1. For Project 3 I plan on using Adobe Illustrator to make a rough outline of my redesign. I am most familiar with this application and have used it in all of my new media classes. I will use this application to design the pages for the online app showing how it works and the benefits of its usage.
2. My values for this project are purely Educational. Of course with that comes other values such as social interactions of the classroom, and mental health. During this pandemic we have become even more divided, especially within our online learning applications. Without the feel of the normal classroom I feel school has lost a lot of its effectiveness and in turn students aren’t learning as well as they should be nor are they getting the mental health necessities that come from being a peer and student within the learning environment.
3. The problem is how we are teaching while in this pandemic. Zoom is not an online learning application, but rather a party chat designed for online meetings. Yes the teacher can still teach over zoom but it is missing many important aspects of the classroom. For a teacher to write out an equation for math they must angle their camera down to a piece of paper but most cameras are built into the laptop screens. Students can easily get away with turning off their camera and not participating, there is little to none teacher to student interactions, the list of issues goes on.
4. My proposal is an application designed for online learning. At the top of the screen there will be a digital white board for the teacher to put the class material on which will take up most of the screen while students’ faces will be in a smaller portion, compared to zoom that takes up the entire screen with the students’ faces. The right will have a live chat box like zoom although the focus will be on the class material shown in class. By giving teachers a simple platform to show the material for class it will lower time wasted on trying to figure out how to show what they want to teach. Besides just class the application should have a homework/work due page so every teacher doesn’t have to use their own classroom page and everyone can be on the same website. The goal is to make it as simple as possible so the only thing to worry about is learning. For my project I will redesign the layout of the class video call and the website surrounding the application.
As someone who dislikes online learning the transition to zoom classes has been tough for me. Every teacher using a different class website which all works differently while using an online facetime application designed for overseas business meetings seems overly complicated. For my Project I am proposing a redesign of the online learning application used for college courses. As seen in the figure above I have added more to the class experience than what zoom offers. At the top left you can see the professor’s face with four buttons underneath, Alert, Question, Private Message and a blank one. The main disadvantage of zoom classes is the student teacher interaction so these buttons help add to the learning experience. To the right of the teacher is the students’ faces, notice how unlike zoom they only take up a portion of the screen instead of consuming the entire screen. To the right of students is the chat which is not new to the zoom learning but a necessary aspect of the application. Underneath the chat box is the class work section. What zoom lacks is a classroom aspect, by classroom aspect what I mean is a class website, somewhere to submit work, see grades, go through class material and rewatch previous classes. The point of this new online learning app is to merge the teachers class websites with the zoom lecture portion of learning. FInally the big black box is the teacher’s chalkboard. Zoom is not designed for online learning although it has a screen share option there is no area to put class work or material, teachers are forced to create their own websites and screen share their work off it. With this application it puts everything everyone needs in one place. Since it seems like online learning will continue to be the status quo we have to use a platform that is more user friendly and offers everything we need. Zoom is not the solution to online learning, but with these simple additions to the platform online learning can be ten times easier for both the teacher and students.
Peter Vigoda 