TEACHER'S JOURNEY AND WHY THEY LEFT - EF
July 2018
In a traditional online education system, teachers are normally treated as internal employees, rather than customers. However, with more and more teachers decided to leave their jobs, and with the rising complaints about being a language teacher, we decided to take action and find out why.
With the world-famous Swedish education brand, EF, we put on the teachers' shoes and dig deeper into their experiences as online teachers.
The aim of this project is to understand the teacher's journey based on real situations of the teachers and create the base of a feasible and tangible prototype on the findings.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
It is crucial to ask the right question to the right people. In this step, we need to identify who are the users and set up recruitment criteria and interview plans in order to make sure that we have a solid base for the research.
The biggest challenge I was facing at this step is to come up with the right user recruitment criteria because of the complicity of how different types of teachers are set up (PT/FT, native/non-native, etc.) and the fact that there has not been any related previous research to refer to.
STEP 1 - User recruitment plan
This step is where all the raw data are from. I and my intern conducted semi-structured 1-on-1 interviews and card-sorting exercises. There are more than 30 interviews, including user interviews and internal expert interviews, conducted for the project with video and written recordings.
The biggest challenge for this step is the big number of interviews we have to do versus the limited time/resource/energy we have. The whole team is made up of 3 people - me, one intern, and VP of product - We wanted to conduct all the interviews face-to-face and make sure the quality of the interviews. But eventually, we have to compromise and do some of the interviews online with video calls.
STEP 2 - Conduct expert interview and user interview
USER RESEARCH
User interview conducted by 3 interviewers who will be asking questions, driving interview directions, taking notes and recording conversations. The majority of the input will come from this resource.
EXPERT INTERVIEW
Gather views and opinions from internal employees/stakeholders/managers. This will help us to gain insights internally and holistically. The interview will be conducted in a formal user interview style with 3 interviewers and1-2 interviewees;
The data collected from the interviews are then being analyzed and defined into a Customer Journey Map (CJM). The method we are using here is to collaboratively color-mark "user needs", "pain points", and "opportunities" in the form where we created to store all interview notes.
At this step, more stakeholders are involved in. This can make sure that the stakeholders participate in some of the processes and allow them to have an expectation at an earlier stage. 3 people from the London team came to Shanghai to analyzing the results together.
STEP 3 - data analyzation
After we identified all the "user needs", "pain points", and "opportunities" from the interview and compressed the loose data into "essence", we are ready to visualize the findings and create CJM.
Customer Journey Map (CJM) will guide the design of the prototype.
STEP 4 - Creating Customer Journey Map
RE-DESIGN: When teachers are using the Classroom software to teach students, they have to re-type the “notes” and it generally cost too much time to do the After Class Report.
STEP 5 - Prototype
