Content Creation for EDU with Gen-AI
Microsoft IDC • M365 for mobile • 2023
Aiding students and teachers in conveying ideas and summarise educational content through generative AI.
Role
UX Design Intern
Organisation
Experience + Devices
Timeline
8 Weeks
Team
Manager Praveen Sinha
Context
The current educational landscape lacks an effective and inclusive platform that empowers students and teachers to create educational content like diagrams, charts, stories etc. Existing tools are often complex, limited in functionality, or lack collaborative features, hindering the creation process and limiting the potential for knowledge sharing.
The idea of content creation is often linked to short videos on social media because of the genre popularity. The team at M365 for mobile wanted to explore the possibility of modern mobile content creation with generative AI. Since, I belonged to the background of education, the team took this as an opportunity to scope my internship project to the educational space.
Brief
We started the deep dive with an open ended brief of solving for content creation for the educational space. Further scoping and process got shaped up as we went ahead. While cycling through multiple iterations of the problem statements and accounting for the time constraint, we finalised on the following hypothesis and goal.
Problem Hypothesis
We believe that teachers and students are facing difficulty in expressing ideas and summarising content because the current tools are limiting, uni-modal, requires pre requisite knowledge, and have a high learning curve.
Goal
Create 2 product concepts that would solve for the problems students and teachers are facing while creating educational content with the help of generative AI.
Process
Onboarding
Exploring M365
Problem Brief
Research
Mobile Devices in EDU
EDU Post Covid
Day in a life of Cohorts
Cohort JTBD
EDU Content
Content Creation Journey
Gen-Ai and Content creation
Challenges in AI-Content Creation
Market Analysis
Analysis
Problem Scenarios
Affinity Analysis
Prioritising Unmet Needs
Design
Use Cases
Ideation
Concept Buildup
Prototype
Screens
Iterations
starting the quest.
We decided to set a questing direction for the project based on the outline of the brief by creating a hypothesis. This helped us identify and work on relevant domains for the whole project.
Hypothesis 1.0
We believe that teachers and students are facing difficulty in creating educational content because the professional tools are expensive, inaccessible to many and have a high learning curve associated to it.
Goal
Create 2 product concepts that would solve for the problems students and teachers are facing while creating educational content with the help of generative AI.
what are our cohorts and assumptions?
Considering the timeline and business directions for the product scope, we set out the following parameters and constraints.
Roles
Students
K9 to K12+
Teachers
Nursery to K12+
User Segments
India 1
50 Million+
Tech savvy
India 2
600 Million+
Digitally Aware and Aspirers
Content Complexity
Context Complexity
We have assumed that the AI algorithms are/ will be capable of generating content irrespective of its complexity.
what is the role of mobile devices in EDU?
Understanding the role and impact of mobile devices in educational space.
Key Takeaways
Increased Mobile Device Usage
Indian Students are dependent on mobile devices for learning activities.
Enhanced Learning Material Access
Mobile Devices allow users to access learning materials and resources remotely.
Devices in Classrooms
Surveyed educators believe mobile devices positively impact student learning.
how does a day in a life of users go?
To empathise with the cohorts, a day in their life was studied with the reference frame of classes. The observations were divided into sections of pre-class, during-class and post-class.
K9 to K12+ Students
Pre Class
Prepare for Class
Plan for the Day
During Class
Give Assessments
Participation in Class
Document the learnings
Spend time with friends
Post Class
Prepare for career
Submit Assignments
Maintain relations
Extra curricular activities
Self Awareness and Care
Track academic progress
N to K12+ Teachers
Pre Class
Prepare material for class
Create lesson plans
Plan for the day
Identify appropriate teaching goals
During Class
Take assessments
Deliver the Lecture
Create To-Dos
Enable Student participation
Help Students
Provide In progress feedback
Post Class
Create digital hub for class
Evaluate work
Self Awareness and Care
Track students progress
Provide feedback
Maintain relations
what are the jobs to be done?
With reference of the above study and research until now, a JTBD table was created on the basis of job areas and their associated goals.
Teachers
Plan and prepare lessons for class
Prepare & maintain organising material for class
Identify appropriate learning goals
Create lesson plans and supporting material
Assign work to students
Provide In progress feedback
Instruct the classes and deliver lessons
Attend the class management
Help students improve from past assignments
Conduct the lecture or lesson
Enable student participation
Ensure that students are progressing in their studies
Track student, progress on assignments
Provide in progress feedback to students
Evaluate and record the student work
Attend to personal/institutional well-being
Create digital hub for class
Evaluate work
Self Awareness and Care
Track students progress
Provide feedback
Maintain relations
Students
Stay on track with school work
Track academic progress
Give assessments
Participation in class
Manage one’s time for learning outside of school
Prepare for class
Prepare for the future
Prepare for carrier ongoing learning
Build networks with professionals and colleagues
Learn industry skills
Create and maintain portfolio of work
Attend to their well-being
Take care of self
Provide support, encouragement for others
Maintain relationships around
Express identity
Maintain a balance between school responsibilities and personal interest
Be self aware
Engage in extra curricular activities
Spend time with friends
what is EDU content?
Based on the goal of our cohorts in EDU reference, the content creation needs can be summarised in three major buckets.
