Today I met with one of my lecturers/mentors at Massey, we had a great conversation about the elective site and how to get students involved. I told him about how I was considering having it become a portfolio builder too, but then thought that would cause too much friction. So I was a bit stuck with getting students to upload their work. I also told him I was considering making it an entirely student run website, and that's when the conversation got interesting. He told me, taking his academic hat off, that is probably where I'd have the most success. But I told him that I wanted Massey's help with getting teachers involved with setting up their profiles, and courses. He told me that would be pretty difficult – they've already got so much on their plate that it probably wouldn't be worth it. I was also concerned the site would turn into one of those "rate your teacher" sites which commonly are quite negative towards teachers. We ended up agreeing that I should create it student first, and then once tutors caught wind of the fact that their courses were being uploaded by students and the site picks up speed, they might be inclined to write their own content. He also agreed that I should focus on the school of design, and try to make my target audience as small as possible to begin with, as long as it's easy to expand. As I left, he said to think of it like Wikipedia, where anyone can edit the content, but it's moderated.

But, I thought, who do I know who contributes to Wikipedia? How does someone even do that? It's not super clear or inviting. So I thought: I want to decrease friction for students uploading information, but I want the information to still be useful. I also thought, what a pain it would be to find one student to write the first draft of the class overview page, which isn't an accurate representation of everyone in the classes view. If someone changed that, it would be their view of the class. Rather than Wikipedia where most things are Objective, the way a student views an elective they've done is very Subjective.

I was pretty stuck at this point. So I just started doing some wire-framing – playing around, and taking the pages back to their most basic layout. I always like going back to Who, What, Where, When, Why, How. So I laid those out on the page as titles. Then I thought of questions behind them: What is this course like? Who are the lecturers? How much work is it? You know, questions that prospective students might ask students who have done the course already. After that, an idea kind of just fell into place. What if the site just asked students these questions straight up? Then, multiple students could answer the question and you'd get different viewpoints without entirely overwriting the whole page and another student's thoughts.

So I thought of an MVP user flow. Students would arrive at the homepage which would ask them if they need help, or they want to help. If they selected that they needed help, they'd be able to search for courses and find interesting ones. Once on a course, they could see what other students have answered to those common WWWWWH questions. If a student selected to help, they'd be able to choose an elective they've done in the past, then answer a random question about it in 280 characters or less. I figure this might gameify the uploading process in a way, by having a random question it becomes exciting, and the student can opt to answer more questions if they feel like it. Once lecturers decided they wanted to add their own descriptions, they could fill out a form to put in the required info, and the student examples would be merged with the lecturers content. This means that even if lecturers haven't been bothered to upload a description, there wlll still be content. I figure this is a much better way of getting feedback from students. I'm really happy with it. Now to create a prototype and do some testing with the two different versions on Tuesday.