Teachmint: Bizarre Adventures of Homework

Introduction 🕸️

Teachmint is a leading provider of education infrastructure solutions. With 10 million+ downloads on the Play Store, it powers the education ecosystem to help students learn better by letting schools and private teachers create a virtual classroom (a digital space of ongoing physical classes to keep everything organized). Since it started, its classroom technology has helped millions of teachers create classrooms that are global and ready for the future.

Problem Statement 🔍

But.. What is Homework🤔

I. Understanding Homework Journey

Homework has been a staple of education for ages. It's the work students do at home to practice what they've learned in school. It's like a coach giving you extra exercises to improve your skills after practice, and we've all been through a phase where we hated almost everything about homework, and the root cause was: "Damn! I forgot about it."

II. Understanding the stakeholders

There are three major stakeholders in homework:

• Teacher
• Student
• Parent (not involved in the current scope)

III. Existing UI

Currently, Teachmint provides two ways for teachers to frame the homework for students:

1. Writing their own questions
2. Choose questions from Teachmint's question bank

Analysis and Scope🪸

I. Homework OR School Diary

I went through one month's worth of data, consisting of 1400 entries, which came out to be something expected and similar to what I learned from my stakeholders' interviews.

Teachers were primarily using the homework section as a "School Diary" and would put every instruction like:

1. Asking students to revise X
2. Giving a heads-up about upcoming test
3. Assigning X exercise from Y book
4. Asking students to complete their notebook
5. And weren't writing the questions on their own OR using the question bank

II. My Hypothesis

While having the set metrics in mind and scrolling through the existing data, we concluded that:

1. Regarding the homework section, teachers have a mental model similar to what primary school teachers have with school diaries, i.e., using it as a mode of communication for what's happening in class.
2. The existing homework section cannot fulfil the teachers' requirements because it is optional that every homework assignment has a submission associated with it.
3. There is no proper homework classification because the current UI is open-ended, and teachers with a goal do not care about the homework category.

Metrics to Move 📊

As discussed with the product team, the critical metric to be solved for the problem was:

Homework Categorization

Every Saturday, Teachmint's KAM (operation managers) would go to various schools for teacher training, where they would let teachers know about the new features/updates and solve queries from their end. My manager, Rachit Garg and I went along to get better insights from the teachers. We could map around ten homework assignments in other subjects across many classes.

However, there are more than 10 types of homework, and asking teachers to choose from one of them would have caused unnecessary cognitive effort (Hick's Law), so we divided homework into 3 major categories:

1. Practice Questions
2. Reading & Revision
3. Dictation and Pronunciation

Creating Homework under each category

I. Question Practice (Category 1)

This category provides a better structure for question-based assignments, a critical component of the learning process. Our research indicated that teachers were creating question-based homework but often had to curate it manually and weren't using the full potential of the Teachmint Question Bank.

Teacher assigning question-based homework

1. Topic: Teachers had a tough time considering the title and often ended up with a title irrelevant to the homework. Hence, we decided to keep the topic/chapter name as the title for the homework, to be chosen from the dropdown (fetching data from that particular education board).
2. Instructions: This provides a space for teachers to elaborate on how students should approach the questions.
3. Deadline: Offers preset options like 'next class,' 'tomorrow,' or 'custom date,' making it easier for teachers to set time-bound objectives.
4. Attachment Option: Enables teachers to attach additional resources or reference materials that might assist students.

Students attempting question-based homework

On average, there are 40 students per Teacher on the Teachmint app and in some cases (especially for primary schools), parents are the sole users of the app. As the first category, it would lay the foundation for the rest of the two categories regarding basic UI structure and should have:

1. Accessibility with 18 languages that Teachmint supports
2. Common mental model across all homework categories
3. Solutions should be accessible in future as well for reference
4. Instructions before attempting the questions
5. Easy to comprehend for parents as well
6. Supports various attachment types to ease the process

II. Reading and Revision (Category 2)

This category is more than just a functional change; it represents a shift in how educators and learners interact with the homework component of their digital educational experience.

