New Jersey School Board Resource Exchange
A Dashboard for Teachers and Educators to Share Common Core Resources Cross-State
Project Challenge: To create an exchange platform for educators to share and administer common core resources throughout the state in an effort to apply consistency to the roll out of New Jersey’s Common Core curriculum.
Project User: New Jersey teachers, administrators and curriculum officials.
Project Role: I was a Product Designer on this project among a series of other designers. My role included early discovery, solution ideation and early wire framing.
Earlier mock ups of the New Jersey State Common Core Research Exchange. While the final mock ups and designs ended up being more sophisticated than the final product due to cost restrictions on the engineering side, the timeline modes and embedded commenting system was a favorite feature.
The Challenge: In 2013/2014, the United States public education system was collectively gearing up for the single most comprehensive standards and assessment implementation in its history. Affecting nearly 50 million students, and their teachers, the Common Core State Standards present a unified definition of student achievement expectations across 45 states.
With a common set of expectations came the promise of mutually shared objectives in defining effective teaching methods and collaborative identification of the best materials and resources to deliver the best available instructional opportunities for both classroom student support and targeted teacher training. Additionally, the Common Core State Standard brought with it challenge in moving from adoption to orientation and examining how to efficiently conduct full training for almost 3 million teachers who are expected to implement those standards with fidelity in the upcoming two years.
Our task was to assist the state of New Jersey in making this transition, designing a resource exchange dashboard that could be used by teachers and students alike in managing Common Core curriculum and materials.
Proposed Solution: Creating a technical framework that can leverage powerful visualization, gaming/progression-like features, adaptive self- assessments, social-learning elements, online communities of practice, and user-curated learning and teaching content. This dashboard was intended to put education at the fingertips of learners - anywhere, anytime, and via any modality of learning that works for the individual teacher and learner. This was an incredibly ambitious project that sought to account for no less than three use cases: State Curriculum Developers, District Academic Officers and teachers themselves.
Testing: This project was unique as it had a multitude of government stakeholders, but as a result, budget allocation for this particular part of their Common Core initiative shifted frequently, resulting in a slimming down of design and features soon after early stakeholder reviews. This is something that happens with B2G partnerships and being able to be flexible and modular in the slimming down of a design is critical in situations such as this.
Later mock ups stripped down the interface and reduced the content to simplify
Even with the simpler layout, this interface would not ultimately be implemented.
Evaluation and Validation: For no fault of our own, the project did not manage to meet the ambition of its original scope, but the project was completed nonetheless. Given factors outside everyone’s control, a lot of the variables shifted, but this still meant that a functional product needed to be completed on time and on budget. At the end of the day, the project:
Was designed and built to support thousands of teachers across the state of NJ to organize, discover, and share curriculum aligned teaching resources and did so successfully.
The platform hosted tens of thousands of resources and was used by thousands of teachers to ease the adoption of national common core learning standards.
A even more simplified version based on the original continues to operate to this day.