Because of pandemic learning outcomes, now is a crucial time to use data in your edTech products to reflect where students are really at. According to reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere, students are still experiencing major challenges with reading, writing, and social-emotional skills after spending two years out of the physical classroom.

This new reality requires edTech product designers to tell a better data story within their learning tools. A strong data strategy helps you design a better learning experience for both teachers and students. It will also help you to make more effective internal decisions throughout the design process.

Because when it comes down to it, collecting data in edTech products is about more than generating a report from your data dashboard. Data creates student motivation and engagement, supports teachers who wish to use learning tools more effectively, and influences the design decisions that you make with your stakeholders.

Below, we outline everything you need to know about better ways to use data in student- and teacher-facing edTech products. We’ll also give you a six-step plan for using data to drive edTech design.

Let’s get into it!

Using Data in Student-Facing edTech Products

There’s a direct link between how you use data in edTech products and how engaging your product is for learners. 

By using product data to create a more complete student profile, you can encourage learners to think beyond test scores and grades. With the right content, users can also become self-motivated, directed learners who understand their own role in the educational process.

For example, a product with a mini assessment feature might tell a student user how many other students have taken the same quiz on soft skills, cognitive abilities, and secondary skills. They might even see a leaderboard with a ranking, or be encouraged to improve their scores through additional coursework and digital credentialing.

Although performance data can drive competition, it can also motivate learners without adding stress. Perhaps your data strategy goal is to help promote helpful behaviors or build new habits in learners. If that’s the case, encourage learners to set goals and track performance or identify which behaviors they’d like to improve.

When you design data in edTech with specific behaviors in mind, it becomes a way to build student engagement throughout the entire experience. You can even eliminate external pressures of competition, while inviting learners to take a more active role in their educational goals and progress. 

Using Data in Teacher-Facing edTech Products

edTech products are data-run machines. Data is at the heart of what products do, which means educators often have access to incredible, detailed reporting that supports their jobs. 

But reporting isn’t all that teachers are interested in. Student and teacher engagement data can tell a much richer story. It can also provide educators with more opportunities to intervene with struggling students or challenge learners who need new heights to climb.

Software companies in the edTech space have already made great strides with predictive data. For example, Blackboard Predict uses analytics of student behavior to identify at-risk students. The program then prompts teachers to intervene and provide additional support.

In addition to predictive features, prompts that showcase comparison data or break down time investments are especially useful for educator personas. If you’re designing a professional development tool, for example, you might share that other teachers using the platform have adopted a specific assessment technique to become more effective in the classroom. Prompts about minimal usage per week to improve outcomes or satisfaction would also work well.

You already use many data points to build engagement with learners. Improve teacher engagement by weaving data strategically into your onboarding or training features. You’ll not only tell a better story using the data you have, you’ll make each of your features more useful. This ensures that educators are using your edTech tools effectively and making a real difference in their classrooms.

6 Ways to Use Data to Improve Your edTech Product

In addition to integrating data into teacher- and student-facing products, you can use data in edTech products to drive product strategy and design thinking. 

Here are 6 ways you can use data to improve your edTech product from the very beginning stages of design:

1. Illustrate industry trends.

We’re not necessarily recommending that you be “on trend.” But trends often point to what users need. What are students struggling with right now? Where are teachers asking for more support?

Pain points are very directional for product design. Use this data to build alignment with internal stakeholders and prioritize what you should design first.

2. Decide on the role data will play in product design.

When you’re still conceiving the project, identify how data will support your users throughout the experience. For example, you might align stakeholders on the following questions:

• How can you use data to motivate behaviors, especially around using products with fidelity or helping users develop new habits?
• Where will data be most helpful throughout the learning or teaching process?
• What user behaviors indicate struggle or challenge? Which indicate success?

3. Leverage the creativity of your engineering team.

When your engineers understand your data strategy they can help you connect the dots in your product content and design.For example, you may wish to know whether your product can interact with a national dataset that shows users a national average—not just averages in their own group, classroom, or school.

You may also want to help engineers anticipate future designs and data strategy, like showcasing user completion data in an R2 design—something that can’t be demonstrated at launch.

Engineers are a great creative resource. Don’t forget to use them!

4. Collect soft data from users to design adaptive content.

Qualitative edTech research like interviews and surveys give users more opportunities to provide feedback on your designs.

Soft data also paves the pathway for designing more adaptive content, further supporting the needs of content engineers and product designers. Consider strategies like:

• Asking students and teachers to rate their experiences or answer a 1-minute question about UX.
• Reflecting soft data back to users to give them more agency about what they’re learning. For example, a prompt in a math product might suggest that the user seems to dislike doing geometry problems and could try a different type of problem solving. 
• Building engagement by delivering formats that users really love.
• Detecting skills users don’t have or which learning styles they love the most.
• Collecting data on users’ biggest challenges, like staying on task. How learners self-identify challenges or learning preferences is interesting alternative data for teachers to have.

5. Validate your UX and design decisions along the way.

In addition to soft data, don’t forget to crunch some numbers. Quantitative data helps you tell the story of the product in ways that will enhance your user’s experience. In addition to reporting, you can:

• Provide friendly ways for educators to drill down on report findings.
• Create better user behaviors to motivate and engage.
• Use engagement data post-launch to continue iterating on feature design.

6. Reflect on your design process.

You can even build a data story around your own product team to improve your design process as you iterate. Use project management tools to identify which features took the longest to design and build.

You might also wish to review which designs offered your team the least effort for the greatest reward. Where are your wins? How can that support the next phase of design?

Not everyone in edTech is excited about data. Chances are, teachers are uncomfortable generating and using reports, and students are zipping through learning content to check a to-do off their list.

It’s our job as edTech designers to package data in an accessible way. We can even turn it into an elegant, simple, easy-to-use asset that doesn’t seem like data on the surface. By integrating qualitative and quantitative data more fully into your user experiences, you’ll improve engagement across the board.

Right now is also the perfect time to re-think your approach to data in edTech products. As students and teachers struggle to bounce back from pandemic learning loss, edTech product owners can tell stronger data stories, design more adaptive content, and pave the way for better classroom outcomes. 

Are you re-thinking the relationship between data and edTech product design? Contact us below to find out how we can help!

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!