Grounding learning for students, while bringing awareness to lesser known World Heritage Sites. UNESCO Lodestar is an online platform for lower-secondary educators to access lessons plans with World Heritage Site case-studies.

Context

6 week project completed as part of Senior Experience Design Course in Vancouver, Canada.

My Responsibilities

Project Management, Product Strategy, Content Strategy, Copywriting, UI Design, Curricular Design

Tools

Figma, Blender, Google Sprint Book, Experience Design, Branded Interactions

Team

Aliasger Rasheed, Katie Park, Benny Huang, Grace Lai, Lia Yujin

Contribution

As project lead, I led our team in determining the area of intervention and framing. As content strategist I determined the content design of the site (the lesson plan in particular) and wrote its corresponding copy. I conducted user stakeholder research and through expert interviews to drive the project. After the project was over, I revamped the interaction and visual design decisions as it felt weaker in its initial execution.

UNESCO World Heritage

Protecting Cultural and Environmental Heritage

UNESCO is a UN agency who’s main mission is to build a culture of peace and sustainability through education, communication and dialogue between different people I focused on their World Heritage Centre which preserves and protects landmarks that bring immense value to the culture and the environment of humanity.

UNESCO World Heritage Centre

“What makes the concept of World Heritage exceptional is its universal application. World Heritage sites belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located.”

Research

Our initial primary research of 13 student and 11 educator survey respondents, helped me frame our interviews with 13 experts, including university and secondary school educators, second-language educators, and professionals working with UNESCO.

Educators find physical spaces ground abstract ideas and events

We interviewed experts with World Heritage, students and secondary/post-secondary educators

World Heritage To Ground Learning

Synthesizing the research gave me 4 key insights to drive our intervention

Second language teachers use cultural heritage to bring personal bearing to language education.

Educators, need age-specific, modular actionable lesson resources.

Open-ended middle school curriculum = freedom to bring in external topics such as World Heritage.

World Heritage is eurocentric and so finding resources on lesser-known non-european Heritage Sites is difficult

Framing through the needs of educators

We used the following questions to constrain our scope and frame our intervention:

How might we make information architecture more systematic and guided to reduce cognitive overhead when accessing educational resources?

How might we leverage project-based learning to re-orient UNESCO’s existing educational resources towards its World Heritage Sites?

Lodestar

A content distribution platform run by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, comprising of curated lesson plans accessible to secondary school educators globally.

Content grounded in Project-based Learning

Lesson Plans are based on project-based learning using World Heritage sites as foundational case-studies to build class projects on. We utilised the SMART(Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and, Timely) learning objectives guidelines to guide our information architecture.

Opportunities within an Educator's lesson-building journey

Entice • Discovery

Enter • Filter for Your Needs

Designing For Educators Globally

Engage • Browse for Applicable Plans

Engage • Engage • Consider, Use & Adapt

Along with providing materials such as videos, worksheets etc, I used project-based learning to help broaden the scope of lesson plans, making them applicable despite curriculum differences.

Exit • Resources Straight to your students

Lodestar expedites the lesson delivery process, allowing teachers to directly add plans to their online learning platform. For the scope of this project, I only considered the most-used education platform in secondary schools, Google Classroom.

The value

Design Decisions

Choosing Opportunities

While UNESCO channels such as their main website lacked intuitive information architecture, I found that a redesign would be simply fixing a painpoint, as compared to creating meaningful value for UNESCO, and for its stakeholders.

Filling in the Gaps

I think that if more time were allocated to the project,I would extend the customer experience through creating convenient touchpoints in educational platforms such as Google classrooms.

Given that lesson plans with the UNESCO trademark would need quality assurance, a next step would be creating a way for teachers to submit their own plans for verification and upload.