SlideDog Live View

Having built a close relationship with Preseria through the development of the presentation software SlideDog, we continued our joint efforts in a new context. This time we focused in on education, looking at how to bridge the distance between student and teacher in a typical lecture setting.

Client

Preseria

Year

2013

Design Tasks

User insights, concept, prototyping, testing

Background

The project was part of the Design-Driven Innovation Programme (DIP) by the Norwegian Design Council. We started with a clean slate and an open problem: How to increase interaction and engagement in a mode of education that has been largely unchanged for the past decades? Through a thourough insights process we arrived at several concepts that were prototyped and tested with students and teachers.

Technology evolves, but education hasn't kept up. Time for a change?

Design Opportunities

From the user insights we discovered three major design opportunities:

Increasing interaction between professor and students

Many students are reluctant to ask questions in lectures, but starting with other simple measures can create engagement and increase participation.

Allowing for continuous feedback throughout the course

Often professors receive feedback only at the end of the course when it is too late to make the necessary changes in the course.

Allow for immediate, visualised feedback

With an already heavy workload professors wanted feedback requiring little processing on their behalf.

Live View

These insights resulted in Live View: A web service that automatically streams presentations so that the students can follow the lecture on their preferred device; laptop, tablet or smartphone. This served as a platform to open up new means of participation and communication between student and lecturer.

We prototyped several new features to take advantage of this, including asynchronous viewing, a live chat, automated progress checks and student evaluations. These were then tested in a live classroom setting, where we were able to see a real shift in the lecture dynamic and in the student-teacher interaction. Live View has since been integrated into SlideDog.