Part of Rice University, Openstax is a grant-funded nonprofit dedicated to providing educational access to everyone, regardless of location or income.
About Openstax
Originally started as a way for professors to remix and self-publish content for their college courses, Openstax grew to become a force in both the textbook publishing and edtech arenas. By publishing quality low-cost college textbooks, they helped bring down their cost for the first time in decades. The tech side of the house pushed the frontiers of educational software.
What is it you’d say you do here?
I wore a few different hats during my tenure with Openstax, from visual designer, to full service UX, to design leadership and management. If you are into long reads you’re in the right place. There’s quite a bit to go through here, but I’ll do my best to keep it interesting.
Openstax Tutor
Built on Openstax’s content offerings in several subjects, Openstax Tutor offers a digital reading and personalized instruction, tailored to individual students’ needs. Begun as a pilot in select High Schools, the program pivoted to college-level offerings in subsequent versions.
An extensive research phase was undertaken to determine product fit. Numerous instructors and students were interviewed to learn teaching and learning preferences, and to find pain points in current instructional systems.
Research artifacts produced by the Openstax design team: 1) quick personas, 2) detailed persona, 3) experience map.
An affinity map consolidated feature requests and user pain points into logical categories. This helped to guide design and development.
Openstax Tutor affinity map created in Mural.
Read, review, retain
The student learning experience focuses on engagement, with short, digestible sections featuring multimedia content and personalized questions. Cutting edge instructional techniques help students retain what they learn. An algorithmic evaluation powers the performance forecast, which helps students focus on weak areas.
Openstax Tutor student experience screens: 1) chapter intro, 2) reading, 3) multimedia, 4) personalized question, 5) performance forecast.
So easy a professor can use it.
For instructors an easy-to-use dashboard makes assignment creation and management a breeze. They can also review and exclude questions they don’t want to appear in homework assignments.
Openstax Tutor teacher experience screens: 1) teacher dashboard, 2) assignment creation, 3) question exclusion.
Openstax.org Website
With over three million monthly visitors, the Openstax website is a vital part of the organization’s operation. In addition to providing general info, the site serves as a portal to purchase books, download content, and log into courses.
The site was redesigned to address several UX and performance issues. To announce the new site, and the arrival of new content and software offerings, I designed a banner campaign. The “Now I Can” campaign imagined students immersed in a world of their studies. An aspirational tagline ties back to the subject.
Openstax “Now I Can” campaign screens: 1) biology, 2) chemistry, 3) history 4) astronomy, 5) mobile views.
But wait, there’s more!
I led or participated in several other initiatives at Openstax including:
- Authoring design patterns and design principles and communicating them to the organization.
- Redesigning the process for downloading books to increase revenue from partners and decrease bandwidth costs.
- Architecting a new instructor onboarding process that greatly reduced wait times and money spent on support calls.
- Leading a design sprint to generate concepts for a new student mobile experience.
- Leading Openstax’s accessibility effort.
- Facilitating monthly focus group and usability testing sessions with a faculty advisory group.
