One of the most important principles of learning science is to move away from more “traditional” modes of instruction, like lecturing or explaining concepts, and toward a more interactive experience.

After all, when learners have access to more interactive educational technology, they’re able to retain and apply new concepts more easily.

It’s important for us to understand this as edTech designers, too.

We already know there’s a direct relationship between user interaction and product engagement. When learners participate within a product, your engagement automatically increases.

But what we may not always consider is how to optimize for user engagement—without disregarding what we know about effective UX design for education.

In edTech, the answer almost always comes back to—you guessed it—learning science!

4 Learning Science Principles That Support Interactive Educational Technology

Thankfully, there are easy ways to apply learning science techniques directly to common edTech features.

The teachers who use your tools will see better learner outcomes—and you’ll see more student engagement than ever. 

Whether you build learning concepts into your onboarding feature or design a sandbox learning tool, try one of these four learning science techniques today for better learning and product outcomes. 

1. Explanation and Contextualization

What is it?

When educators use “explanation and contextualization” to teach students new concepts, they provide students with familiar, relatable scenarios to make it easier to understand or apply something new.

After all, it’s much easier to get learners to stretch and grow if there’s a healthy tension between what they already know and what they’re still learning. Students will also be more likely to draw on familiar concepts to make new connections or applications.

This happens all the time in schools. Just think of how common word problems are in math instruction, or how students are asked to draw from real-world experiences to make arguments in writing instruction!

What does explanation and contextualization look like in edTech?

edTech designers can apply this concept to interactive educational technology in a number of ways, from learning games to high-concept narratives.

You can leverage animation, video, and other kinds of content to help students draw from real-world or fictional scenarios to better understand new concepts. Building interactive simulations also allows product teams to teach concepts through memorable game situations.

For example, many classrooms now use Minecraft to help students learn programming and other STEM skills. The colorful, imaginative world is fun and engaging. Students learn about everything from the Civil Rights Movement to climate change while practicing real-world problem solving.

At Backpack Interactive, we used this technique in our “Passport to Mars” project for LEGO and Scholastic. Students are introduced to an imaginative fictional scenario–  leading a team of astronauts and scientists on a mission to Mars. This concept worked not just because it was fun, but because we relied on students’ existing understanding of space travel stories to create a context for learning about real-world science and STEM careers.

As you apply “explanation and contextualization” to your technological solution, don’t be afraid to leverage genre tropes to give students easy inroads to learning content. You can even help students go beyond solving problems that demonstrate understanding and use contextualization as a stepping stone for more abstract or challenging concepts, too.

2. “Before & After” Reflection

What is it?

Using the reflective technique of “elaboration,” learners make connections between new information and prior knowledge. 

When a learner connects a new idea in their working memory to their long-term memory, they retrieve the information they need using well-worn neural pathways. As with contextualization, this technique helps learners understand new concepts, remember new information, and apply or extend concepts later on. 

Your teacher persona will be very familiar with this technique, and there are numerous reflective prompts teachers already use in their classrooms. These include: 

• 3-2-1 prompts, in which students share three things they learned, two interesting facts, and one thing they still have a question about.
• Drawing pictures of new concepts.
• “I learned, I noticed, I wonder, I think” prompts that help students articulate their understanding and continue to generate their own questions. 

By providing students a framework for curiosity, teachers use reflection as a way to both help students retain information and to encourage agency over their own learning.

How does reflection work in interactive edTech products?

Product and curriculum designers can work together to provide teachers with a set of digital tools for helping students reflect, including templates and lesson plans that outline these techniques and provide better results in the classroom. 

From the student-facing side of your product, you might consider reflective prompts or multi-modal responses that reinforce learning. Even quick-response emoji reactions can help students break down bigger, more complex concepts and digest them more easily. 

In addition to providing users with more opportunities to react to content, you can also offer ways for learners to quickly access past lessons or information. Encouraging reflection on past work will help learners scaffold up to new concepts, and this can be accomplished within your product’s UI.

