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Pearson Common Core System of Courses
Pearson
Pearson Common Core System of Courses
Pearson Common Core System of Courses
This is the first product of its kind in the U.S. educational system. It brings a broader digital experience into the classroom and capitalizes on the unique benefits of that technology. The interface and curriculum will radically change the way kids learn. It has also reinvented Pearson’s business model and brings their offerings into today’s digital world. The massive scale of the project makes it incredibly ambitious, innovative, and above all – essential to the future of education in the United States.
2. The Brief: Summarize the problem you set out to solve. What was the context for the project, and what was the challenge posed to you?
Our client brief was very simple at its heart – keep kids from becoming bored in their classrooms. Pearson wanted the product to engage students by empowering them. To achieve this, our digital interface needed to do three main things:
1. Make students more responsible for their own education.
2. Use digital interactions to support more fluid collaboration & communication between students and teachers.
3. Give teachers better insight into student performance.
We wanted to create a product that any K–12 student in the United States would intuitively know how to use. Teachers were an equally important user for us to address, as they would be implementing a new curriculum to a class of tablet-toting kids. The product’s user experience needed to be simple and fun to use. Our interface also had to accommodate a vast and diverse array of content types. Our user-centered approach helped us design solutions that were simple, modular, and effective.
4. The Process: Describe the rigor that informed your project. (Research, ethnography, subject matter experts, materials exploration, technology, iteration, testing, etc., as applicable.) What stakeholder interests did you consider? (Audience, business, organization, labor, manufacturing, distribution, etc., as applicable)The product went through a lot of creative iteration that involved many teams. In the very beginning, product designers collaborated with master teachers to align the product’s user experience with Common Core standards. A team of content creators and developers then helped bring that vision to life. We made sure that visual and interactive design patterns suited the cognitive threshold of users in every age group (K-12). Motion testing and environmental accessibility experiments ensured that the product UI was viewable in actual classroom lighting conditions. The resulting interface was then tested with teachers in one-on-one interviews and with beta classroom instruction.
5. The Value: How does your project earn its keep in the world? What is its value? What is its impact? (Social, educational, economic, paradigm-shifting, sustainable, environmental, cultural, gladdening, etc.)
Our interface makes education come alive for students. It was specifically designed to help K-12 students:
• Interact with instructional and educational content
• Annotate primary texts
• Produce and organize original work in a digital notebook
• Collaborate and share their work with each other
The experience was also optimized to meet age-based needs. For example, we created an innovative image-based login process for Kindergarteners who can't yet read. Built-in analytics make it easy for teachers and students to track progress and receive guidance on where to improve. Insights about students are supported by contextually integrated content and communicated to teachers through visualizations.
The Common Core is a new set of national education standards for K-12 grade students in the United States. Recently implemented, they were designed to support equal opportunity in education for all students across all school districts. Pearson, the world’s leading textbook publisher, needed to create a brand new curriculum based on the Common Core, while at the same time shifting its publishing model from print to digital. Pearson decided to develop tablet-based teaching tools that would improve student achievement and make US students more competitive. This idea supported their core values and goals for further business transformation.
This is a bold action taken by a textbook market leader to solve an important and gnarly problem: textbooks are wildly anachronistic. They are too costly for school districts, too heavy for students, and nowhere near interactive enough for the way young people learn now. It is rare to see the market leader be this bold in disrupting their core products—and for this reason it rose to the level of being truly strategic.
There is a huge promise behind this work: to help students move through many different kinds of material in ways that permit and reward many different learning styles. The “common core” anticipates that students will also get more sophisticated as they age, and the system thus adapts to more and different kinds of content, tools, and usage patterns. This may be the most difficult part of the design challenge, and delivering on that promise will help to keep this digital system from becoming obsolete.
Jurors shared one quibble about this prototype concept: it appears to not be nearly open enough to really reflect modern media norms and ideal educational uses. We suspect there are political reasons for this choice, but getting politics out of our classrooms would be another bold choice that needs to be solved soon.