March 2020 - Raccoopack Media

Case Study

ISABC | Digital Skills Curriculum Builder

Custom App Development | Web Development

To create a modern and balanced curriculum that teaches digital literacy to students, ISABC draws from a wide number of frameworks.

We developed the digital skills curriculum builder with ISABC to offer a visual and user-friendly tool for building curriculums. This online tool is used by curriculum planners and technology teachers.

The Independent Schools Association of British Columbia (ISABC) is an association of 26 outstanding schools, and links teachers and leaders to promote the sharing of the best educational and leadership practices and ideas.

Problem

ISABC was previously using an existing spreadsheet that displayed and linked large datasets from a number of educational frameworks. However, there were a few limitations with this tool:

The spreadsheet contains many complex datasets, and is difficult to sort and filter.
Users need to easily visualize the relationships between different frameworks, including competencies and support modules.
The resulting curriculum needs to be exported to a printable format.

Solution

After understanding the user needs and documenting use cases from interviewing stakeholders with ISABC, we identified visualization, intuitiveness, and accessibility as the core design pillars of the app.

A New and Improved Approach

The Digital Skills Curriculum Builder allows curriculum planner and teachers to easily begin by starting with a skill type, then dive deeper with supporting modules and competencies from different educational frameworks, and vice versa. Supporting information such as grade levels are also displayed in a clear and elegant manner.

Key App Features

Mindmap: To provide a high level visualization and entry point of the curriculum
Curriculum builder: Assists the development of education frameworks by enabling the filtering and connection of digital skill types
Export: Create an offline and printable curriculum

Process

Focusing on the User Experience

As one main goal of the project is to make the curriculum builder easy to use while linking the various datasets together, the key is to create an effective user flow. To accomplish this, we gathered feedback from the users on the as-is spreadsheet tool to understand the steps taken to produce a curriculum. Using this information, we were able to link the datasets into a user flow that provides a methodical step-by-step approach of creating curriculum on the builder.

As well, this information allowed us to detail user stories and wireframes for the mind map, curriculum builder, and export features.

Results

After a series of iterations and testing, Raccoopack Media was able to deliver the project on time and budget. The release of the interactive Digital Builder has had a transformative impact for educators and teachers. On top of time and effort saved, the tool provides the advantage of visualizing the links between the different educational frameworks.