concepts to build a national education platform. For BOERD, a partnership of Edu-sharing and GWDG helped form this project with relevant competencies.

Open educational resources are freely accessible, openly licensed instructional materials such as text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing, as well as for research purposes. Read more

WirLernenOnline is both a search engine and a community for open educational materials (OER). Read more 

BOERD

BOERD develops an OER-promoting plugin-based infrastructure concept for learning management systems for the national education platform under the pilot project Bildungsraum Digital (BIRD).

Duration
The project duration was almost 6-7 months before the concept was tested and pitched to The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Target
The first phase was to develop a solid proof of concept, pitch it to the government, post to which a key decision had to be made to raise capital and move further with the development in the future.

 

Goals
 

  • promoting OER content infrastructure, so that educational content can be created, legally shared, curated and used across organisations
     

  • developing a sidebar plugin concept for learning management platforms and authoring tools to connect to the National Education Platform
     

  • enable uniform learning, teaching, content creation and cooperative work without media discontinuity
     

  • using advanced AI services for automated tasks
     

  • Build on Moodle as an LMS example

Role
As the design lead in the project, I drove the design process to produce high-quality design solutions. I worked in close collaboration with stakeholders and team members to fulfil project goals and design solutions in an agile environment.My daily tasks ranged from performing core design activities like research, conducting workshops, strategic thinking, ideation, visual designs, testing but also ensuring proper workflow management with a fellow designer.
 
Team
I was part of a team of 4, which included 2 project managers and 1 graphic designer. We organised bi-weekly check-in meetings and brainstorming sessions to ensure an inclusive workflow.

Design process

I followed a data-driven approach to pursued the following process

Group 2625.png

Research

Before the start of the project, I carried out in-depth market research to understand concepts like curriculum development, competency management. I studied how international academic competencies are developed in a framework.
View market research

All of this helped me to understand and drive design communication through a higher level. Independent to this research, I also conducted stakeholder interviews to understand the specifics of the projects like goals, constraints, deliverables.

Empathise

Semi-structured interviews
I carried out semi-structured user interviews asking general and specific questions to understand their previous, current workflow and pain points in teaching and collaborating in digital space. I also skimmed relevant data out of existing personas that aligned with the project context. I validated it through interviews, hence removing any assumptions or bias.

Participants
The participants were 2 teachers working in different federal states in Germany.

Some important questions

Q.What problems do you face while teaching in a pandemic? How do you solve them?

Q.How has your current teaching scenario changed due to the pandemic? What was it like before?

Q.Describe the most important tasks while using learning management systems?

Q.How important is collaboration while preparing a course? How do you collaborate in the current scenario?

Strategise

Evaluating the data I had till this point, considerations like technical scope, feature priorities, detailed descriptions were missing. Although we were told to design a concept, it was important in my opinion to view it from a product lens to make it a realistic deliverable. At this stage, I also began thinking about important strategic questions like deliverable planning, timeline, next steps etc.

Ideation

I conducted a discovery workshop with a mix of stakeholders, managers, development and a few users to ideate on features, priorities, technical scope, product goals.

Design
 

Apart from meeting the target deadline, these goals acted as success metrics from the design side

​

  1. Modular
    Bundling features in UX modules to deliver in an agile approach

  2. Scalable
    Scope for future possibilities to build more features on top

  3. Flexible
    Customising design based on specific environment eg LMS

  4. Accessible
    Considering open access to all

  5. Realistic
    Concept but with a product vision

The data was enough to start crafting rough wireframes which were followed by iterative feedback. We began making a design system including styles like font, colours and reusable design components. Visual designs were made with a minimalistic and clean approach for uniform integration in LMS. The final deliverable was a click prototype with a presentation.

Test

I conducted a remote moderated user test combining the think out loud technique and asking specific tasks like can you show me how would you publish a course? How would using the plugin improve the content?

Improvements were made analysing results by user’s comments, emotions and my observations for each screen which resulted in removing confusion. Any unusual skips were also captured

The impact

The final decision is being made, keeping fingers crossed 🤞

bottom of page