Kelly M. Murdoch-Kitt

The goal of this project was to understand the current state of learning in a college environment, and gather insights on unmet needs for possible future product development.

This was conducted via thorough competitive analysis following extensive testing of existing online learning tools, followed by a series of 28 on-campus interviews at three different San Francisco universities to evaluate students’ current learning experiences and what they might expect or hope for in the future learning landscape.

At least half of the findings fall into a new category we created (that does not appear on the original Territory Map) called Collaboration, Communication and Community. This category describes activities and communication relevant to the entire learning group rather other than a one-to-one or one-to-many connection, and is not necessarily tied to assignment based-work.

Students all responded to personalization of the materials – not just personalized to them or their learning style, but acknowledged that their instructor was providing insights from his/her own experience.

Creating a representative personality or voice is also important for students – uploading images of students, allowing for personalization, etc. This is especially true in the realm of group work, where visualizations of data and information are vitally important for group work. There is no evidence of these kind of management tools currently being used in our assessment of learning products and tools.