Teachers
Academic
Sharing Class Handouts
Lesson Plan Approvals
Split-up Syllabus Sharing
Administrative
Student Attendance
Applying for leaves
Academic data reporting
Social
Sharing best practices
Wishes and quotes
Achievements, Kudos
Students
Academic
AV Presentations
Process Documentation
Planner
Personal
Note taking in class
Notes while browsing
Mind maps
Social
Wishes
Achievements. Kudos
Polls and Surveys
Examples of EDU Content
Technical reports
Lecture Material
Posters
Research papers
Journal
Diary Entry
Analysis
Stories
Debate and Speeches
Assessment and Test
Lab Reports
Narrative
Schedule
Videos
Reports
Illustrations
Summary
Art Projects
Multimedia Presentations
Literature Analysis
Lesson Plans
Visual Aids
Hand out and Worksheet
Reading List
Learning Guides
Flows
Posters and Charts
Essays and Paragraphs
Diagrams
Poems and Rhymes
Case Studies
Key Takeaways
Content share and recall benefits are driving new ways of working, leveraging mobile phones to connect physical and digital mediums of content.
Mobile devices have enabled quick content creation by use of template based scenarios. Below are the different type of content creational requirements for teachers and students.
what is the content creation journey?
The content journey creation in an ideal situation consists of 6 Steps. For the scope of the project, we are aiming to create solutions for the Create step.
Job Steps
Research
Online References
Peer Discussions
Existing Notes
Plan
Tools Exploration
Method Selection
Structure Plan
Create
Content Creation
Content Editing
Assess
Peer Reviews
Feedback
Revise
Making Changes
Final Review
Conclude
Exporting
generative AI and content creation.
With the rollout goal of Microsoft Copilot on M365 Products, and the increased demand of generative content creation, we decided to utilise Copilot's ability to support the experience.
Microsoft Copilot on M365 Products enables users in
Efficiency and Speed
Generative AI's ability to quickly and efficiently generate content is one of its most notable features.
Personalization
It enables content creators to tailor their output to specific user preferences, enhancing user engagement and satisfaction.
Scaling Content Production
Generative AI provides the capability to scale content production without a proportional increase in human resources.
Data-Driven Insights
AI's ability to analyze and interpret vast amounts of data for content creation purposes is transforming the way content strategies are developed.
what are the challenges in AI powered content creation?
Summing up the challenges of AI powered content creation.
Multi Modality Combined Generation
Foundation models for different types of content
Efficient generation algorithm for content and design documentation
Human Machine Interaction
Controllable generation algorithm
Re -editable generation algorithms
Model Evaluation based on user feedbacks
Quality Evaluation
New benchmarks for visual predictions and design
New evaluation metrics
Large data collection and labelling
Large-scale contents with high quality designs
Efficient data labelling platforms
Responsible AI
Traceable generation with respect to originality
Unbiased generation with fairness and responsibility
concluding the problem hypothesis.
Based on the research until now and considering the time frame of the project, I finalised the problem hypothesis.
Hypothesis 2
We believe that teachers and students are facing difficulty in expressing ideas and summarising content because the current tools are limiting, uni modal, requires pre requisite knowledge, and have a high learning curve.
brainstorming on scenarios.
I created 24 problem scenarios with respect to the hypothesis, along with the job steps, JTBD and the unmet need.
Scenario Example
Scenario
Sarvesh is a student who wants to create a high fidelity storyboard for a use case of a product concept. It is taking a lot of efforts and time in sketching individual frames in Adobe Photoshop.
JTBD
Demonstrate the Idea
Need
Acquiring Feedback
Visualising the story line
Job Steps
1
Estimates the required time for individual sketch
2
Allocates 1 hr to each frame
3
Creates the Sketch on Adobe Photoshop
4
Sends the illustration to professor for feedback
5
Make changes if suggested.
6
Compiles the storyboard and uploads on Onedrive folder
prioritising unmet needs.
Based on business needs and market demands, we did a need prioritisation and selected the top 2 problems to address.
Summarisation
To help users easily summarise discussions, class notes and create overview of already existing flowcharts, notes, podcasts etc.
Multi modal Content Creation
To help users easily create multiple forms of content like class recordings, explanation videos, podcasts, illustrations, stories etc. and convert them into other forms.
ideation & final solution.
We finalised on 4 product concepts and ideated on their scenarios.
concept scenario.
I created 4 explainer videos to explain the designed experience.
concept story.
The experience can be understood from the hero’s journey.
Ordinary World
User is part of the EDU space.
Call to adventure
Need to convey the idea or summarise content.
Crossing the threshold
Using M365 Create.
Reward
Delightful and easy experience of content creation like never before.
Climax
Generated content successfully.
Closure
Exports the content in desired form and format in the ecosytem.
proposed interfaces.
A walkthrough of key elements of the proposals.
concept prototype.
A prototype of the concept for one of the scenario was made using an automation tool Pipedream.
my takeaways.
My internship at Microsoft was an amazing journey. I had my share of ups, downs, learnings and re-learnings. Designing a product concept, working along with some of the best designers at Studio91 was a great experience.
Adaptive Design Process
The process of my design kept cycling through phases, which taught me that there is no fixed design process. We jumped steps, modified them and even created some of our own to design the better.
Design Thinking
Exposure to real world projects introduced me to newer tools, methodologies and processes. I am thankful to my mentor for teaching me things beyond the scope of project and helping me become a better designer.
Industry Standards and Practices
I acquired some understanding of industry standards and best practices followed in design, which helped me in ensuring my work aligned with current design trends and usability standards.
Business and Design
I learnt how design fits into the broader business goals and strategies at an organisation. Designing a product that fits in line with Microsoft’s vision was a great experience.
Designed with love by Rishikesh