Professional learning environments can also encourage before and after reflection as a mode of problem solving. For example, in the Arts Hub we recently designed for Boys & Girls Club of America instructors, we made it easy for arts educators to discuss lessons and support others who have similar classroom challenges. By helping to solve others’ problems, educators learn more about their own challenges and even receive feedback on their lesson plans along the way.

3. Learn by Doing 

What is it?

When learners or facilitators train in new concepts in real-time, low-stakes environments, they’re “learning by doing.” Creating a low-stakes environment for this kind of learning is key. If learners are not penalized in terms of their grades or their classroom outcomes, there is more incentive to try and potentially fail at something new.

Learners in this scenario might watch and model new behaviors or strategies, verbalizing their answers or the process by which they arrived at an answer. Teachers use this strategy in ELA classrooms all the time, and it is slowly being adopted in STEM classrooms, too. 

After all, educators don’t get the same level of information just from looking at written work or math proofs. Verbal explanations are a great shortcut to understanding both student misconceptions and their available problem-solving strategies, so educators can course correct as needed.

All forms of feedback are valuable in “learn by doing” pedagogy. Students who arrive at the wrong answer will benefit from correction or intervention, while their instructors gain more insights by hearing how their student thinks. 

Even if students produce the correct answer, instructor feedback can extend the principles of the lesson or help these students better understand what makes their answer a good one. Once teachers have insights into student reasoning, it’s much easier to identify the building blocks that will unlock more complex concepts.

How do “learn by doing” strategies work in interactive edTech products?

From simulation exercises to verbal assessment, you can support participatory knowledge building in both student- and teacher-facing products in a range of ways. 

For example, when Backpack Interactive designed Heinemann’s Listening to Learn, we helped transform professional learning video content for math instructors into a participatory teaching lab. 

Educators watch as an expert interviews a student about their numerical reasoning skills. They are then asked to choose which problem-solving strategies the student demonstrates. 

Users are given not just the correct answer, but the best one, including explanations of which strategies the expert would use and why. Because educators are essentially practicing verbal assessment skills in real time, it’s more memorable—and it makes a real student assessment less intimidating.

Better feedback keeps students motivated and engaged in their learning content, too. As students progress, feedback encourages them to continue to apply new concepts in different learning experiences.

In edTech, we can even scale just-in-time feedback with support from artificial intelligence. For example, when students perform practical skills or produce knowledge in real time, AI is capable of providing qualitative feedback on their efforts. With great content design, students understand that there is more to a “right” or “wrong” answer than the answer itself. 

4. Learning through Play

What is it?

Learning through play involves creating a low-stakes, alternate world and using a metaphor for real information or educational concepts. If students are learning about space exploration by designing their own mission for example, you’ll engage their imagination, encourage openness, and eliminate fears of failure.

What does “learning through play” look like in interactive edTech products?

A digital medium is a great place to create an imaginary world and introduce low-stakes learning or sandbox games. Animation, video, sound, character, and multiple storylines each break up imaginary worlds or stories into economical pieces for a cohesive learning experience. 

Because of the pervasiveness of video games, students are already comfortable with being introduced to a whole new set of rules. They are skilled at learning by discovery, rather than by meticulously reading a long list of instructions. edTech product designers can take advantage of these baseline user skills and help students discover rules in simple and intuitive ways. 

One of the best ways to facilitate learning through play in edTech is to incorporate learning content, new challenges, and assessment into overall gameplay, rather than separating them into an imaginative experience and a multiple choice assessment. 

The more you integrate assessment directly into your student experience, the more powerful the entire experience will be. You’ll also provide opportunities for educators to learn more about students than they would through traditional programs or assessments, including their problem-solving strategies or creative choices.

Each of these learning science techniques support the way students learn, while increasing the amount of interaction and engagement in your edTech product. Not only will the content in your learning tool be more memorable, it will also address real teacher needs around process skills, assessment, and just-in-time feedback.

