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Students Skills Assessment Tool

How might we enable students and supervisors to identify the skill gaps during their learning journey and how might we strengthen the skill set of the students to enhance their future employment prospects?

Header photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Background

This was a 6 month long project where we replaced a self-assessment competency-based tool in a form of a PDF document provided by GRE+D (Graduate Research Education and Development) to help students self-assess their skills so that they can identify skill gaps to design and personalise their learning journey. We shipped this application in 2019 in time for the second semester at the University. This case study focuses on the students skills assessment of the project.

Role: UX Designer
Methods and Tools: User Interview, Current State Analysis, Usability Testing, Optimal Workshop, Wireframing, Prototyping, Google Analytics, Adobe XD
Team members: Stakeholders (GRE+D), Product Owner, a Scrum Master, a Business Analyst, and 3 Developers.

The Problem

GRE+D is a research student learning framework, launched by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 2017. They offer a number of workshops and training opportunities on campus and online for research students to attend.

Since 2017, HDR students were expected to complete a Word document where they would self assess their skills. There were about 20 skills the students would assess themselves with a rate of 1 to 5 and would record evidence of how they have achieved this level or how they’d like to improve their skills. There was no mandatory requirement to complete this form or collaborate with their supervisors. Once the student has completed the form, there was no easy way for their supervisors to track how their students are doing or to find available workshops and training to improve their skills. The awareness of the opportunities offered by GRE+D was only through emails and was not easily accessible by students. Student progress only existed in this document.

Previously, the physical skills assessment document looked like this.

Previous PDF skills assessment

Research

We conducted a workshop with 8 HDR students and a separate workshop with 5 GRE+D staff to understand some of the challenges they are facing and what they would like to see in the future. We learnt a lot! We also gathered requirements from GRE+D staff and stakeholders.

These were some of our findings:

  • Assist students to easily find and access training and workshop opportunities to upskill
  • Track students progress and encourage them with regular engagement
  • Connect supervisors and students through the skills assessment tool
  • Enable to see trends and patterns of skills that students needs

Feedback & Iterations

We also brought together the entire team to brainstorm different visuals and forms of displaying student progress, training and workshop opportunities, and self assess against the skills.

We then used an interactive prototype to test with a number of HDR students.

Design iteration wireframes

Some of feedback from students were:

  • What is the purpose of this tool?
  • How much information do I need to document?
  • Some of the skills examples and descriptions need to be more concrete

From these initial feedback, we found that there were a lot of problems with what we have initially designed for. We went back to the drawing table, discussed and presented some of our findings and brainstormed ways we could improve this.

These were some of the improvements we were focusing on:

  • Have a consistent student journey
  • Have clearer expectations for students
  • Improve the skill descriptions to make it clearer for students to understand without the examples
  • Provide examples of the experience or training for each skill that are relevant
  • How opportunities are displayed should make it clear to students what value they would get.

We worked with GRE+D staff members and some help from the content officers to improve some of the languages used in the tool. We then updated the prototype and conducted a number of usability tests. The test was screen and voice recorded and we have analysed our findings on Optimal Workshop.

Outcome

After conducting many user interviews, a number of design iterations, we felt really confident about launching this to our HDR students and staff of GRE+D! This was our final design.

Onboarding

We found from our user testing that a lot of the students didn't know what to expect and how it will help with their degree. To help solve this issue, we created an onboarding page to introduce the new online tool to first time students in the tool. This page explains how this tool works and what to expect out of the tool. It also goes through step by step process and explanation of the three research skills; Advance, Engage and Lead.

Rating their skills

Previously, the students were expected to rate their skill based on 1 - 5. We found through user interviews that students found it difficult to rate themselves in this rating. So we tested with a number of different terms and we ended up with 'new to me', 'some experience', 'significant experience' and 'not relevant'. We also worked with communications offiers to simplify some of the skills names and the description text so that students understood what each skills are.

Finding opportunities

The last screen is a list of opportunities based on what they have rated themselves against each skill. It is also in order of date so that they could see upcoming training or workshops they could attend. On the left hand side is a filter option for each skill. We would like to expand on this filter for the next iteration to help them narrow their opportunities. There is an option for students to print their skills assessment so that they can see how they have progressed over the year. The students can also update their skills once they come back to the tool.

3 months and 6 months after the launch, I created a report on how the tool was tracking. Have there been students completing their skills assessment? Are there returning students? What might we be able to improve in the next iteration?

It was great to see the number of students in the tool increasing and the returning students coming back to the tool to update their skills level and finding opportunities. There were more opportunities to improve this tool however, with the time constraints we had a list of backlog items that could be reviewed next time.

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