Guiding EdTech Expertise: A Collaborative Journey into Product Design with ISTE

ISTE’s Course of Mind team is working to raise the bar for what educators expect from edtech products. In the summer of 2021, they focused their efforts on a tool to help educators and administrators evaluate edtech products of themselves, with guidance on what to look for.

Offering
Hourly Advising

Client
ISTE

Approach

Buying edtech software is a highly complicated and expensive process. It ideally involves buy-in from the school district, the IT department, the teachers, and the students. Unfortunately, that process rarely includes everyone.

The ISTE team already has strong SME knowledge about edtech projects and their effectiveness, school systems and politics, and learning science. They sought support to bring this knowledge together in a human-centered approach.

Key Outcomes

My coaching helped the team:

  • Assess their recruiting processes with a focus on equity and how participants impact outcomes

  • Planning and preparing for group research sessions

  • Real-time feedback on facilitation, specifically how to encourage participants thoughts and ask for expansion in a group setting

  • Support in identifying insights and connecting them to product requirements

  • Shift from research into How Might We questions

  • Develop lo-fi prototypes

Through a combination of advising, conversation, and editing existing work, ISTE’s team was able to handle the vast majority of the design work with my support, rather than hiring a full time contractor.

At a critical moment in the project, I led the ISTE team through a virtual workshop to create their own How Might We statements.

One key skill we identified as a gap was prototyping. To upskill the team, I offered a crash course on rapid prototyping attended by the core team and a handful of additional colleagues.