Our solution
The research led us to a point where we knew the basic elements that our innovation would need to comprise: non-linear learning objects, presented as a game, in a social environment. It took a bit of work to come up with the initial specification, but the proposal called for the following:
“The development of a system that will display learning objects of any kind (documents, videos, Web pages etc…) as nodes on a canvas, which can be accessed in any order the user chooses. The colour of the nodes should denote useful information (like viewed / not viewed, learning style etc.). Users should be able to comment on these objects and contribute their own to the canvas. The objects should be held at different levels, which can only be unlocked when a user has the pre-requisite amount of experience to access that level. Users should be able to organise Objects into Collections and into Guides. These will be linear representations of a series of nodes – allowing different objects to be linked together to tell a complete story. The system should be accessible both on a desktop computer and through a mobile app.”
In honour of the Natural History Museum, where our solution started, we called the environment Curatr.
Development begins
Throughout the initial development of the product I could see that others were building solutions that included elements of our thinking. This was hardly surprising, as most of our key points could be considered emerging trends in learning solutions. But one thing that was of concern was that our solution really looked like nothing else out there. We had developed a very visual approach to learning, with our atoms of learning being represented by nodes on a canvas. Our menu system looked like something out of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. We were decidedly odd.
We made the decision to release a very early Beta version of our software to a private crowd. We desperately needed outside feedback that what we were doing wasn’t completely crazy. So we gave ourselves a deadline of about two weeks to put out a Beta version for the public at large to play about with.
Development reached a certain point of fever-pitch around this time as we pushed towards release. I had put together a short couple of promo videos and a one-page Website to help us recruit beta testers in advance of us actually having anything worth testing. Seeding the videos through my own blog, Twitter, and e-mailing it out to a couple of key trend-watchers in the e-Learning industry, we’d managed to create our own little world of buzz about Curatr. Within our two-week timescale, we had over 200 organisations from some 35 countries sign up to test the software: a phenomenal response.
In order to procure some useful research information back from our beta testers beyond the usual bug fixes and feature advice, I decided to run an experiment. We would split the testers into eight groups. The groups would work with one of two sets of content; some would have access to all our features, some would not see the social aspects of the system, some wouldn’t see the gaming parts to the system and the final batch wouldn’t see either gaming or social elements. It was my intention to examine the average amount of activity for the groups in attempt to disprove a null hypothesis: “Enabling the Gaming and Social features of Curatr does not make an improvement in the activity levels of a user.”
Of our beta signups, a little over half actually logged on to help us test. There were two content sets in the test. Generally speaking, those participants who worked with the content set based around Shakespeare’s Hamlet tended to be more active than their counterparts, who worked with content on the Science of Education. Go figure! Those persons who had neither Gaming nor Social features enabled were, on average, around 50% less active on the system than those who had both.
I had the evidence, both anecdotal and empirical, to suggest that Curatr was an idea worth pursuing.
“Houston, we have a problem”
It became apparent from our Beta feedback that some of the people who were working on our “non-social” experiments didn’t actually realise that “social” was turned off. They couldn’t work out that something was missing. This really worried me. I was hoping the lack of social would smack people in the face and show the whole thing to be a waste of time. We had based the idea of social around the concept of elements like a Leaderboard and User-Generated Content, but where people weren’t contributing, this became irrelevant. We were wandering into the same trap as others that had gone before us.
So we went back to the drawing board on social. This was a difficult task, not least because we’d got hundreds of testers using our product already. We needed to tweak the product to make it people-centric, in the Facebook mould. After a bit of a brainstorm the answer became apparent; in fact it was staring us in the face. The clue is in the name: Curation!
Curation, for us, is all about the acquisition, organisation, and sharing of learning objects. By giving each user a Gallery of their own we could allow people to acquire, organise, and share objects back with the group as they saw fit. We would replace our opening screens with activity streams, the updates taken from the people you had chosen to follow. We would also introduce a “Peer view” above the level of the Object view, meaning users would need to choose a person to learn from first. Not only would we create a more social experience, but we were opening up lots more pedagogical approaches that could be taken with Curatr.
In social networking terms there are broadly two types of relationship; the friend or the follower. Friends are what Facebook and LinkedIn do – your information is private (given the right security settings!) and you allow the people that you designate as “Friends” to access it. This is a two-way relationship; both parties have to agree to become Friends. The follower model is slightly different; it’s Twitter. Here your information is generally more public in the first place. People can choose to follow you without your permission and the relationship is one-way, until you decide to follow a person back.
Developing the “MVP”
Over the next few months we released updates for Curatr on a continuous basis; bug fixes went up immediately, major releases came around every couple of weeks. We tied down our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) around this time – the feature list that would make our product commercially viable. This was a desperately difficult process and continues to be today; knowing which comments to listen to and which to ignore.
In addition to this we had always intended to be mobile from Day One, looking to release an App to the Apple store at the same time as we launched our product. Right now, mobile is an order-winner for some customers, but pretty soon I believe it will become an order-qualifier. If your solution isn’t available on a range of devices, it won’t be a part of the marketplace. This is especially true when we talk of Social Learning; this is anytime, anywhere learning which doesn’t rely on centralised interventions to move on and update. Mobile, for us, was not a mere option either – it was a total necessity.
For users to be motivated to use a social learning environment it must be more than just another method of communication. We use curation, game dynamics, and a non-linear approach to learning in order to create an environment which allows for Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. For our users, social will not be an option; it won’t even be an active thought. It will just be the way it works.
To reward your patience in reading this far, here is a look at Curatr as it exists at this point.
Video: Curatr in action…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_XbJ801CZM
