Dara Afraz

Business Finance Courseware

An interactive course that helps entrepreneurs gain finance acumen by combining didactic material with passive and active learning trials.

The standard methods of instruction for learning are usually inefficient at fostering durable understanding. PALMs, on the one hand, is an excellent learning aid, but it lacks ways of incorporating didactic material. The mission was to create a course model that combines the two while being usable on any device.

Create journey flows and visualize model ideas. Propose front-end methods and techniques that facilitate optimal presentation of didactic material. Create responsive UI templates for engineers, and test them across browsers and devices.

Execution

We started the effort with ideation. Having conversations over whiteboard sketches, we shaped a preliminary model. We grappled with questions such as: When should we unlock new categories? How should we inform users about passive vs. active trials? What front-end technology and format should we choose for the didactic material? How can we visualize progress vs. mastery?

Once our ideas were matured enough, we built a working prototype to facilitate further investigation by our partner scholars. In the meantime, we partnered with various finance experts from Coursera and others to hash out contents for Business Finance use case.

We added additional capabilities to presentation and highlight multiple content formats, such as financial tables, to make the system supportive of varied stimuli and usable for a broader range of topics.

The methods and experiments in this work became the foundation of a new breed of learning-aid software, Perceptual Adaptive Courseware, that provides a transformative approach to whole courses by adaptively integrating conventional instruction with effective interactive learning.