Ed-VR
As communication skills gap is a growing problem in the United States, Ed-VR is a bold step in reducing the communication skills gap between the students and the employers. It is an attempt to build the confidence of the students while communicating in different environments.The broader impact of this project would be how human-machine collaboration can solve an unmet social problem since the current initiatives such as online trainings and workshops were proven to be insufficient and inefficient in improving the student's communication skills.
Client:
Role:
UX Designer
Overview
The Problem?
Industry professionals report that there is a gap between the capacities of university graduates and the expectations of industry, including both technical and non-technical skills. Although educational institutions often provide impeccable knowledge and suitable facilities for their students to acquire and improve their skills, there are still many areas where the students lack the required skills.
ED-VR in action
Process
👨🏼💻 Secondary Research
Learning about the market, what the market has to offer.
🤼 Competitive Analysis
What the competitor has done to tackle this issue of skill gap.
Secondary Research
📝 Interviews
Interviewing valued officials as well as targeted users will help us understand our purpose.
A recent survey in the US found that 61 % of all full-time entry-level openings require at least three years of experience
There does not exist a smoother transition for the baby boomers to get accustomed to the industry skills and experience.
At the start of 2019, 7 million U.S. jobs remained unfilled, and American employers consistently cite trouble finding qualified workers.
in India 80% of engineering students who graduated in 2015 were unemployable and only 3% had suitable skills to be employed in software or product market.
More information about the Research
What has industry done before to tackle this?
Universities provide soft-skills training in classroom.
Industry training provided by the employers to its employees.
Online soft skill development courses provided by companies such as Linked Learning.
Why this still a problem?
Online training is not very effective as they do not provide practical training.
Students feel shy to ask for help as they have a fear of being judged.
Efforts are made to overcome this problem. The existing approaches to address this problem include:
Online Courses offered by various online platforms.
Universities provide mentoring and conduct workshops to help students.
Employers train their employees to improve their skills.
User Interviews
To dig deeper into this problem and to understand this issue in the real world, we decided to interview two employers and two students.For our research, we targeted only the B.S. in Computer Science students from IUPUI who are in their final semester and are looking for jobs.
What some users had to say
We contacted two recruiters on LinkedIn and interviewed them to understand what their requirements are from new graduate students, and on what basis they hire these students.
"The biggest skills gap I have noticed with new graduates vs. industry requirements is communication. New graduates tend to want to communicate only via email, text, or social media. While these forms of communication are crucial to the success of just about every company, being able to expedite processes and timelines falls on the ability to either pick up the phone and call someone or set up a face to face meeting with them..."
"We expect our potential developers to be fluent in communication to collaborate easily with the clients and understand their requirements; this smoothens the process and produces better results."
"Unlike the freshman year, the senior year is a stressful one of transition; employers expect a lot from the students which not everyone can fulfill. Interviews are difficult to crack as sometimes we know what the right answers are, still, we are not able to articulate it properly."
More than 80% of respondents say online learning is not the right solution. The notable reasons stated for online learning not being effective are that these online courses lack interactivity and are less adaptive or collaborative.
Target Audience
Who are our users?
👖 We narrowed our users down to students, who will be graduating.
College student
As a college student, I will be graduating soon and I need to start looking for jobs!
Data Synthesis
Affinity Diagram
Affinity diagrams are a type of visual brainstorming method that allows groups to organize ideas based on their natural connections. We've all been in brainstorming sessions that seemed to go nowhere, and distilling these discussions into a cohesive takeaway can be challenging because there are so many people exchanging so many thoughts and perspectives. An affinity diagram comes in handy in this situation.
Key Issues identified
Reasons for the skills gap in the U.S. because of the high expectations of the employers and lack of practical skills of the students.
Major skills lacking in the students and its impact on students and employers Soft skills are the primary skills lacking in the new graduate students. Out of all the soft skills, we found out that "communication" is one soft-skill that employers are looking for, which the students lack. Not finding a job after graduation reduces the confidence of the student which impacts their mental health. Also, employers incur a huge amount of money in training the under-skilled employees.
