Final Design
By sharing our early ideas with each other, an outline of what would come to be our final design began to take shape. Each idea had something unique to offer, helping us to eventually converge upon a more holistic final design.
This section was informed by the works of Bates (2019), Christensen (2008), Milstein & Chapel, and Oyarzun & Conklin (2020).
Teachers need to find the middle ground between complete learner freedom and over-direction to enable learners to develop the key skills needed in a digital age.
Bates, 2019, p. 224
Designing the Solution
Logic Model
Creating a Logic Model allowed us to really take stock of all the moving parts of our design. It forced us to ask and then answer questions that were as simple as, "What do we need to make this work?" all the way up to "What is the long-term impact (beyond the scope of our learning goals) that we want this learning to have?"
Learning Process
Below is an example of a learner track (1 of 3 that range from beginner to advanced) that a learner can expect to follow. This learner track goes into deeper granular details about the lessons than the logic model above.
Learner Experience
But how does this learner experience look and feel to the actual learner? We brought back one of the personas we created from our Learner Analysis below in order to gauge how well we did in designing a solution that would fit her specific characteristics, such as her needs, desires, prior knowledge levels, etc.
Age: 23
Status: In a relationship
Education: B.A. Education
Job: Public School Teacher
City: Chicago, IL
Bria
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Bio: Bria is a recent grad who is working her first job as a public school teacher. She recently married her partner Simon, and they are now making various financial decisions but she feels unconfident about her skills.
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Personality: Ambitious and eager to become more knowledgable.
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Goals: To save money for a house with her partner.
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Motivations: To break from her family's history of poor money handling and achieve financial stability.
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Challenges: Doesn't know where to start or how, even with all the free resources.
Learner Journey Map
With Bria's background and goals in mind, we applied a journey map to visualize what her experiences would actually look like. Below is what Bria's personal experience with our solution could potentially look like at each stage of the journey.
The Solution
Taking all of the aforementioned steps as well as our constraints into consideration, we concluded that the final solution would work best as a feature within the existing Coinbase app. Below is our final ideation on what this might look like before we move into the prototyping stage.
Learning Feature
Our solution would exist as a feature within the Coinbase App
Knowing that we could leverage the existing resources of our sponsor company, we recommend incorporating this solution as a feature within the Coinbase app.
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The Design Rationale below provides deeper insight into all of the design decisions illustrated above.
Cognitivism
Learning Theory
Interest-Driven Learning
Game-Based Learning
Anchored Instruction
Learning Method
Mobile App
Technology
Video
eLearning
Media
Design Rationale
Quick Overview
Below is a quick overview of our design rationale, which explains how different elements of our process helped inform one another. Each of our decisions is grounded in the empirical evidence we gathered as well as by the supporting literature.
Our Guiding Learning Theory
Brief History
Cognitivism came about as a response to what many scientists found to be shortcomings with the prevailing Behaviorist paradigm at the time. In particular, it sought to fill the gap that Behaviorism was unable to account for, namely the inner mental processes of the individual that were unobservable to the eye.
Information Processing
Cognitivist approach to defining how information is processed, stored, and retrieved. This influenced the role of pre-existing schema greatly for our project.
Cognitive Load
Cognitivist theory that only a finite amount of information can be processed at one time. This helped inform our strategy to chunk and scaffold.
Self Regulated Learning
Cognitivist theory that learners are active pursuers of knowledge. This influenced our decision to provide them with the flexibility and freedom to explore .
Theory Alignment
Although there were elements of other learning theories that we found applied to our solution, it was Cognitivism that provided the most accurate lens through which all of our analyses and research best aligned.
Detailed Rationale
The summary above provides a quick advance organizer, but the detailed explanations behind our decisions, including how they connect to our evidence, are provided below.
Why Cognitivism?
Information Processing
Cognitivism explores how the human mind receives, processes, encodes, and retrieves information. This helped us sequence the content in order of complexity according to Bloom's Taxonomy so that learners begin with cognitively easy tasks like recalling and understanding before progressing onto more difficult skills like using their critical thinking in order to analyze, apply, evaluate, and, ultimately, create. In addition, it helped guide our decision to chunk our content so that it would abide by Millers's 7 +/- 2 theory when it came to how much information the mind could process in our working memory.
Self-Directed Learning
One of the hallmarks of a Cognitivist approach is the affordance of self-directed learning, where learners decide their own pace, scheduling, and cognitive load. This draws upon the results of our Learner Analysis, which showed that most of our learners were busy working professionals who wanted to avoid traditionally unengaging and long-winded lecture-based courses. They also wanted the flexibility to start and stop whenever they wanted without feeling any pressure from an instructor or facilitator. They are highly motivated to learn and want to be in control of the experience.
