Co-Lab

Since this is about tutoring, I am looking for students who attended the UX program while there was tutoring. I created a screener to help find participants who would also have either needed or wanted tutoring at the time. They needed to fit in these categories:

1. Attended the ACC UX program for at least 1 Semester from Fall 2019 to the Present
2. Students who struggle with their work
3. Students who may just want someone to help polish or expand their work

For me, contextual inquiries are the best way to get information from people. Since this was during the COVID-19 Pandemic, I forwent the inquiries and did virtual interviews instead. I used ACC’s UX department’s Slack group to reach out to both current and former students. With only a few responses coming in, I switch tactics and send out texts to current and former students that I know fit the criteria. In a couple of days, I am able to recruit a total of 7 people. With the Pandemic making it impossible to speak with anyone face to face, I schedule online calls over Google Meet and record meetings with Open Broadcast Software (OBS).

Of my 7 participants:

1. All are between their mid-20’s to mid-40’s
2. All of them were childless
3. 6 of them worked while in school
4. 3 had graduated prior to being interviewed

So I have a group of students with some level of responsibility outside of school and a few students who know what school was like before the pandemic.

After the interviews, I look through all of the recordings and pick out the utterances that show me beliefs, feelings, and habits. This will help me find patterns that can explain why no one is coming to tutoring. I take all of my utterances and put them in Miro on sticky notes so that I can create an affinity diagram and extract insights.

I was able to gather 4 insights from the utterances:

I present these findings to the key stakeholder, who is the very same professor mentioned in the insights and we begin ideating solutions to address them.

First, we have to change the nature of the TA and Student relationship by exposing the students to the TA more frequently. We come up with the idea of a Co-Lab as a way for students to come and be around the TA. We’ll have the Professor hold their office hours in Co-Lab so that the students will go to it and interact with the TA while they wait to speak with professor. So while the Professor is busy with helping a student, the TA would help other students and thus increase their familiarity and comfort with the TA.

The TA would also be available outside of Co-Lab Hours so that the students have flexibility. We also want the Co-Lab to be a collaborative space where students come to do more than just get help. We want students to think this is a space for them to grow and interact with each other. This would hopefully help keep their sense of independence. They are closer to help and they will feel more comfortable asking for it if they just happen to already be at Co-Lab. This would then hopefully lead to the students engaging more with the TA over time and help reduce the amount of work the professor has.

Since the new format for the classes is still in the trial phase, Co-Lab is only offered for the 4 courses that were participating. This means we could keep Co-lab hours to one day a week, since we were working with a smaller pool of students. Co-Lab had hours twice in that day: 3 Hours in the morning and 3 hours in the evening. Both the Professor and the TA are there and there is always at least 1 person available to help.

Because of the Pandemic, the TA’s role is remote and Co-Lab is virtual. This means we need a place that students can come virtually to interact with the TA. We decided to use Google Meet because it was available to all the students, since they have a school Gmail account and the rest of the Google Suite came with it.

Since nothing is ever perfect the first time around, we adjusted the service as we found problems. I started a Google doc with that has our observation of issues that we either notice or hear from the students.

Google Meet had a pretty big issue. Only one person could speak at a time, meaning only one student at a time could ask for help and only one person could respond to them, which usually ended up being the professor. This meant the load is not being reduced and the students are not engaging with the TA. This also stopped Co-Lab’s collaboration aspect.

Since the students, the Professor and the TA already have access to Blackboard, we switched to its collaboration tool, Collaborate. Collaborate has the ability to create different rooms so that you can have multiple groups of people talk and share without interfering with each other. The TA could help answer students’ questions while the Professor could have one-on-ones, all without interrupting students who were working with each other.

So, we came up with a few more changes. The first one is to have the TA come to a few of the classes and help out there. This would allow the students to become more familiar with them and see them as a resource. Since many of the students were in the same four classes, they would encounter the TA multiple times and get used to them.

The second change was to have more things happen during the evening Co-Lab. We know some UX designers and researchers who had worked on some really cool projects and ask them to come present to the students. We also let the students present things they are working on outside of class so that they could get feedback from their peers.