Reasons for not developing soft skills: Soft skills are often undervalued, far less training is provided in developing these skills over technical skills to the students.
Current measures to bridge the gap and its failures: There are workshops conducted by the universities. Private companies such as LinkedIn, Udemy also provide online courses for developing these skills. Students feel shy to accept that they lack the soft skills. They feel intimidated by attending the workshops provided by the universities. Many younger students prefer one-on-one offline sessions for the development of soft skills over online classes.
User Personas
We crafted two User Personas based on Affinity mapping
Defining Functional Requirements
Taking into account the key user requirements, here we present Ed-VR, a collaborative virtual reality platform for learning where students can practice and interact with other students. Key features of the system include:
Alias Name
Ed VR takes into consideration the inhibitions of the students and allows them to practice through interactions using alias names.
Practical Training
ED-VR platform will help the students in improving their oral communication skills by interacting with other peers in real-life scenarios.
Feedback
Students can get feedback from peers and mentors to improve on their skills.
Human Reactions
Students can look at the reactions of the other peers while practicing to get a real life experience
Multiple settings
The system would consist of multiple settings such as presentation, interview, public speaking.
Redefining the problem statement
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How Might We Reduce Skills Gap between Industry Requirements and Student Abilities to Fill Tech Roles?
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Ideation
Brainstorming
We wanted to design a product that will be address all the technical feasibility we had stated. We brainstormed 50 ideasand out of those we narrowed down to Ed-VR.
We decided to move forward with Ed-VR, which is a collaborative virtual reality platform. The Ed-VR system can be built upon a technology called “Responsive Virtual Human Technology".
Detail workflow of how ED-VR will function?
Framing the needs
User Needs
ED-VR is a virtual reality platform that allows users to practice their communication skills without fear of being judged. Our framework will provide a function that allows learners to remain anonymous when interacting with their peers in real-world scenarios.
Business Needs
Through enrolling mentors and signing students up for classes, ED- VR needs a way to onboard customers easily and effortlessly.
Storyboarding
Following the completion of Ed-VR, we developed a storyboard to visualize how our persona would interact with the product.
Task Evaluation
For our product evaluation, we conducted eight sessions with four users and four experts. The tasks that we asked the participants to perform were as follows:
I want to schedule a session for a presentation setting
I want to practice the presentation skills in VR simulation and,
I want to view my feedback.
For each task, we collected metrics on time-on-task and task completion. Along with collecting these metrics, we also asked the users to think-aloud while they were performing the tasks. After completion of each task, we asked the users to answer questions on the likert scale based on their experience
Detailed information about the report can be found here.
What the USERS had to say about it?
Users expressed interest in using a device like this where they could learn communication skills through virtual reality.
Learning communication skills without having to deal with real people by communicating with their virtual avatar piqued their interest.
Three out of four users had never used a virtual reality program before, but expressed an interest in doing so in the future.
Four out of four users believed that a device like this could help them gain trust when speaking in real life.
What the EXPERTS had to say about it?
Experts raised some feasibility concerns.
One of the major concerns was that the students might not feel comfortable practicing in an unknown environment like the IUPUI library and hence would be hesitant in using the system initially.
Another concern that was raised was the technical feasibility in making the VR simulation very much similar to the real environment.
Incorporating all those recommendation and feedbacks into the final design to create ED-VR
Hi-Fidelity Prototype
Booking Session
Users can schedule booking as per their convenience.
Profile
It shows all the information, users need about their score, their speed the learning lessons and so on.
VR settings
Our MVP, is the VR settings, where users can select their type of environment where they want to practice.
Future Scope
Allow interaction and collaboration between students from multiple universities
Provide system generated feedback as well - such as eye contact, time taken to present, speaking pace and word suggestions.