Enhancing user flow of ELI website
The ELI(English Language Institute) at the University of Michigan provides language, academic, and intercultural instruction for international students and scholars, and others who speak English as a second language. This project helps to create an effective workflow and information-sharing process for a teaching assistant prep course at ELI and update the information architecture of the website.
Overview
Problem summary:
-
TA prep course ELI 994: Pedagogy, Culture, and Language
-
ELI department is facing challenges surrounding enrollment in the course
-
The information-sharing process is inefficient
-
Too many methods of communication, which cause confusion
-
ELI department is seeking to simplify and consolidate its methods of communication
Interview Protocol
We conducted several interviews with different stakeholders to find out the detailed workflows of the teaching assistant enrollment and their pain points. There are three kinds of people are involved. One is the course coordinators, who are responsible for the enrollment process and sending all types of notifications. One is the college coordinators that nominate the prospective students who are going to be teaching assistants, and the other one is the students who have taken this course.
For more details on the protocol, please click to READ MORE
Affinity Wall
We have extracted key sentences from the interviews and created an affinity wall. According to these keywords, we concluded that their pain points mainly come from two aspects: Communication & Organization of Information.
Communication
Organization of Information
For more details of the affinity wall, please click to READ MORE
Key Findings: Student Perspective
Awareness
“On multiple occasions, students have been confused or worried about when the nomination process begins” - A01
Logistical Challenges
“The first thing international students want to know about is housing” - S01
Access to Information
“Important message with a schedule would have been most helpful.” - S01
Key Findings: Admin Perspective
Course Website
A01 describes the course website as "not the easiest" because "things get buried in there" -A01
Sharing Information
“I don’t know about a lot about housing so I cannot always provide students with an accurate response” - C01
Communicating Value
R01 says "there could be a lot more done with explaining to students why they need to take the course" -R01
Recommendation: Improve the organization of public information
By publicizing necessary public information to minimize the communication work for admin people to improve the efficiency.
BEFORE
AFTER
Recommendation: Improve the organization of private information
As for the information that is only shared between ELI and College admin, we suggest they use a mutual platform where different users have different levels of access and each one can upload and download the information they need in one place
One possibility: Google Workspace
Staff are already familiar
Use a Google Form to standardize the nomination list process and make inputs available as Google Sheets
Document sharing settings are highly versatile
Archive documentation for future reference to build institutional knowledge
For more research details, read the final report, please click READ MORE