CourseKey

Providing higher education institutions with critical attendance and academic tracking solutions.

My Role

Sole Product Designer

CEO, VP of Customer Success, VP of Business Development, Product Manager (1), Engineers (8)

Team

Project Dates

Mar 2020 - Jan 2021

Context

CourseKey

CourseKey is an EdTech B2B SaaS startup with a patented attendance solution for career schools. The CourseKey digital platform allows students to check in for attendance via a mobile app that uses sound and GPS to validate student attendance.

Tracking student attendance at career schools is essential for two reasons:

  1. Schools must prove that each student completes the required hours for their program for graduation.

  2. Schools must demonstrate adherence to compliance regulations to stay accredited and receive Title IV funding from the government.

The [COVID-19] Problem

When COVID-19 hit, the need for tech solutions increased in scale and complexity for higher education institutions. New government requirements for remote and hybrid learning environments proved hard to track, especially for schools without a robust tech stack.

Top challenges resulting from COVID-19:

  • Accurately and efficiently recording attendance in remote learning environments

  • Administering COVID-19 symptom forms on campus

  • Identifying the last day of attendance for a particular student

My contributions

Collaborated with Product and Client Success to define functionality, uncover client needs, and evaluate our value-add.

Ideation

Met with partnering schools weekly to understand government requirements, present new designs, and quickly iterate over new ideas.

Research & Testing

Created all mock-ups, prototypes, and design specs for multiple concurrent projects. Worked with Engineering to ensure quality implementation.

Design

Execution

Prioritized workstreams to provide timely finalized designs to the 10+ person Engineering team and prevent a design bottleneck.

Solutions

1. Activity-to-Time Attendance Conversion

I interviewed leaders of multiple schools to better understand new pain points stemming from the pandemic. Recording and viewing student attendance for asynchronous and blended courses ranked highest. 

  • Synchronous Courses: Classes that run in real-time, with students and instructors attending from one or more locations.

  • Asynchronous Courses: Classes that run on a more relaxed schedule, with students accessing class materials during different hours and from different locations.

  • Blended Courses: Classes run on both synchronous and asynchronous schedules.

As stated by the Department of Education, schools should award a pre-defined amount of time when a student completes an asynchronous activity. (e.g., a student submits a quiz on their own time at a remote location and receives 30 minutes of attendance). 

Using a Learning Management System (LMS), like Canvas or Blackboard, students can submit their completion of asynchronous activities. However, these systems cannot convert activities into time, nor display them in context with synchronous student attendance records. Instructors spend hours each day manually converting submissions to time and entering them into CourseKey or another system.

Automated Data Conversion & Display

I designed an Activity-to-Time Attendance Conversion feature that automatically pulls activities completed by a student from a school's LMS, converts them to a predefined amount of time (configurable through the CourseKey interface), and displays them in context with other course records. 

(e.g., a student completes a quiz in Canvas. It is automatically converted to 30 minutes of asynchronous attendance and posted to CourseKey.)

Instructor Flow 1 - Course Records

The flow below illustrates an instructor navigating through their course's attendance records. They begin looking at the Records Overview tab, which includes students' total awarded time (sync + async attendance), then navigate to the Synchronous and Asynchronous tabs to get more granular details about activity and attendance records. 

Instructor Flow 2 - Student Records

The flow below illustrates an instructor navigating from the Course Records page to the attendance details of an individual student. They navigate through an overview of weekly awarded time, a progress bar of total course attendance organized by attendance type, and detailed drill-downs of each type of attendance.

Student Flow - Student Records

Students needed a way to view attendance and course progress on their CourseKey student app. The flow below demonstrates a student checking their total awarded time, required time, and synchronous and asynchronous totals. The students can view the details of how and when both types of attendance time were collected, calculated, and awarded.

Feature Impact

CourseKey was the first and only solution on the market for calculating asynchronous attendance. It added immense value for schools struggling to survive during the pandemic. As a result, sales took off CourseKey expanded its team to keep up with its growing client base.

2. Daily Student Health Check

When students were allowed back on campus, schools were required to administer a daily symptom form to all in-person students upon entry. Staff spent hours each day filing them, and each student spent a few minutes filling out a paper.

I designed a Daily Student Health Check solution that allowed students to confirm whether or not they have symptoms in about 5 seconds - paper-free. If students have symptoms, they are instructed to return home, and the system notifies the school of their excused absence. If students don't have symptoms, they get a Green Pass to show staff upon entering their building.

Feature Impact

Because of the relative simplicity of the Daily Student Health Check feature, we were able to release it within a matter of weeks from conception. The majority of our clients added it to their contract immediately, and it became the project with the highest return on investment at CourseKey.

3. Last Activity Recorded Page

If students fall below the required attendance threshold for their program, they are no longer eligible to graduate and get dropped from their program. The result is a student without a degree and a loss of profit for the school.

To ensure as many students graduate as possible, registrars and program directors monitor student attendance and intervene if they notice a student getting close to the threshold. They look at the attendance records of each student to uncover those falling behind - an extremely inefficient process. The pandemic exacerbated the issue with the additional complications of documenting asynchronous attendance. As a result, staff spent more time figuring out who was absent than reaching out to get students back on track.

I designed the Last Activity Recorded (LAR) page for staff to have a list of all students organized by their respective 'last activity recorded' date. The system crawls each student's synchronous and asynchronous attendance records and ranks them by 'days since LAR' so schools can intervene before students become ineligible to graduate.

Feature Impact

Our clients loved the LAR page because it aggregated pertinent data from different systems and displayed it in a format specifically designed for their most crucial outreach use case. This concept prompted the idea for the next-generation version of CourseKey. See the case-study on Cortex.

Results

Business Outcomes

CourseKey's client base quadrupled after launching the solutions above. By the end of 2020, Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) had tripled to $3MM. We received funding and buy-out offers and, in January 2021, secured a $9MM Series B funding round. CourseKey also filed a provisional patent for the Activity-to-Time Attendance Conversion software. It was the third patent for the company and the first that I've co-authored.

Professional Growth

By working closely with the CEO, VP of Client Success, and others on the executive team, I learned how to identify opportunity areas and create solutions to attract new business and upsell current clients. My business acumen improved, and I gained confidence when presenting to and collaborating with executives and external clients.

The post-launch client feedback transformed how I regarded my skills as a designer. Schools saved time and money using the solutions I designed, freeing them to focus more on what matters - the students. My work's positive impact on schools inspired me to think bigger, and I became eager to improve more people's lives through thoughtful design.