One of the most significant advantages of this category is the reduction in time and effort required to remember the homework with more instruction quality than just solving tasks.

Teacher's asking students to Read before the upcoming test

Previously, when schools were not using the Teachmint app for the education infrastructure:

• Primary-grade teachers would write homework on the blackboard and ask students to copy it on their school diaries.
• From secondary grades onwards, teachers would dictate the homework aloud in the class.

However, teachers saw an opportunity to add instructional homework in the open fields in the homework section of the app, but this was not how the product team envisioned it because it only supported question-solving homework at the time.

Student's Flow

Often, teachers won't ask students if they have read or revised what they assigned to them, and irrespective, It is very easy for students to lie in class that they have read/revised what was being given by the teacher. Hence, we provided some friction before marking it as "Read" by following:

1. Not allowing students to mark as read until all attachments are added.
2. Introducing a "Swipe button" instead of a click button.

While ideating about this feature where students won't be allowed to mark their assignment as read, I learned that the in-app document reader (it was done to make sure that students wouldn't leave the platform) only allowed students to view the file and not include basic features like search, zoom, page numbers, etc and was causing a lot of problems.

Hence, we decided to let students download the file until we have the engineer bandwidth to create an inbuilt document reader with all the basic functionalities required to read a document.

III. Dictation and Pronunciation (Category 3)

This special category would be visible only to primary classes(specifically for language subjects). During Covid, when the education industry was completely disrupted, teachers, students and parents were suddenly exposed to digital applications they weren't aware of. They used apps like WhatsApp and YouTube as mediums of communication that would naturally occur within a physical classroom.

Teacher's asking students to Read something

Pronunciation as homework never seemed possible before Covid, and during Covid, teachers turned to WhatsApp for Pronunciation as classwork. This ignited the idea that we should try how it would turn out as homework.

🗣️ Pronunciation: Teachers can assign chapters from school textbooks and add documents.

📝 Dictation: Teachers can record audio, add pre-recorded audio or use audio from the Teachmint audio library

Student's Flow

This allows students to listen to the audio files as often as needed, facilitating better comprehension and practice. Also, clear guidelines remove ambiguity, helping students (and their parents) understand exactly what they must do.

In the Dictation exercise, students must upload a photo/pdf of their work for assessment, equivalent to what happens in the Practice Question from the school textbook. However, for Pronunciation exercises, we only allowed students to use the in-app audio recorder to avoid plagiarism in homework.

Till now, we have discussed the need for the introduction of homework categories (Question Solving, Read & Revision, and Dictation & Pronunciation), requirements for each category and problems faced along with my approach to overcome them while crafting them.

However, the process doesn't end here with teachers creating homework and students turning in the assignment because After this comes the major component of learning, i.e. Assessment and Feedback

Post Submission Flow ✔

I. Teacher's assessing the submitted assignments

Once an assignment is created, based on submission, it can be bifurcated into 3 major categories:

1. Not submitted (Once the deadline is passed, it is important for teachers to know where exactly a student is stuck in the process.)
2. Evaluation Pending (Students have submitted their attempts, and the teacher is supposed to check them and leave feedback, which will depend on the submission quality and the student's punctuality.)
3. Evaluated

II. Students looking at feedback from teachers

Every homework-related update is reflected in the class's chat(also a push notification), which helps students to know if there has been any new assignment or any update on an existing assignment that leads to that particular assignment (which can be accessed directly from the homework section as well).

Here, students can view their submitted attempts for the assignment and marks obtained as the feedback given by the teacher, which can be used to know their mistakes and learn from them.

Future Amendments

1. Enhanced Analytics: Develop advanced analytics for teachers to monitor and adapt to student needs.
2. Gamification: Add badges and leaderboards to boost student engagement.
3. AI Assistance for Students: Incorporate AI tools for real-time homework help and guidance.

Impact✌️