Formative Evaluation

Throughout the process we got many instant feedback, from the difficulty we face, the data we collected, and suggestions from our instructor. Each time we respond to it and adjust our pathway accordingly. Here are some major changes that we've made:

• Initially we were targeting high school students, themed on helping them doing interdisciplinary exploration. However, we faced many problems with this topic, especially with its scope -- are we helping them explore courses, or careers? Should our vision of success be a successful selection of courses in college, or something else? How would it be possible for us to teach this? Do we need to learn about every single field?... Due to those hard-to-decide questions, we changed our topic, still on interdisciplinary learning, but to our own campus -- inter-departmental collaboration within NYU Brooklyn.

• Our new topic came with a vision of a huge conference day,  however, as we investigate related problems on how people do not have enough collaboration among departments, and with our instructor's warning, we gradually realized that the problems we found out were more like UX problems (on what's lacking in the environment) rather than learning problems (what's lacking in the learners). Thus we had to redefine our topic and problem space using the data we had. We brainstormed at least 8 more directions, including teaching faculties how to facilitate collaboration in class, teaching people how to organize successful large events teaching students time management skills etc. And we finally decided on our current one. 

• Our original intention for the project was to help people explore their own interests and potentials ways of utilizing interdisciplinary resources for their own fulfilling development. However, our data shows that this is not a problem that people generally face -- they are pretty clear with what they want to do and are satisfied with their current fulfillment level. Thus, we switched our focus from a fulfilling pathways exploration to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, which we saw was lacking with evidence.

The Problem and Potential Impact

• Those are nice skills to have, wish to have more evidence to show the necessity of those traits: why do we have to have those skills to survive in today's world?

• We currently have many 21st-century skills as our direct objectives, but more often, it's only a secondary goal behind some more concrete and specific goals. Would it make sense/ possible to design something that teaches those goals directly?

• Our biggest challenge: 

  • How do we design an effective experience that would allow people to experience the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration firsthand? 

  • How do we overcome the motivation gap -- that people do not want to come to such a class given their busy schedule and lack of value in interdisciplinary collaboration.

• Negative effect: 

  • The essence of this instruction is extracurricular activities. Will it have an impact on students' own academic work?

  • Will we be able to tailor the experience to each individuals's interests to make it impactful?