Oyin Runsewe
Product designer

EdVis

An interactive dashboard to help international education planners make sense of learning data towards actionable policies.

Edvis logo

Edvis logo

EdVis is an interactive dashboard to help education planners better integrate learning assessment data for sustainable and equitable education systems.

ROLE

UI/UX Designer

TEAM

Designers - Aletheia Délivré, Rejeanne De Jong, Kayley Cheung, Nicolas Fan, Henry Mai

Data Scientists - Jenna Fu, Bowen Zhang

Web Developers - Onimisi Ukanah, Sam Tang, Haley Glavina

Project Manager - K.V.S Dileep

TIMELINE

January 29-31, 2021

ACHIEVEMENT

We won the price for most impactful solution. Check out UNESCO's article about the Hackathon and the other winners

CONTEXT

I teamed up with some fellow BrainStation alumni and joined the IIEP-UNESCO Hackathon Hacking EdPlanning in collaboration with Latitudes - Exploring Tech for Good

THE ISSUE

Although large-scale learning assessments have increased over the decades, this has not led to efficient educational policy and planning.

To better understand the reasons, UNESCO IIEP conducted a qualitative research study in six sub-Saharan African countries. The research examined how these countries used learning data and the factors that determined data usage to change educational policies.

The results showed a number of challenges preventing the efficient use of learning data in planning:

  1. The lack of tools to visualize data

  2. The inability to link learning data to explain the causes of poor learning.

  3. No linkage of data to fields such as health and standard of living

  4. There is minimal use of data by lower-ranked staff members who do not understand the data's technical presentation..

EXPECTED DELIVERABLE

A prototype of an interface that presents learning assessments in a way that facilitators at different levels understand for effective policy and planning decisions

RESOURCES PROVIDED FOR THIS CHALLENGE

A set of national large-scale learning assessment data of Burundi that contains both student outcomes and background information.

TEAM APPROACH

Friday January 29, 2021

Understand & Ideate

Team meetings

Expert interview with UNESCO's research officers

Data analysis (Data Scientists)

Crazy 8's and Sketching

Saturday January 30, 2021

Decide & Prototype

Solution presentation to team members

Vote and Decide

Logo ideation and branding

Fast prototyping

Sunday January 31, 2021

Build & Pitch presentation

Build prototype (Developers)

Create pitch video

Presentation + Q&A

IDEATION
My amazing team members made up of designers, data scientists and developers

My amazing team members made up of designers, data scientists and developers

Our first approach was to break off into our different fields and work on the challenge, but after hours of sketching, we realized that we needed information from other areas to inform the interface's layout and content.

As a team, we decided to keep each other updated at every stage and hold quick meetings when a concept seemed unclear.

The Data Scientists synthesized the relationships between student learning outcomes and different student, school and teacher characteristics and factors related to other sectors.

The UX designers used the results to create an interface while consulting the developers to ensure they could implement our designs

The developers gradually built the interface as soon as design screens were completed and approved by everyone.

The Product Manager made sure we were sticking to our schedule and designing an interface relevant to the challenge.

Then we sketched...
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SOLUTION
UNESCO-IIEP Elvis

  • User-friendly, interactive interface

  • Visualizing learning outcomes by province (geospatial views)outcomes for targeted policy intervention

  • Linking baseline data with factors impacting learning outcomes for targeted policy intervention

  • Filters: Gender, Standard of living

Pitch video showing the features and benefits of EdVis

LOGO & BRANDING
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NEXT STEPS

  1. Obtain more specific data on schools to further refine visualization levels

  1. Observe year-over-year trends in learning outcomes over years

  1. Integrate recommended policy actions from IIEP-UNESCO case studies into EdVis interface

  1. Build out a portal to collect learning assessment data and facilitate data-sharing at all administrative levels

LEARNINGS

  1. Establish a common language across the team to prevent miscommunication and enhance the team's workflow

  1. Always seek feedback from your team members and stakeholders at every decision point because it checks assumptions quickly and allows for natural "pivots."

  1. Don't be afraid to ask questions, especially in a cross-functional team with unfamiliar technical terms. Clarity allows for faster problem solving