Teaching Channel
Teaching Channel provides resources, inspiration, and tools for improving student learning. Their website is a high quality video-based learning platform aimed at teachers K-12. For time-strapped teachers, finding videos and information has to be simple, fast, and relevant.
Challenge
As a primary platform for educational videos and supplemental resource documents (such as lesson plans), Teaching Channel is a place for effortless discovery of useful educational tools. The challenge lay in surfacing the videos and related content so that they could provide inspiration and resources for educators to use in the classroom the next day.
Approach
Teaching Channel partnered with Method to create a community-driven site where time was a critical factor; teachers have little time to waste in searching for relevant materials. We responded to this challenge with an alternative to search which enables teachers to easily and more quickly browse and discover relevant content through filters and contextual details.
Increasing teacher engagement required the development of key features that would encourage use and also simplify the daily tasks. Co-designing with the core users, teachers, was critical to accomplishing Teaching Channel's mission. To motivate teachers to participate and share, a point and badge system was created to encouraged engagement by rewarding teachers for providing feedback and contributing to the community.
Critical to the video experience was the implementation of a Notes feature, which allows teachers to create time-stamped notes attached to a playing video. The notes act as user-created chapter markers that can be shared or kept private, helping track and contribute valuable information.
In addition to the website redesign, we also updated the logo and design language for Teaching Channel in order to differentiate the brand and communicate their edgier, fresh approach. The result is a typographic expression derived from a call to action to "teach!" and a container based off of the concepts of the related technology and community metaphors.
Outcome
The new TeachingChannel.org is a celebration of the teachers that are shaping education and students across the nation. Since launch in June 2011, the new TeachingChannel.org has 30,000 registered users, growth of 688% over 8 months, and 140,000 unique monthly visitors. Monthly, nearly 6,000 hours of video are watched, with over 10% of video viewers watching over 10 minutes of video.
