Schools Team 10 - Classroom Community

Classroom Community

Schools & Colleges - Team #10 - Shelby Cornelison, Logan Kreisher, Yuchen Zhao

Overview

Future leaders of this world are in school right now. COVID has severely impacted the lives of these students and has isolated them from friends, professors, and how they learn. Now with online learning, everyone has to adjust and professors are struggling to make sure students are getting the best quality education possible. Which is why we created Classroom Community.

Classroom Community is a forum-based website for students and professors. This website isn’t just a forum, it’s a discussion platform to allow relationships to be built, encourage collaboration, and allow flexibility.

Education is an important part of life, so let’s encourage growth and ease the transition to online learning for everyone involved.

Team Members

Shelby Cornelison (Project Manager, Senior Brand Marketing @ Anderson University) Shelby was responsible for scheduling all internal and external meetings, created the logo, and wrote Go squad files. She created a space for team members to work collaboratively and freely express ideas with a separate Slack channel. Shelby also put this document and slide deck together with help from the rest of the team.

Logan Kreisher (Software Developer, Senior Computer Science @ Indiana State University) Logan was responsible for assembly of the website based on Yuchen's designs. Logan made all the html files, css files, and JavaScript functions.

Yuchen Zhao (Software Developer, Senior Computer Science @ Rose-Hulman) Being a software engineer who seems to be better at graphic design, Yuchen Zhao mainly contributed to the ideas development, UI design and demo testing of the Classroom Community website. Together with his group members, Yuchen applies some concerns received from the professors and students.

How did you decide on this customer segment, problem, and solution?

After speaking with professors, we were able to discern that there is a worry about understanding, collaboration/engagement, and time-consuming systems.

Professors first worry about engagement within the class. It would normally be easier to split the class into groups and start classroom discussions for in-person classes. However, with the transition to online learning, it is difficult for professors to observe student understanding of the material with the only way to be contacted is a scheduled meeting initiated by the student or an emailed question.

Collaboration is another issue and concern from professors and they are concerned that with the importance of discussion, there are not many ways for students to be able to collaborate and work towards answers themselves which grows critical thinking and strengthens interpersonal relationships and having a professional presence.

Then there is an issue of professors constantly getting emails from students with questions, most of them with the same questions, and having to respond to every single one. This is extremely time-consuming and is difficult for the professor to be able to focus on other tasks and may even accidentally look over a student’s email. The email system of contact for questions about the material is very slow and thusly, can take too long for students to finish an assignment on time. How did your team build and iterate on the solution? After discussing the described problems, our team decided a forum-based website would be the best solution. There are a variety of reasons for this. This would firstly allow collaboration between students and allow discussions. Collaboration would then allow growth in learning and interpersonal relationships. With this solution, it would also allow students to post questions and gain answers quickly from students (which can be approved by the professor), TA’s, and professors. This tool then also eliminates the multiple questions being asked over email and allows professors to see what students are struggling with, but also keeping material related questions in one place.

Key Metric Goals for Testing

Marketing
2500 social media impressions
500 social media interactions
100 landing page views

Customer Discovery + Product
5 interviews conducted
3 beta testers
6 user tests

Technical Architecture

The website itself is hosted through Github pages, so the website is a collection of static web pages.
Website Link: Classroom Community
Github Repository: Classroom Community Repository

Key Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks

Languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We wanted to use a website, so these three languages are an important part of any website. The JavaScript was used to add some functionality to the website.

Libraries: jQuery and Google Fonts. jQuery was for extra functionality in JavaScript functions. This made some of the functions much cleaner and easier to implement in order to have some functionality on the website. Google fonts was used to make the website look cleaner with a less basic font.

Free Stock Images: pexels.com. We used this tool because we needed some profile pictures for our students and professors.

If you had another 5 weeks to work on this, what would you do next?

1. From a business and marketing standpoint, we would have gathered testers and get one on one feedback from potential users.

2. From a developer and production standpoint, we would have liked to have hosted the website on a linux server to have the much needed benefits of a robust backend server. We would have used PHP, MySQLi, and MySQL to implement a database to cause a much better and more put together website.