Case Study: Delivering a robust nursing student learning insights
By: Dae Hong Kim
Experience and brand systems leader | Enterprise-scale Product Platform Design | Edtech, Health, and Art
Company:
Elsevier is a global leader in information analytics, scientific publishing, and decision support solutions for the science and healthcare industries.
Business Strategy:
Increase health market share in North America by investing in the next generation of education tools for nursing programs. Create a new health brand driver for the narrative that includes nursing, medical, and health education impact through technology. Increase brand association recognized beyond empowering knowledge that enables informed decisions for better health outcomes.
Problem Solution Investment:
For over 140 years, Elsevier has championed the story in being a trusted partner in advancing scientific knowledge. In 2015, I was brought on to help a handful of emerging education technology products undergoing a digital transformation to develop the health markets business.
Brand Touch Point:
One of the signals that occurred across products over time is that learning progress insights was always part of the experience benefit across the offerings. To complicate the matter, these features are built with different coding methodologies and frameworks. This led to product specific learning insights management for faculty and students that was difficult to navigate and access in a cohesive way.
High Value Question:
What would it look like to consolidate redundancy and how would it work so that we can:
- Deliver connected experience for our audience that works across products
- Build on a flexible framework to accommodate the variety of learning taxonomy.
- Start offering the solution without waiting until all the data and its interoperability is enabled.
Complication:
Among the different facets of design challenges under my care was constructing the right visualization format for a given cohort’s performance.
The most repeatable cycle was happening between assigned materials (Define) and assessments (Check).
The assigned assessments related to learning objectives by completing quizzes was a way to gain insights by instructors as well as students on what areas of study to improve.
For instructors, this insight wasn’t evident without adequate assessments observed over time. Therefore, the time dimension was critical in representing learning progress. However, the areas of improvements are mapped to different teaching rubrics and standards that subscribed to varied taxonomies.
This led to the hypothesis that the display format would need a page interaction framework to afford data visualization refinement while a familiar structure for assessment data can be delivered earlier.
Resolution:
I proposed a product strategy recommendation by envisioning a phased approach.
I authored a set of best practices and standards for data visualizations with brand thinking.
I developed a design and research visual workbench that reveals experience gaps and discovery opportunities while inviting discussions to illustrate recommendations with stakeholders.
I combined a geographical, topographical idea with a time dimension to represent learning insights.
This approach would afford a flexible view layer that can represent a conceptual container to display the density of assessment across categorical needs in concert with ordinal markers for an entire cohort as well as individual students.
This enabled the learning program criteria, course, or assessment types to continue to evolve and be integrated without binding it to any specific format.
Result:
The product owners and engineering leaders loved the approach delivered and paved the horizon strategy for nursing and health education business, a solid direction on how to unify the performance insights across the portfolio. The long view of this approach reduced engineering overhead allowed the existing features to be refined into a transition plan using the new framework. The product team was able to speak to the company’s global brand value of Robust closing the loop to be a trusted partner to drive higher brand equity in health markets business.