Whether you’re designing a low-stakes environment for students to practice new concepts or a professional learning tool for educators, these fundamental principles will make your features more effective—and more fun!

Are you designing a new learning tool for the fall? Contact us below to find out how we can help!

Remote learning needs, pandemic learning loss, and changing personas have re-shaped the edTech industry over the past three years. With new insights from students and educators, product owners are now designing based on a more nuanced understanding of what our users need and want. 

The result? Rapid edTech innovation, from key software integrations for educators to better reporting data for the parents monitoring their child’s learning activities at home. Gone are the days of ignoring the parent persona or assuming that teacher expectations for edTech products are lower than their expectations for consumer design.

Here are five examples of edTech innovation that emerged because of insights from the pandemic—and how you can address them in your own product designs to make a long-lasting impact on your learning tools.

1. Emerging edTech personas

Remote learning caused a massive shift in the relationship students, teachers, and parents have with learning technology. These changes mean that edTech designers and product owners also need to approach learning technology differently.

We might once have assumed that teachers rely on paper and printable resources, even when using the occasional edTech product. Now, however, we now know they’re fully committed to digital learning tools.

From high-flex lessons to virtual curricula, teacher acceptance of edTech is widespread. A teacher’s user baseline (the baseline assumptions designers can make about teachers’ needs and pain points) has changed for good.

But teachers aren’t the only personas whose user baselines have shifted. Parent users are also becoming more sophisticated, curious, and confident when it comes to their learning tech choices.

Thanks to remote learning, parents have a brand new set of expectations about the products their children use for school. Some parents are even looking for supplemental technology to enhance what their children are doing at home.

Pre-pandemic, administrators largely held the role of edTech buyer. Now, however, they have shifted their focus to providing their students with basic hardware needs and internet access, so they can adequately promote remote learning.

While this has been a difficult time for everyone in the education ecosphere, it’s resulted in an exciting evolution of user relationships to technology.

By conducting edTech research to monitor these shifts, product designers can reflect new, more sophisticated needs in their learning tools, rather than trying to create products driven solely by content. 

After all, edTech innovation is driven by paying attention to our users. The learning tools that will stand out in future markets will be expertly designed solutions targeted to these microshifts in student, teacher, and administrator personas.

2. Cross-curricular collaboration & SEL features

Social distancing has only emphasized the need for social emotional learning (SEL) across the curriculum. Educators who already believed in group projects and peer-to-peer learning are looking for more effective ways to incorporate student collaboration into online coursework. Meanwhile, teachers who don’t normally incorporate SEL have likely been mandated to work it into their existing curriculum.

As edTech designers, we must now be more deliberate and intentional about including these elements in our products. With features like multi-modal responses, class voting, and threaded discussion boards, innovative edTech tools can help students build connections with one another and reflect on their interactions with peers. 

After all, when teachers have SEL-powered tools at their fingertips, they’re able to emphasize successful communication, collaboration, and reflection alongside student content mastery. And that’s a win-win for the entire class.

3. Virtual Reality and Asynchronous Help Content

Building interactivity into online lessons proved challenging for even the most superstar educators. Peer-to-peer and group learning features will help teachers increase student engagement. But virtual reality, just-in-time teacher help videos, and other edTech innovations will boost engagement even further.

Now is a great time for edTech brands to experiment with XR, even in products for very young students. Virtual reality lessons help teachers explain complex concepts from afar, whether students are learning how rocket engines work or interacting with models to explore math and physics concepts.

And while we believe in well-designed features that facilitate real-time learning, asynchronous videos and explainers have real value for student engagement, too. As students move through lessons or learning sequences at their own pace, pre-recorded content creates opportunities for them to receive just-in-time help from their teacher.

