Analyzing and Enhancing Accessibility on a Course Information Page
Goal: Make the math course page more accessible and easy to access for both students and teachers
The Problem:
The current math course page for Kaplan International College of London (KICL) is a bit of a mess. It had seen a lot of changes in curriculum and delivery method over the COVID years as well as a sudden boom in students in the last year. This paired with rotating staff has left the course page in a state of confusion. Students often complained about being unable to find important documents and not knowing where they were in the lesson. As the primary source of information regarding the course for both students and teachers, this needed to change. It also is not standardized with other branches of the college across the country. Kaplan would like for the page to be more functional and to match across colleges.
My Involvement:
As the representative for the London branch of Kaplan, I was tasked with doing a full overhaul of the course page in collaboration with other colleagues across the other colleges to ensure a formalized formatting and layout to the course. Once we had established a set standard for how we wanted the course page to be arranged and labels to be written, I worked individually to implement these changes for KICL’s page in LMS (Moodle).
Two user bases:
As mentioned briefly above, there were two main demographics that I needed to cater to in this redesign:
The Students
The Students at KICL are all international students with varying levels of both English proficiency and math proficiency. This means the page needs to be very clear and straightforward to access and use. Students often complained that they couldn’t find the important information or complained about missing information that was on the page, just hard to find.
The Teachers
At KICL, there were around five or six permanent or full time staff that taught this course and then there were an additional five to ten sessional or part time tutors that taught the remaining classes. These part time staff were rotating with new batches hired every winter. All the information for teaching the course is also on this same page so the need for the information to be clear and easy to follow from a teaching point of view was also essential.
With both of these groups in mind, I began by first analyzing the faults in the current page. I gathered opinions from both my students and the sessional tutors I was managing as I went and their complaints are incorporated into my notes below:
The Original Site:
This was the home page for the course. Huge issue with scrolling here and lack of any guide for students or staff. Not intuitive design, not very user friendly and still contained several files that were no longer used. This is also students first impression of KICL and this maths course specifically.
This page represents what each topic page looked like. This one in particular was the first three weeks of content and was the victim of teachers adding in new notes throughout the semester without any proper labeling or explanation of files. New teachers really struggled understanding this page (which was not ideal especially considering it was the first weeks of class)
This was the revision topic section for Cycle 1 content. There is no indication of what each file covers or even what is to expect on the exam. This is not an efficient way to help the students revise and students often complained that they did not get enough practice with exam-style questions before the exams despite them having access (technically) here.
The sidebar was an ignored space in the original course page. The elements there were required by the college but did not hold relevance to this course. This is space that has massive potential to help guide and direct students through this course page.
Summary of Analysis:
The original course page was full of unused content and underutilized space. The sidebar has great potential to help increase navigation ease for the course when utilized to its full.
In terms of accessibility, this course page provided little to no descriptions for files and was not laid out in a way to help guide the user through. This made it difficult for the students to navigate, especially those who struggled more with their English skills.
Aesthetically, the course page also just looked messy which is not the image Kaplan wished to present to its paying clients.
With this all in mind, I utilized the standardization provided by the team and set about reorganizing and relaying out the course page.
The New Course Page:
No more scrolling! All the floating files are now placed into a "Module Information" folder and organized by topic with proper headings and descriptions. Maths topics are now grouped by exam; a huge hit with the students and has already reduced the amount of questions asked to this topic. Overall, a cleaner, more presentable aesthetic welcomes students into the course page.
The topic pages are now all laid out in the same style. The content is clearly laid out at the start and then the files are grouped into three categories (only one shown here) with a standard naming convention and descriptions. This set standard helps students who may struggle more with English get familiar with a single way of labeling and allows them to find files easily also just by number.
The Revision page now contains actual useful information. The content to study for the exam is present (multiple times) on this page and each file is labeled by what subject it practices. Use of language (such as 'exam-style' questions) encourages students to attempt more of these practice problems.
The top of the sidebar now contains a link tree that is specifically designed for new students to click through to familiarize themselves with the course. This allows them independence and something to refer back to on their own if they get confused. This space could still be utilized further in future iterations though as noted.
The Positive Impact:
“Why didn’t you do this sooner? I can finally find stuff on my own now without having to ask you every time… though I might still ask you when I forget - laughs-”
A Student in My Class
“Ah thank you for saving me from scrolling every time I opened the page. That was a pain! Now it’s easier to find the lesson material quickly at the start of lessons.”
A Sessional Tutor
“Your course page has set the standard for the rest of the college! I am having my tutors redo the physics page to match maths right now. The way you have everything labeled now is incredible; truly great work.”
An Academic Leader from another department
