Easel
Project Type
LMS Improvement
Date
September 2021 - January 2022
Role
Project Manager and UI/UX Designer
Location
University of California Irvine
What is Easel
Easel offers a new approach to course authoring to solve the issue of non-collaborative course creation. Easel does this by implementing many new features to the average LMS.
Why did we design a new LMS?
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Lack of class creation tools
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Poor design of class creation tools
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Absence of user engagement and communication (TAs, graders, and professors)
Our First Steps
From personal experience as university students our group felt current popular learning management systems are poorly designed and non-collaborative. This issue leads to a lack of quality courses and makes course creation difficult for professors. So to start the project, our team decided to set our goals.
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Create a unique LMS tool
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Implement collaborative features
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Promote user engagement
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Improve communication between users (TAs, graders, and professors)
We then began research to find a solution and ensure that the solution we design would be unique and effective. After the research phase, a business case, scope, and work breakdown structure were created.
Design Plan
Our group decided to make Easel's design similar to current popular learning management systems but also added features that help support collaborative course creation. To do this we added collaboration tools that allow our design educators to work with staff (TA, graders, and other educators) to create and edit courses. Some major tools in Easel's prototype include live course editing with staff, version control, and viewing the student's view of the course.
Figma Prototype
Home view
Users can view all of the classes they are currently a part of and view who is currently editing the course. This allows the users to have a central area that gives them a simple-to-understand interface, letting them view who is editing the course and communicate with them.
Student view
Users can view how the class is presented to students.
Live editing
Users can view who is editing the course, and they are also given the ability to leave comments.
Version Control
Users can view who has edited the course and when, but they are also given the ability to revert to a previous version.
Our Last Steps
Once the prototype was created, all the documentation was collected and put together into one final project report