Milestone 2 > Contextual Inquiry
Due Date: 09/26/2007 | Owner: Chris Hanrath
The process:
For this milestone we conducted interviews with 1st and 2nd year MBA students, academic advisors, and Alumni. We decided to ask questions about a person's experiences, instead of just asking specific questions. We did, however, ask a few specific questions about each person in order to later develope a persona. We also produced a Gantt chart and literature review.
Here is a list of our questions:
Questions for Advisors
- How long have you been working for the school?
- What's you job description, role?
- Do you have any other affiliations? Do you work with any other departments?
- Describe a common session with a student seeking advising.
- Describe a good advising experience and a bad one.
- What makes them good or bad?
- What are some common questions students ask when in an advising session?
- How prepared are students when coming to an advising appointment?
- How do advisors know what they are talking about?
- Segway to "What resources do they use", "Who do they talk to?"
- What information would you like students have when they come to an advising appointment?
- Wrap up question: are there they any additional resources that you feel would be helpful to students that are not commonly known?
Questions for Students
- What's your academic and/or professional background?
- What year are you?
- Have you decided on your career path?
- How do you select classes with your career interests in mind?
- How do you make your class choices?
- Who do you talk to? Peer advisors, academic advisors, faculty?
- Who influences your advising decisions the most?
- Which information resources do you use the most? Which is more helpful?
- Given all the resources that are available to you do you feel that you were able to make an informed decision about your class choice?
- How has the process of selecting course differed between your undergrad and grad experience?
- What would be helpful on a website that would help you decide on a course?
- Maybe other students opinions/ratings?
- Typical courses taken, combinations?
- Anything else?
Questions for Alumni
- What's your background?
- How long ago did you graduate?
- Is your career path what you expected when you graduated?
- How did you select you classes? Advisor, on your own?
- Have you ever given advice to current of perspective student about class selection?
- What would have been helpful to you, if anything, when you were in school when selecting classes?
Using these interview questions, we performed multiple interviews with a variety of students and staff. Using the the data we collected we were able to identify specific trends.
Conclusions
The summation of our data suggested that students have five main sources of influence when deciding on course selection:
After producing an affinity diagram we were able to produce these top-level nodes:
Key Influences
- I select courses mainly based on my career interests
- Alumni's opinions are sometimes helpful but not always available and accurate
- I get recommendations from other students
- I can make better decisions with course ratings
Breakdowns in seeking information
- I am overwhelmed by the amount of information available
- I don't know where to look for information on the courses that interest me
- I know where to go online for resources, but what's available isn't helpful
Advising as a means to resolve confusing
- I come to advising because I want to check my academic progress
- I find school policies and procedure confusing
- I give students an overview of the various resources available when they can't do things on their own
