Background
Oxplore Teach is a project run by the University of Oxford that provides classroom-ready sessions and CPDL (continuing professional development and learning) for teachers to support academic enrichment for pupils from a wide range of backgrounds. It aims to help teachers support learners to become high attainers. It is an inclusive academic enrichment programme designed for all learners– very different from the traditional gifted and talented approach. This focus is on supporting learners to develop the key thinking and metacognitive skills which will support their attainment and progression.
The CPDL consists of a set of free e-learning modules for teachers and other educators (including teaching assistants, tutors and activity leaders). Each module summarises key published research papers giving details on what works to support learners to stay on their attainment trajectories throughout secondary school. Research shows that children from backgrounds of disadvantage ‘leak out’ of the pipeline from school to university at a disproportionate rate to their peers.
Oxplore Challenges are “Oxplore sessions in a box” designed to be run with minimal preparation time and materials – to make it as easy as possible for time-pressured teachers to use. Each Challenge encourages learners to think like a university researcher and practice the key Oxplore skills, which are based on the qualities that university tutors and employers have reported looking for in potential candidates for further study and work.
We were asked to build an online platform to organise the content logically and engagingly, so that it would be easy for the audience to access.
Getting started and working with the audiences
We started our process with up-front interviews with the Oxplore team to understand their work and their goals. We progressed into collaborative project planning to ensure that we had an ambitious but flexible plan that took into account potential delivery risks on both sides.
The core audience for our technical solution was secondary school teachers and their students, so it was important to us to undertake a series of consultations with teachers from across the UK to understand what they and the school needed and what they deemed to be useful. This approach established for us that a well-designed content-ready platform would be a very valuable resource for schools.
Using the information we gathered during our consultation, we developed a list of potential feature sets which were then validated with target users in order to prioritise the necessary sets of features that were most important in making the platform appealing.
These features are technical (i.e. how the platform would work), programmatic (i.e. how Oxplore Teach could be structured) and substantial (i.e. the content within the sessions provided).
Working with the audience is invaluable. Through our information gathering and primary research, we discovered the importance of providing ready-to-run challenges that teachers could run in the classroom to help their students develop the key Oxplore skills. Teachers need to be able to run these challenges out-of-the-box, so the platform needed to support this. This led to a rethink of the scope of the project and the development of a detailed product roadmap.
Our design solution
Oxplore is an established brand with an associated look and feel. The design challenge for us lay in taking the brand and building a design story for the online platform which appealed to both a professional teaching audience and a student audience. Coherence with differentiation was key.
We introduced a card design for the challenges and CPDL that quickly highlights key information. Along with carefully selected filtering, this immediately gives teachers the information they need to find the set of challenges they’re interested in.
Designing the user interface for both the online courses and the challenges required thinking carefully through the user experience. For the courses, we needed to consider how the user launched the course, tracked their progress and easily resumed the course at the point that they left off.
For the challenges, we developed slides and designed a display so that the slides were suitable in a classroom format. We also included interactive elements and facilitating tools such as timers.
We developed an administrative interface that enabled adding, editing and updating both the courses and the challenges as easily as possible.
Our technical solution
We developed a fully-fledged platform with complex custom functionality. We built the solution using Drupal, which provides the solid underpinnings, extended to meet the specific demands of CPDL and in-classroom challenges using the latest JavaScript technology. It is carefully and thoughtfully architected to be robust and maintainable.
The outcome
We were able to deliver beyond the original brief. We took as our starting point that the ultimate aim was to engage teachers and to support teachers in developing key skills in the classroom to enable their students to raise their attainment. Undertaking a detailed consultation with teachers to truly understand their needs and translating the findings into a set of features that defined the scope and specification of the new platform was key to the success of the project. Incorporating challenges into the platform was a crucial decision based on our research findings and enabled us to deliver a comprehensive, fully functioning, engaging platform.
Oxplore Teach has been well received, and there are plans to keep enhancing the site.