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- Olivia, the Organized Student
- Levi, the Lazy Student
- Tina, the TA
Olivia, the organized studentOrganized Student
Olivia is super organized. After the first day of classes, she goes and enters every pset, test and project milestone into her Google calendar. This not only helps her remember assignments in the future, but gives her a nice overview of everything she had to do during the semester and when she will have crunch weeks. The data entry takes her ~30 minutes, and she often gets frustrated at Google calendar for mis-interpreting MIT class numbers as times. She used calendars collaboratively for one project class a few years ago, but her group just used the calendars for events and left the task organization to email and in-person conversations.
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- There are students who would go in on the first day of class and add everything they need
- However, they might repeat effort: Olivia would want to do it herself
- Google calendar isn't used for dynamic, group scheduling.
- Google calendar is annoying to enter non-repeating events on (ie bulk adders are really nice)
- Efficient entry is necessary to attract this class of users
Levi, the Lazy Student
Levi dislikes unnecessary work. He occasionally uses a small to-do list, but mostly prefers to keep track of his assignments in his head. To check his class assignments he visits the course website for each class, checks his email for announcements, the lazy student..and talks with other students in the class. He would like a tool to help keep track of his assignments, but would be reluctant to spend time adding assignments himself. Whether or not he would use certain features, like rating assignments, largely depends on how easy they are to access and use. However, he thinks it would be interesting if an assignment tracking tool also allowed him to see when friends had completed assignments.
Additionally, Levi would like a tool that integrates with services that he already uses, such as Google Calendar.
Lessons learned from Levi:
- Many users will only consider using this kind of tool once it has enough users to ensure assignments will be added.
- Whether or not some features get used will depend on how they're presented to users.
- Social features and gamification may attract additional users.
- It it probably better to integrate with alternative services instead of competing with them.
Tina, the TA
Tina has been a TA for two years, and she currently uses a number of websites and online tools to communicate with her students. She is not satisfied with the current way of entering this information, which sometimes involves editing HTML files on her computer and uploading them using FTP. As a student, she uses Google Calendar to organize her assignments. At the beginning of a term, she schedules all her test dates in a personal calendar. As a TA, one of her concerns is getting the word out when a change is made to an assignment. Tina believes that a collaborative organizer would benefit her more as a student than as a TA, but she also thinks that such tool should support the specific needs of TAs and instructors. She is particularly interested in collecting assignments statistics, such as difficulty and time to completion. She believes the collaborative nature of the tool would not make it less reliable, especially if moderated by the TAs.
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