With more asynchronous sequencing and planning, distance learning becomes personalized or adaptable and therefore more engaging. If a concept doesn’t make sense, students can watch the explainer and try again; re-watching is a great way to expand or deepen knowledge, too.

4. Re-imagined Adaptive Content

Truly innovative educational technology facilitates adaptive learning in both teacher-facing and student-facing products.

Every teacher wants to have more one-on-one time with students. Learning tools can help teachers do this at scale. Learning tools can provide supplemental resources for areas of struggle or personalized check-ins based on individual progress. These features can help teachers streamline one-on-one attention and provide more adaptive pathways for their students.

While remote learning caused plenty of new challenges for students, it did give students new opportunities to experience self-paced learning. By its very nature, self-paced learning is adaptive. edTech can do even more to take lessons from remote learning and apply them to student-facing synchronous and asynchronous tools for better engagement.

5. “Meta” Teacher Onboarding

No, we’re not talking about Facebook’s rebranding efforts! But we do think better product support and “meta” onboarding experiences for teachers will make or break future remote learning tools.

During remote learning, teachers spent hours they didn’t have cobbling disparate digital tools, platforms, and resources together to support and deliver their curriculum. They continue to need more support integrating their software choices in order to get the most out of every tool.

Teachers love when new learning tools provide a step-by-step vision for integrating the product with the solutions they already use. These proactive features support teachers as they onboard their own students to a digital classroom, cutting down on the amount of time they need to spend in a “tech support” role. After all, we want teachers to spend more time doing what they do best—teaching our students!

edTech innovation based on user research conducted throughout the pandemic will continue to make long-lasting impacts on product design. Despite the many challenges of remote learning, there are more opportunities than ever to design exciting new tools and features that meet teachers, students and parents right where they are. 

Are you starting to design a new edTech product? Find out how Backpack Interactive can help! Reach out below.

As schools returned to in-person learning last fall, teachers identified both a student learning gap and a persistent loss of social emotional learning (SEL) skills. 

After all, when students are in a classroom with their peers, they collaborate, share, and find their place in a learning community. Unfortunately, remote education meant that students didn’t have the same opportunities to practice these skills. 

That means it’s up to teachers to find new ways to address students’ SEL needs to avoid student stress, frustration, and burn-out. Thankfully, edTech has the power to help. We can design digital tools that build students’ SEL skills and support teachers with professional learning content. 

Whether you’re designing a remote learning tool, a product for in-person classrooms, or edTech that helps teachers switch seamlessly between learning environments, here’s everything you need to know about using edTech to teach SEL.

How to Integrate SEL Features into Remote Learning Tools

SEL skills are compatible with every subject area, and they’re especially important to integrate into features for remote-first products.

To be even more valuable to teachers and administrators looking for SEL solutions, here are three things your remote learning tools should do:

1. Encourage Multi-Modal Responses and Student Collaboration

Many in-person teaching strategies that promote SEL growth translate well to remote learning. This includes project-based learning and other collaborative tools that offer students the ability to create responses in their preferred medium.

Take Flipgrid, for example. In this tool, students answer academic questions in multiple modes, from video to written response. The ability to respond in different media encourages students to engage in creative expression, a key component of social emotional learning. Teachers can also easily build a collaborative element into Flipgrid assignments, further strengthening students’ SEL skills.

Tools like Flipgrid offer important lessons for edTech companies looking to expand how students respond to digital assignments and collaborate with their peers online. When students are able to choose the response medium, they have more agency over their own learning. This leads to more engagement with your tool—and with their course work.

2. Provide More Opportunities to Teach Digital Citizenship

Online student interactions are completely different from discussions that take place in classrooms. They’re most often asynchronous, written, and mediated by teachers or skilled facilitators. 

Whether they’re commenting on other students’ work or contributing to a digital discussion, students must still practice important SEL skills online, like social awareness and building relationships with their peers. 

These elements of digital instruction have advantages for teachers, too. Threaded discussion boards and other types of digital interactions provide teachers with visible records of their students’ work. 

