Ensemble was born from the unique experiences of our group - university students who were undertaking their studies during a global pandemic. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, our group studied in an online format. This lasted over 2 years and while in recent times, courses have transitioned into a hybrid format, online learning support is still integral to the learning experience. Further, our group has experienced this not just as students, but as tutors as well. As a result of this, our group has a deep understanding of not just the strengths, but the limitations of the existing technologies used to help students learn in a purely online or hybrid format.
From our unique perspective, our group was able to identify an existing technology that required improvement to meet the needs of students and teachers alike - the online forum. While one could argue that there are plenty of choices, we found that all forum providers were ultimately lacking, whether that be in regards to UX and UI, Q&A Management, the monitoring of course and student performance or moderation.
Some examples of key players in the education forum space failing to meet user needs are Moodle and its poor user experience and interface design. Moodle’s forum functionality is arguably difficult to find and has a confusing structure using a ‘blog-like format’.
Further, edStem’s lack of a proper Q&A management system leaves students and tutors alike frustrated in their struggle to be heard. Students are able to post questions, but answering of these questions is done by leaving comments. As students and tutors engage in conversation via comments, they are only aware of these comments when they receive an email and/or forum notification. This makes it easy for students and tutors to be inundated with notifications, leaving questions unanswered as the progression of the conversation is lost in a sea of noise.
As our group noticed the limitations these forums had and the frustration experienced by course staff and students alike - being both students and tutors ourselves, we saw an opportunity to provide a solution to an important problem. Thus, Ensemble was born.
As we will see from the subsequent sections of the final report, Ensemble will attempt to address the glaring problems of poor UX and UI and lacking Q&A Management and forum moderation tools. Ensemble does this through its clean interface design, thoughtful experience design and unique triage system.
In particular, our triage system is one of our key novel functionalities. It solves issues regarding Q&A management and moderation through the utilisation of queues. Course staff will begin with a main queue that will hold all the open questions to be answered. Additional queues can be created for greater organisation.
A use case of the queue creation functionality is opening a number of queues to represent each of the topics taught in the course over a term. The questions being posted can now be organised according to topic, with staff being able to answer any of the posts, or just posts in an area of their expertise.The management of posts once they have been answered, or if unacceptable behaviour is displayed, is handled by the answered, closed, reported and deleted queues.
This is a powerful Q&A management system that provides course staff with the tools, interface and user experience needed to ensure that they are able to answer all the questions posted by students in the course. We’re excited to share the potential of Ensemble to solve a central issue amongst forums. Over the course of this final report and demonstration, we hope to demonstrate Ensemble’s ability to positively transform the learning experience for students and course staff alike, and improve the facilitation of online education.