Utilizes Prior Knowledge
Moreso than any other learning theory, Cognitivism pays special attention to the existing knowledge structure of the learner. Our Learner Analysis showed that this would be especially important to us since our learners were all at such different starting points. Had we failed to recognize the significance of prior knowledge as part of our design, our solution may have ended up as a one-size-fits-all that ultimately satisfied no one. Incorporating this very important element helped inform decisions like using a pre-assessment at the beginning to determine the appropriate learning track.
Which Learning Methods or Strategies?
Interest-Driven Learning
Our Learner Analysis, which was informed by the interviews and surveys we had conducted, showed us how eager our learners were to learn about Financial Literacy. They admitted that they were consciously aware of their lack of knowledge in this regard but how important these skills were to their future. Knowing about their motivations allowed us to design curriculum that aligned with their interests because we already knew that they were highly motivated to pursue these topics in depth.
Game-Based Learning
As our Needs Analysis revealed, one of the most important, yet easily overlooked, gaps was the Motivation gap. Our Learner Analysis revealed how stressful and discouraging the process was to find a way to learn that would cater to their needs and standards. The motivational psychology behind game-based learning targets the motivational gap by making learning fun and engaging. Earning points and unlocking rewards provides immediate feedback and encouragement to continue.
Anchored Instruction
What was the true, larger-impact, purpose of this learning, beyond just our immediate learning goals and objectives? We decided that it was for our learners to develop transferrable skills, so that they can apply what they learned here in real-world settings. Anchored instruction stresses the importance of placing learning in a meaningful problem-solving scenario, which is exactly what we intended to do with our scenario-based learning modules.
Media & Technologies
Mobile App
Mobile apps were still an ideal fit due to its many unique affordances, such as portability (lightweight and usable anywhere), interactivity (touch-based and responsive), versatility (able to utilize multiple forms of media), and connectivity (able to access people/internet/other resources). In addition, there are no barriers to access (anybody can download and access them), users themselves don't have to replace or update them (it is up to the developers), and it is very cost-effective for the business in terms of getting their product or solution into the hands of as many people as possible at once.
Video
As a medium, video offers some of the best affordances for our group of learners. First, videos (once made) are asynchronous since they can be viewed or taken at anytime at the learner's own convenience. Second, they are a highly visual and auditory medium, which allows abstract concepts to be represented in ways conducive to our learning (in line with the Dual Coding Theory or Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning). And finally, they are much more engaging and motivational for learners when compared to texts or even audio files, which was very important to our particular group of learners.
eLearning
How could we adhere to our mission of providing stress-free, visually-engaging lessons that would best prepare our learners to actually apply what they have learned in real life? Short of putting them into a real-life situation, we chose to use scenario-based e-learning to mirror authentic practice as closely as possible (without our learners having to risk their real money). As a medium, e-learning provided the unique affordance of allowing learners to simulate responses (and their consequences) while also being highly engaging, interactive, and leading to the creation of transferrable skills.
Learner Assessments
Pre-Assessments
The first point of contact for learners with our solution is a pre-assessment questionnaire that is designed to determine their prior knowledge levels in order to then assign them to the appropriate learning track. This was included to take into account the (potentially vast) different prior knowledge levels of the learners so that their experience can feel more personalized and catered to their specific situation and needs. The questionnaire itself contains a combination of knowledge check questions (based on facts, principles, and concepts) as well as personal ones (ie. which financial topics do you most want to learn).
Formative Assessments
As learners proceed along each lesson, they will take various assessments (for which they can earn points), such as multiple choice quizzes (to assess whether they can distinguish certain facts and principles) and compare & contrast examples (to assess how they evaluate things), among others. The point of these formative assessments is to gauge their progress as learners as well as provide them with feedback (in the form of points earned from correct answers) so that they can feel confident in their knowledge and motivated to keep learning. The key to building confidence is allowing for quick easy wins that accumulate over time.
Summative Assessments
Whereas the purpose of our formative assessments is to provide feedback both ways (to the assessor as well as the assessed), we used summative assessments as a way to measure their progress against a more concretely-defined standard. One of the penultimate summative assessments comes in the form of the creation of one's own investment portfolio, providing definitive proof that the learner was able to successfully learn the knowledge from preceding modules and then apply it by synthesizing something new. These summative assessments are meant to mirror real-life scenarios as closely as possible.