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Enhancing Engagement through Study Groups on Numerade
Project
Numerade Study Groups
Year
March 2025 (2 weeks)
Scope of Work
Product Design, Component Building, Interactive Elements
Role
Senior Product Designer
Numerade's platform thrives on providing students with valuable academic resources, yet engagement and content contributions have remained a challenge. To address this, the team proposed a new feature: Study Groups. This initiative was designed to offer students a collaborative environment where they could discuss academic topics, share resources, and seek support, ultimately increasing user engagement and content uploads.
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Objectives
- Foster collaboration among students by enabling peer-to-peer learning and assistance.
- Increase active user engagement by providing interactive tools for real-time discussions and resource sharing.
- Encourage content sharing, including notes, lectures, exams, and other academic materials, to expand Numerade's resource library
High School Students
Seeking Help with Homewok, exam prep, or classwork discussions.
College Students
Collaborating with peers on advanced subjects and sharing notes or past exams.
Independent Learners
Using Numerade for self-study and looking for support in specific subjects.
Educators or Tutors
Helping students by moderating chat rooms or sharing curated resources.
Key Features
- Chat Rooms:
- Users can create chat rooms by selecting a subject (e.g., Math, Physics) and a specific topic (e.g., Algebra, Mechanics).
- Study groups are open to all users. Groups can be discovered through search or recommendations based on a user's profile and preferences. - Collaboration Tools:
- Users can upload and share notes, lecture slides, exam papers, or images of homework problems directly in the chat room.
- Users can create question threads within chat rooms for specific homework problems or topics.Threads allow structured discussions, making it easier to track responses.
- Users can. react to messages with emojis to show acknowledgement or agreement. - Moderation and Safety:
- Users can report inappropriate content or flag spam for moderator review. - Content discovery and Sharing :
- Uploaded files are stored in a shared repository linked to each chat room. Users can browse files uploaded by others and sort them by relevance, recency, or popularity.
- Users can invite friends to join a chat room by sharing a link. Option to share a thread or file with other users. - Personalization:
- Ace, our AI can suggest study groups aligned with their school subjects and topics of interest, based on the users profile.
- Users receive notifications for new activity in their joined chat rooms (e.g., someone answered their question, a new file was uploaded). - Group Admin Abilities:
-A user that created the Study Group will be a group admin and can pin messages, files and threads to the group.
KPIs
Engagement Goals: Increase daily user participation in collaborative activities, such as asking questions, answering peers, or uploading files.Boost the average time users spend engaging with the Study Groups feature.
Retention Goals: Encourage users who join Study Groups to return to the platform regularly to engage in discussions or contribute resources.
Adoption Goals: Drive adoption of the Study Groups feature among new and existing users by promoting its benefits and relevance to their learning needs.
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Component Creation
Message Bubbles: Designed with varying states such as with files, images, reacted to, replied-to messages for clear visibility during group discussions. Users are able to react to messages with the reaction bar during hover state.
Image and File upload: These cards support multiple file types (PDFs, images, documents) with preview functionality to allow quick access to uploaded materials.
Study Group Cards & Lists: Displayed active participants, offline users, and moderators with clear role indicators.
Navigation Elements: Tabbed navigation allowed students to easily switch between chat, file uploads, and group details without losing context.
Explore Study Groups
Search Bar: Users can search for any study group by entering keywords related to subjects, topics, or group names.
Group Previews: Each result includes key details such as the group name, description and number of active members.
Join or Request Access: Students can either join immediately or preview the group before joining.
My Groups
Joined Groups: Displays all the groups a student has actively joined, sorted by recent activity to highlight ongoing discussions.
Recommended Groups: Curated suggestions based on the student’s academic interests, past participation, and trending topics within Numerade’s platform.
Messages
Message Types: Users can send text messages, images, links, and file attachments to share valuable resources and information efficiently.
Reactions: Users can react to a message with an emoji.
Reporting: Users can react to a report inappropriate content or flag/spam for moderator review.
Threaded Conversations: To keep discussions organized, threaded replies allow students to respond directly to specific messages, ensuring key points are easily traceable.
Pinned Messages: Important messages, such as exam tips, group schedules, or key files, can be pinned for easy reference.
Creating a Study Group
Start New Group: Users can initiate group creation from the "My Groups" section or directly from the Study Groups homepage.
Invite Members: Users can invite peers by sharing a direct invite link or selecting from their network within Numerade.
Next Steps
ACE Integration: The Numerade AI, ACE chat, integrated into every chat room. ACE assists users when no one is online by answering questions, providing explanations, or sharing related study resources. ACE could also prompt users with related resources (e.g., videos, flashcards) when it detects specific keywords in the chat. ACE could adapt its suggestions based on the user’s learning history or preferred study style.
Content Repository: Uploaded files are stored in a shared repository linked to each chat room. Users could browse files uploaded by others and sort them by relevance, recency, or popularity.
Polls & Surveys:Users can create polls to ask questions (e.g., "Which is the hardest topic in Calculus?").
Gamification: Introduce roles like Mentor or Top Contributor based on user activity (e.g., answering questions, sharing resources). ACE could recommend roles based on user engagement metrics. Users could earn badges for active participation: e.g. "Homework Helper" for solving 10+ questions or "Content Contributor" for uploading files.
Conclusion
The Study Groups feature successfully addressed the platform's engagement and content challenges. By providing a collaborative space with file-sharing capabilities, Numerade enhanced the overall user experience while empowering students to learn together. Moving forward, further optimizations such as improved group management options are planned to sustain momentum and expand impact.
