Looking Beyond Certificates: Creating Meaningful Achievement Recognition for Oppia

About Oppia

Oppia is a non-profit foundation whose mission is to provide free access to education to all. It does this through its open-source platform, Oppia, which offers interactive learning experiences, especially for underserved, low resource and low-income communities.

My Role

I joined as a volunteer at Oppia to create detailed Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) and design visual journey maps for new features that addressed the needs of Oppia's learner base. A feature I was working on was designing the Post Certificate Experience for Oppia learners after they had passed a Certification test. This was part of a larger Certificates Project and focused on looking at how learners would be able to view, download and share out their certificate with others.

Learning about Oppia’s Target Audience

As a first step, using Oppia's foundational research from past field studies, I put together more details on the target audience I was designing the Post Certificate Experience for and their technical familiarity. Oppia's audience was mostly learners in low resource environments who had limited access to devices, internet and data. These were also learners who were not familiar with using web browsers, especially for actions like downloading or sharing files.

Design Inquiry

With the target audience in mind, I started to put together the specs for the Post Certificate experience PRD. But I kept hitting a block where I felt I was trying to justify the use of a Certificate for recognition of mastery for my users rather than their needs building up to it.

I realized I didn't fully understand why a certificate was chosen as the form of recognition to showcase an Oppia learner's mastery. The preliminary desk research I had done also showed that many Oppia learners may never have received a certificate before, which raised the question - will they understand it, value it or even know what to do with it? In that case, was a certificate the most meaningful or useful option for this audience or were there other, better alternatives that we should explore?

And for this, I needed to dive deeper into Oppia's learner base and their needs and understand what the current research is telling me to determine the right direction forward.

Desk Research

I used Oppia's foundational research reports on Brazil, Uganda and Nigeria learner base to put together what the learning and technology environment looked like for Oppia students today.

What I first decided to determine was if Oppia's learner base had any prior exposure to learning resources and if so, what those were. This would help me understand what Oppia learners enjoy, and the rewards or motivations offered by these.

The next thing I wanted to understand was what technology & device access looked like for Oppia learners. What are they most familiar with today? What are the constraints they operate within? What is the existing status quo?

Looking into what social media and messaging looked like, students surveyed said they enjoyed connecting with peers and friends through social media and online platforms.

  • Learners mostly relied on low barrier messaging applications such as WhatsApp. According to Appfigures, the most downloaded app on the Play Store in Uganda was WhatsApp.

  • Learners had some familiarity with Instagram and Facebook.

I also looked into research that showed what motivates or not a learner.

  • The feature most cited by students was gamified features such as levels, strategies and challenges

  • The most cited issue that hurts users in their learning process was difficulty reading and interpreting text

Determining Design Direction

This research was helpful to really understand the constraints and behaviors of Oppia learners, and helped set a direction for the Post Certificate Experience to be lightweight, mobile friendly and integrated with familiar tools to support motivation and usability.

Analyzing Certificate Alternatives

Based on the research data I had gathered, I wanted to compare other potential alternatives against our previous hypothesis of a Certificate to see what would best engage and motivate the learners more after a certification test.

For alternatives, I decided to use badges, avatars, progress bars and celebratory messages since these were what was most familiar to the Oppia learner audience through their experiences with games and learning apps like Duolingo.

Research Conclusion

From the above analysis, badges seem to fulfill all key requirements since they are low bandwidth friendly and most importantly, familiar to the Oppia learner audience through their experiences with games and learning apps like Duolingo.

The ease of sharing also opens up the possibility of enabling direct sharing to platforms like WhatsApp.

Design Decision

My recommendation to the team hence was to proceed with badges as the initial form of recognition. These are lightweight, visual and instantly rewarding, and could appear on learner profiles or dashboards.

We could in the meantime continue gathering feedback from learners on badges and to understand if we need to consider offering an additional, more formal option such as certificates in later phases.