Synopsis

UNESCO World Heritage is about fostering peace by sharing cultural appreciation across the world. By reflecting on reappearing human behavior across cultures, educators have an advantage at grounding humanitarian curriculum for their students to grasp easily. UNESCO EduHub is a tool developed to allow educators to take advantage of a deep well of knowledge accumulated across human existence.

Background

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) is an agency of the United Nations dedicated to the preservation of heritage worldwide to promote world peace and understanding. Heritage Sites are locations nominated by locals that signify cultural importance and, once accepted, offer people an opportunity to visit and explore the culture that developed there.

Preliminary Research

Immediately when we investigated, UNESCO was difficult to pinpoint an exact user due to wide variety of professions involved their own website and let alone the heritage sites themselves. Initially we knew UNESCO had something to do with global recognition and maintain peace as it is part of the United Nations. I steered my team towards focusing on the educational documents UNESCO has already created, questioning how useful and important these lesson plans would help an educator.

User Research

During sprints based off The Sprint Book, we interviewed 13 stakeholders. 8 of them are educators and using what we learned from all 13 we formed 4 insights

It was at this time when I made UNESCO Hub, a sharing place for educators to post their own findings and interesting facts they came across. We used this to test what aspects of a shared lesson plan, like the one you can find made by UNESCO, is considered valuable for educators.

Insights

Framing

One important aspect that most educators shared with us is that curriculum is extremely dynamic, and the best kind of lessons are those that are so well catered to their students that the students can grasp a concept and go beyond truly understand empathetically. Why does some historic moment matter to them here and now? It is because the decisions and emotional impact still exists in some other cultural form that we can experience now. Telling a story of someone’s childhood in war and their emotional depth to maintain aspects of their lives safe is relatable now for someone who is struggling over the loss of a loved one or simply moving away from home.

Thus, how might we leverage UNESCO’s well-maintained heritage to enable educators the resources they need to create an impactful project-based lesson plan

EduHub

Our intervention is a platform run by UNESCO World Heritage, that contains curated lesson plan guides geared towards project-based learning using World Heritage sites as foundational case-studies to build class projects on.

The site operates as a seperate website that can be just accessed from a google search when finding lesson plans.

By using a filter the educator can narrow down their search and then explore the case studies available.

Based off of my UNESCO hub I wanted the interaction to still feel like your exploring on a map. When you typically arrive at tourist information counter there are foldable maps available. I created this grid that opens and expands as you hover and discover the possible lesson plans, as if your folding and entwining with a large pocket map.

An important component was the content strategy we had to develop for a modular case study. Lessons were specifically made by us from scratch to provide the visual and contextual resources necessary to bring a case study to its fullest potential. Each individual component was individually downloadable, making resource gathering fast and efficient to get what an educator needs smoothly.

Lesson plan modules can be exported as files or straight into google classroom.

Values

Reflection

My biggest gripe was not including some educator and educator interaction. Having case study materials peer reviewed or commented on can help guide educators further make better decisions to elevate their teaching material. 6 of the 8 educator interviews commented that they really appreciate work that has been done by other educators because it is a good foundation for their own material. I am currently thinking of ways to include a commenting feature without having a rating system to denounce potential case studies.

Overall, this project was very fun to partake in and there were many lessons learned not only about design, but about human heritage that I will take with me for years to come.