Inspiration
Do you find yourself easily distracted while watching online educational videos? Introducing Edumedia.
Our idea began with an interaction I had with my lecturer in a small math class. My lecturer became sick before an exam and had to cancel office hours which was something that the class needed. He decided to try streaming his office hours on Twitch as a method of being able to be available to more students while also keeping everyone safe. This was very successful and now he streams on Twitch every week for math.
A week later, I was talking to him about how this idea of streaming on Twitch was very beneficial for the students and how it is hard for teachers like him to have live interactions with their students. He mentioned a good point about how there’s no website for this kind of niche as most educational live websites are paid and private tutoring.
Our idea stems from this and is about opening a space in educational streaming where there’s no barrier of entry and you can just start streaming educational content with the use of interactive mathematical tools that students can use alongside a lecture.
We wanted to create an engaging online platform that mimicked real-classroom experiences. You know- the feel of sketching graphs in your notepad while listening to your algebra lecture.
What it does
Edumedia lets its users seamlessly transition from educational videos/recorded lectures to applications about the subject such as desmos, thus enhancing the student learning experience. We wanted to build a product that eliminated the hassle of toggling between multiple tabs so that the student can work more efficiently. Our user-friendly interface is accessible to all with multiple triggers such as keyboard shortcuts, voice, etc. We make sure to retain the delightful in-classroom experience with interactive educational tools and collaboration with comments.
Our product development principles are simple:
- it enhances learning through an engaging & delightful interface.
- it simulates the authenticity of a real classroom and translates this digitally.
- it’s economical and ensures the accessibility of quality education to all.
How we built it
Research
We started by listing use cases for our product. We studied the challenges faced by professors and students while using current educational streaming platforms. Professors cited issues such as live streaming difficulties and students faced distracted learning and lack of involvement.
Ideation & Design
We scrambled the components of current learning modules to sketch a more usable and interactive interface. We synthesized from our research that students/professors use tools such as Desmos while learning and hence tried to integrate these in our layout. We wire-framed a low fidelity version to test our app flow before adding the major design and branding.
Development
We made a plan of the needed programming languages and related API’s that had to be implemented to make the development process more efficient. We used React for the front end coding and Python Flask for the back end coding. The Firebase Engine was utilized for the storage of videos and it was useful for updating information in real-time.
Challenges we ran into
The idea of integrating an interactive mechanism such as Desmos was difficult to execute while maintaining the user experience of multiple viewports. We approached this issue by sketching out multiple layouts and testing at low-fidelity to see which was navigation-friendly.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
We challenged ourselves to adhere to our product principles whilst delivering a quality product. The task was to transform the currently monotonous experience of one-dimensional video streaming to a high-involvement experience and Edumedia has managed to achieve that.
We also feel accomplished for being able to collaborate as a team of developers and designers and achieve our individual goals in the process.
What we learned
With the implementation of an interactive website, we were able to learn new topics such as using REST API and incorporating the Firebase Engine.
The product development process taught us a great deal about user-experience and customer psychology. As a team, we were all able to elevate and enhance our team working, coordination, and time management skills. We each possess different competencies and were able to teach each other in the process.
What’s next for EDUMEDIA
Design and development is an iterative process and we’d like to test our current prototype on target users to gather feedback and refine our creation. We plan to do this till we’ve reached a stage of outstanding user satisfaction.
Secondly, we’d like to expand product experience to multiple types of subjects such as music and design as we believe that our interactive platforms can be customized to suit different learning objectives.
From a business perspective, we’d like to collaborate with educational institutions and form a network of channels and users - one big happy Edumedia family!
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