Nowadays, children have easier access to an enormous amount of information, some of which may be inappropriate and beyond their range. Meanwhile, they can choose from various options. All of these can lead to information overload and anxiety.
However, children cannot get enough support from the settings they inhabit daily, to reflect on their experiences and reach their full potential.
We adopted the participatory design method to empower children by inviting them to raise topics they are interested in as the context for learning. We then designed discussion sessions revolving around the themes they had brought up, in which we used the anchored instruction approach to scaffold children to actively and reflectively share their experiences.
Students would form into the community of practice (CoP), which consists of 10-18 children and a facilitator. Supported by videoconferencing software, we hold online collaborative discussions for different CoPs.
We also gamified the whole learning journey so that children could be more engaged.
After years of practice, our solution is proven to be satisfactory and financially viable.
Over the past three years, we received 94.8% positive reviews and achieved a high referral rate of around 60%. Our practice has been reported and approved by some influential media and KOLs in the field in China.
Over the past years, our online courses have had over 2,000 accumulated users. Our attendance rate increased to around 85%, completion rate 75%, and renewal rate 52.6%. These figures are much higher than the average in the online learning industry in China.
Since 2019, in our offline workshops, our students have identified and proposed solutions to over 20 problems in 5 local communities from 4 provinces of China. Last year, we cooperated with a local organisation in Tibet, recruiting 10 children from different ethnic groups to collaborate with our students.
This is our first try to establish deep-level communications between ethnic groups and cultures in China. Besides, in the future, we hope we can continue improving our design based on research evidence and make it open source.
1. Contact us (you can find contacts on our page) and share your context with us, so that we can know what kind of support we can offer.
2. Have meetings with us to understand the underlying logic of our design.
3. Test our product in a small group of your target users and send us feedback.
4. Have a review meeting together to see any potential adjustments to your adoption to fit your context.
