Kuali • Student Suite
How can we centralize curriculum management digitally, ridding universities of paper-based records and processes?
Summary
From a technology perspective, higher education administration has been slow to adopt new, innovative solutions for multiple reasons. One primary reason is that tech companies generally don’t rush to solve problems in the education space because they’re budget centers rather than profit centers. When starting as the founding member of Kuali’s product design team, I was shocked to find that within these institutions, which were on the cutting edge of research and academics, were stuck in a world of physically running paper documents across campus.
Team Myself, product manager, and 4-8 engineers (dev team varied by phase)
My Role UX research, UX design
Discovery
For the first several months I focused almost exclusively on discovery. Most of this was done via video calls where I was able to interview various registrars, department heads, and advisors, but I was also offered the opportunity to visit most of the schools we worked with. During those visits I not only was able to continue interviews, but I found that administrators were surprisingly open to allowing me to attend and listen in to various committee meetings. Here are some of the key takeaways from discovery:
1•Administrators knew they had process problems, but had zero time to try and solve them. I discovered very quickly that no one was stuck in their ways, but rather administration was on a fast moving, never ending treadmill from day one, leaving no time for process improvements.
2•Higher education administrators are incredibly passionate. Designing products for Kuali was unique in that I was no longer solving problems to help organizations to generate revenue, but rather for institutions that were dedicated to bettering the world through the pursuit of knowledge.
3•Curriculum planning was constant ... and paper-based. While academic calendars are fairly straightforward, curriculum planning never ends. Furthermore, curriculum planning is extremely hectic with everyone involved being stretched way too thin.
Brainstorming
Due to the complexity of curriculum management I began actively mapping out review workflows with various individuals involved in each of the touchpoints. I both created and collected dozens of different workflow charts that outlined variations such as undergraduate reviews, professional curriculum reviews, as well as various international variations as we also served institutions in Canada, South Africa, and the UK.
Prototyping
As I entered the solutions phase I had three main areas in mind as primary focus:
1•Status tracking - The individuals proposing curriculum changes generally owned that area of study, so reviews could become personal. Furthermore, registrars had the responsibility of maintaining a bird’s eye view on the entire curriculum. This made it crucial for any user to immediately find the status of a proposal, no matter where it was in the review process.
2•Simple navigation - University courses, and especially programs, are complex. They not only house metadata around the area of study and who is teaching, but also dependencies across all other programs within an institution.
3•Asynchronous communication - Whether a new course was being requested or small changes were being made, curriculum proposals were constantly being redlined and sent back for edits.
Testing
While users remained strapped for time, almost all of the universities we partnered with really saw the value in investing time into the solutions we were developing, and as a result I was able to conduct usability tests on an almost daily basis. This made our team’s design and development cycles incredibly fast and iterative, the entire experience being very exciting.
Outcomes
Today Kuali is utilized by over 150 institutions worldwide and continues to grow. Many of the universities that I directly worked with have since moved from completely manual, paper-based processes or homegrown systems to completely utilizing Kuali's Student Suite to facilitate their curriculum management. This has helped in assisting registrars, faculty, and staff to be able to focus on the quality of their programs and graduation rates.
