Qualitative/Formative Research Methods
Literature Review | Market Research | Interviews | Contextual Inquiry | Coding
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many higher educational institutes moved to a period of remote learning, closing physical campuses and classrooms. Harrisburg University of Science and Technology (HU) was one of the many universities that chose to continue its Fall 2020 undergraduate semester through remote learning. During this semester, student engagement in school events and student life activities has fallen dramatically. This decrease in participation suggests that remote learning has caused engagement difficulties within the undergraduate student population at HU.
This led to our mandate:
“Increasing student participation in HU student life activities during the COVID-19 pandemic in a remote environment.”
Goals:
Identify the role that digital systems play to keep students engaged at HU and provide opportunities for improving student engagement on remote learning platforms.
Research Questions:
1. How do students spend their time at home?
2. What role do digital systems play to keep students engaged in HU?
3. Do students engage with other students in a virtual environment outside of a classroom? How so?
Recruitment Kit: Explainer, Informed Consent, Screening Protocol
Before interviews, we created a recruitment kit, consisting of an explainer (recruitment ad), informed consent forms, and screening protocols for participants.
Theories and concepts derived from literature review.
Types of Engagement
Upon completion of the interview process. We transcribed the interviews to analyze the data.
From our interview data, we used a coding process based on engagement theme and context types that were created from the theories and concepts work in the literature review.
The interview data found common themes of scheduling conflicts, lack of student interactions, and general discomfort for being “on-camera.”
Contextual Inquiry
We were able to observe remote student life events through contextual inquiry. These sessions provided insights in identifying the main problem with current student life events: low engagement.
Through a prior art (market research), we were able to evaluate current digital solutions towards student engagement and find new needs or areas where solutions can be implemented based on insights from previous research.
The initial raw dataset of 16 applications was narrowed down to a final dataset of 5 applications which were then recorded, examined, and analyzed manually.
How might we…?
Through our research of identifying user needs (interviews, contextual inquiries) and business needs (market research), we are able to reframe the the human needs into a design opportunity by using How Might We (HMW) statements. These HMW statements use identified user needs and insights to create opportunity problems as a foundation to create design recommendations.
Design Recommendations:
