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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

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Organization of Information

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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.

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BEFORE

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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

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