These records are especially helpful when teachers have to translate SEL lessons into a digital environment.  

The best digital tools designed for education support teachers as they examine student interactions, providing opportunities to offer lessons on digital citizenship to their class.

3. Level the Playing Field for Students with Special Needs

Our turn to technology during remote learning has, in some instances, leveled the playing field for our most vulnerable students. 

Unlike in a physical classroom, digital intervention tools don’t highlight differences because students are working from home. Students with different social preferences have more options for how they interact with their fellow classmates, perhaps by using the chat function, turning their camera off, or taking computer breaks during class. 

Meanwhile, students with learning differences can take advantage of intervention tools more regularly. For example, a reader who struggles with dyslexia might stay at grade level by listening to audio books. Ultimately, the more proactive you are in designing for special needs, the more accessible your remote learning tools will be for all users.

Teaching SEL with edTech During In-Person Learning 

It’s not easy to manage a classroom. With the right SEL features, your edTech tools can better support teachers working in small groups or integrating academic games into their individual learning time.

The best tools for teaching crucial SEL skills provide students with positive feedback, opportunities to make decisions, and chances to reflect.

Build Student Confidence

From prep work to individual interventions, teachers have so many responsibilities that they can’t necessarily check in with each student every day.

edTech tools can take at least some of this burden off of teachers by providing immediate feedback or rewards for student effort.

Whether students are working toward a badge or tracking a habit, receiving immediate positive reinforcement makes a big difference in student resilience and confidence.

Even with support from edTech tools, teachers still play a crucial role in helping students develop SEL skills like grit. This is especially true when students are using academic games during individual learning time.

For example, teachers might ask which skills a discouraged student can use to overcome a challenge in gameplay. The more students are asked to develop creative solutions to problems instead of giving up, the stronger their SEL skills become.

Encourage Agency

When teachers use edTech products during in-person lessons, they should be able to easily integrate student agency into learning.

Students might be encouraged to follow a pathway of their own choosing through an academic game, for example. By making their own choices, students have more ownership over their learning, a key component of teaching SEL.

Where can your product better support a students’ need for choice?

Build Moments for Reflection

Reflection, in the form of journal prompts, reading logs, or other assignments is also a key component of SEL.

By stopping to consider their own progress or the challenges they face with material, students become more aware of what they’re learning. They also consider how those skills might be applied in different contexts.

Reflection can be integrated into digital tools with any kind of learning content, from math to reading to science. Whether you ask students to journal directly within your product or offer curriculum prompts to teachers, edTech can easily address the need for student reflection.

Supporting SEL Needs with More Responsive edTech

Well into 2021, teachers faced uncertainty about whether their lessons would take place in person or virtually. Many teachers also had students cycling out of in-person classrooms to isolate or quarantine and recorded in-person instruction for asynchronous learners. 

This reality required teachers to design “high-flex lessons,” or lessons that could be taught both remotely and in-person with few changes. edTech that helps teachers shift seamlessly between asynchronous and synchronous learning and lesson planning will continue to be valuable for teachers and school districts in 2022.

Solutions can be as simple as improving product integration with existing communication tools like Slack. In a learning environment for high school or college students, Slack can facilitate peer-to-peer learning by encouraging discussion, Q&A, and other forms of student response. Both asker and respondee learn SEL skills—just as they would in a traditional classroom.

Digital conversations can also become focal points of whole class or in-person instruction, helping teachers to build out a more flexible lesson plan. When a facilitator is able to point out important moments in any type of student conversation, other students learn from those interactions—and the ideas captured within them. 

Throughout 2022, we’ll continue to see a big push from educators and administrators for learning tools that address SEL. The pandemic made it more important than ever for product owners to understand how teachers integrate SEL skills into their instruction—and to find effective ways to support SEL instruction digitally. 

Are you designing a new SEL feature for your learning tool? Contact us below to find out how we can help!