College Modality Research

Northcentral Technical College offers classes in-person and online. Many classes are a combination of both and have specific terms associated to them.

Process Overview

Understanding the problem - Client consultation

Protocol - Creation, brainstorming

Note taking - Rainbow chart tracking, quotes

Synthesis - Qualitative affinity mapping, quantitative analysis, Excel

Findings report & Video highlights - Camtasia, video editing and compiling

Presentation - Client presentation, data visualization, slide deck

Challenge

Role

Northcentral Technical College (NTC) wanted to know if all of their class instruction mode offerings and terms made sense to their students.

They wanted to make sure they were offering and communicating the optimal course modalities clearly.

My role in this project included consulting in the creation of protocol, watching the 17-hour long interviews and taking notes on them.

I created a findings document which was then presented to my managers.

I created a slide deck which was added on to by the CEO of the company who presented it to the client.

Understanding the Problem

Northcentral Technical College has 9 course offering modes: In-person, Online, Online (Virtual College), Computer Conferencing, NTC Connect, Blended, Hybrid, Interactive Video Conferencing and self-paced.

They also acknowledged they had many course offerings and they wanted to know if it was possible to reduce the number of modality offerings while still being perceived as flexible by the prospective and current students.

Protocol

To determine this, we sought to understand the desires and motivations in student course selection through the protocol.

Some questions we asked:

What would be the most important factors for you in deciding which class section to take?

Are there other ways that you would like to see classes offered? That you might be interested in if they were available?

“Sophie is a student at NTC next fall, and she is going to take an Accounting course _______”. How would you describe that mode of learning? (Fill in with the following words)

“Online”
“Face-to-face”
“Online in a structured way”
“Online in a ‘your pace’ way”
“Online with an interactive livestream”
“via ‘Virtual college’”
“via NTC Connect”
“Hybrid”
“Hybrid in a structured way”
“Hybrid in a flexible way”

Note Taking

My main task in this project was taking notes on the 17-hour-long recorded interviews. Notetaking was done by dividing up questions in an Excel sheet then noting participant responses. For repeated response was denoted by marking another color in the participant category. This technique is called rainbow note-taking. I chose it because it allows me to visually scan for how many times something was recorded and form themes and trends more easily. I also took notes on potentially relevant quotes that participants said.

Synthesis & Results

My Synthesis was done in Excel. I found a few main trends.

The three most important things for the student to know about a class are as follows:

Content Structure – Examples: no due dates, set due dates, set own plan for due dates,
Meeting Structure – No meetings, meeting frequency and dates and time, meetings for questions only, meetings for groupwork
Location – online, in-person, both online and in-person

*With this system it is important to note there are meetings, the location will need to be specified for each

The other element is the ability for these things to be flexible which could look like:

Content Structure – Ability to move back due dates, or be stricter for students who need more structure
Meeting Structure – recorded lectures, optional meetings, meeting for special circumstances
Location - Attend livestream if can’t make it, choose to go online vs in-person

Findings Report

I put together highlight videos in Camtasia. Each video was exemplifying one point or question. I noted some quotes and the time on the recording when they were said so it was easy to go back and find them.

For the findings document, I decided to split it into two main sections: Terms and definitions and modality preferences. There were the two main areas we focused on.

The presentation that was given to the client was based on the findings document that can be found below.

Reflection

The main takeaway from this project had to do with the types of deliverables. Our client was university administration. They were academics so a more academic-sounding findings document was appropriate for them. However, had the client been someone else, it may not have been. I unintentionally did this, but next time I will have to be more strategic.

I also initially struggled with finding a way to compare definitions of things. I ended up breaking them down more and categorizing them by theme and like responses. But I did learn that it was effective at spotting small differences in definitions.