Rethinking Feedback New Problems, New Directions BY ISAIAH FREEMAN | UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOW | VIRGINIA STATE UNIVERSITY
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reating a solution for a target audience is rarely
a linear process. My journey to my new solution has been just that. I faced what I believed was a roadblock, but found a corner pointing me in the right direction towards creating a novel open-source student feedback system applicable not only to Virginia State University, but to any university. I want to share what this system entails, and the journey that led me to creating my new feedback project called Priam. About a year ago, after completing the six-week training for the UIF program, I came across a new, yet far more important problem that caused me to switch into a new direction as a change agent. The results of my training at UIF culminated not yet as a fully-fledged project, but as a single question: How might we communicate the needs of students to faculty and administrators in a concise and actionable manner? Last fall, I spent a long amount of time brainstorming and deciding what this solution would look like. Being redirected into a new question after an iteration of design thinking is less of a daunting task than it may seem. Despite the feelings it could invoke, I started to realize something phenomenal: I did the research already! All of the information and knowledge I gathered from surveys I did, interviews I conducted, and stakeholders I met with are not gone. They carried over to my new problem. The same can be said about my experience creating my new solution. Thanks to the findings from UIF’s training program, along with conversing with other students, I learned three things students felt were missing from their Virginia State University experience: • They don’t know who to reach out to for ideas or concerns. • If they do know, they haven’t been satisfied with responsiveness. • They greatly value supporting the ideas of their fellow peers. Now I have three metrics of determining a potential success of my solution. The most important step
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towards my new solution was solidifying an understanding of my peers through one of the world’s greatest inventions — Google Forms. Allowing students to tell their stories via surveys gave me a more complete picture of the student experience. What I learned is that there exists a significant population of students that have great ideas, but have no clue who to reach out to. Almost all of the 20 students interviewed have attended at least one campus Town Hall, yet less than 25% attend regularly. From this, I’m able to understand that there is definitely a need for Priam: an application that manages a live system of posts from students that can be voted on and categorized via department, major, or building. Built for both desktop and mobile, this application will dedicate a feedback mechanism for each educational institution that signs up. Students can then use this system to anonymously post their concerns with tags, as well as upvote other posts, creating a catalog of organized concerns for that institution. However, attending the Silicon Valley Meetup last year as well as this year has shown me that multiple universities can often share the same gaps. Fortunately, as Fellows, we can collaborate cross-institution to fill them. Priam needs to now be made to be used at any university, regardless of location. With this project now public, myself and other Fellows in computer science will be creating something ten times greater. With this in mind, my next step towards a completed project is creating a demo for select students to test at our campus by late June, and build the next stage of educational feedback.