Parents, the pandemic, and school software —a steep learning curve

Why should we think about parents as users of school-based software?

“Parents kind of get thrown under the bus as users,” the UX lead at a digital educational company recently said to me. It was an offhand comment, but it started me wondering: how are parents experiencing the software “assigned” by their kids’ schools during remote learning in the U.S.? From a software development standpoint, it’s easy to see how parents might fall behind teachers and students when it comes to prioritizing user needs. And I can see how school districts might have teachers and students first in mind when selecting software.

If parents are not the primary users of educational software, why think specifically about their needs?

Before 2020, the idea of parents as a tertiary set of users might have made a certain kind of sense. But the pandemic of 2020 and the rapid pivot to remote learning means that millions of parents became users of school-based software virtually overnight. We have heard a lot about how overwhelmed parents, and especially mothers, are by the move to remote learning and it’s not hard to imagine a million reasons why this might be the case. But I found myself wondering: could software be playing a role in parental stress during this unprecedented moment of mass remote schooling? And if so, what could we do to reduce it?

To begin with, I think there’s an equity or social good argument for listening to parents. Because parenting in heterosexual relationships in the U.S. so often devolves more heavily on female parents, adding to the work of parenting often means more work for moms. And the impact of extra work during the pandemic is so pronounced that it’s pushing women out of the workforce.

A second reason to listen to parents as users is that—unlike user groups within a lot of products—parents, students, and teachers are deeply interconnected. Design better experiences for students and you reduce parent burden. Design better experiences for parents and you reduce teacher burden.

Finally, the mass move to remote learning has created a “natural experiment,” which means is that this is a great time to learn about a group of users that might have been harder to reach even a year ago.

How are parents experiencing school software?

To get at the larger question of how parents are experiencing school-based software, I wanted to know

• Are parents interacting with school software more frequently than prior to the pandemic?
• What are parents trying to do when they interact with their school-based applications?
• How well are they able to accomplish those tasks?
• What are their pain points?
• Where do they go for help when using these programs?

I decided to do a small-scale qualitative study to get a high-level view and to generate some ideas about designing with parents in mind. I chose to focus specifically on applications and did not collect data on video software, though I heard lots about these [you try fighting with a 6-year old wannabe YouTuber over the mute button!].

I conducted 10 phone interviews with parents of K-8th grade students in 5 states. I began with a convenience sample of acquaintances, each of whom I asked for introductions, preferably to parents outside their school district. The 10 participants, all moms, skewed heavily toward professionals, and as such do not capture the full range of parent experience. More research is need to understand the experiences of working class and English-as-an-additional-language parents. Participants included cis and trans women, women working in the paid and unpaid labor economies.

I started with the intention to interview 5–8 parents total, but it quickly became clear that a kindergarten parent might interact with school software very differently than the parent of a 7th grader. So I created 3 user groups based on student grade level. I decided not to include pre-K or high school in this project, but those are also worth study. For this project I interviewed

• 4 K-2nd parents
• 6 3rd–5th parents
• 4 6th–8th parents

A few parents fell into more than 1 group, in which case I asked questions for each child in my target grades.

CROSS-CUTTING FINDINGS

1. Parents and students use overlapping but not identical applications

To begin with, parents had interacted with school-based applications little or not at all prior to remote learning. This suggests that onboarding may be a key need across user groups.

Another important finding is that parents and students use overlapping but not identical tranches of applications. Parents in this study reported using between 1 and 4 applications while reporting that their children use between 1 and 11.

Parents interact more with “administrative” than “pedagogical” applications. Most commonly parents interact with an access management application, a portal, and a learning management system (LMS). Some also use a dedicated school communication tool. Less frequently parents reported getting on pedagogical applications with their child.

Interestingly, this distinction between administrative and pedagogical applications breaks down at the level of the LMS. These are applications like SeeSaw, Canvas, and Google Classroom that act as a container for course materials, but also, increasingly, as spaces where students can conduct work directly. The fact that schools are stacking applications, as well as the overlap in functionality between applications, suggests that the educational software market is not yet hyper consolidated (though Google holds the lion’s share) or vertically integrated.

2. Parents are using your competish or will soon

One result of these application stacks is a context in which parents are experiencing a welter of school-based applications, including at times, competing products. Parents reported using multiple similar applications because

• they had children in multiple schools or grades using different applications
• because their child switched grades levels within a single school
• because their child switched schools
• because their their child’s school changed vendors

From a competitive standpoint this means that parents have the opportunity to have side-by-side experiences of competing applications, which makes it a rich and potentially rare opportunity for research. From a design perspective, a context in which parents feel overwhelmed by having to use multiple applications calls for creating experiences that stand out for their ease of use. It also calls for establishing industry best practices across common learning interactions.

3. Parents’ experience of school-based software is fragmented and frustrating

Parents’ experience of using school-based applications is currently fragmented. Poorly integrated applications can lead to “ghost functionality”—the presence of features that don’t actually work. One parent said,

“ParentVue has Calendar, Attendance, Gradebook, Daily Assignment, Class Notes, Student Info, Class Schedule, School Info, and Report Card. Nothing is updated on this. I had to point this out to the school. I only use it for class schedule, to remind my son which class to be in when.” (Parent of a 7th grader)

These parents were actually excited enough about the promised data to take time to contact their schools about it and were disappointed that they couldn’t access it.

Parents also reported feeling overwhelmed by the fact that districts, schools, and teachers sometimes communicated with them on separate applications or across multiple channels, making it difficult to remember where to go for which information or how to communicate with the desired person. Even when there is a dedicated communication app, it may have limited functionality relative to the user’s overall communication needs.

Let’s talk about newsletters! I have the whole school newsletter. I have the teachers’ newsletters. I am overwhelmed and I can’t keep up. I need to hire someone to read my kids’ email. PPS is using another application called Remind, but this is more for district level communications. (Parent of a kindergartener)

4. If a parent calls the teacher, are you hearing them?

Asked where they go with questions or help related to school-based software, parents overwhelmingly said they contact the teacher, even when they were aware of a district help line.

Not only does this have massive implications for teacher workload, it means that issues may be going to teachers rather than to help desks or search logs where it could become usable data. This is a good reminder about why it’s important to take the time to talk to users directly and to triangulate data from different sources.

5. Parents want to see what isn’t there

Parents’ top request was to see what work their child was missing. Trying to figure out which work had and had not been submitted was not always clear or easy.

Mid-quarter his grades were low, which I saw through the parent portal and I went through his assignments to see if he’d turned anything in. I emailed the teacher and it turned out that he had turned them in, but they had not been graded, so they were showing up as an F. (Parent of a 6th grader)

Showing parents which work is missing requires that the system be able to recognize (and that teacher identify) student work in four states:

• not yet submitted (not counted toward cumulative grade)
• submitted but not yet graded (not counted toward cumulative grade)
• graded (counted toward cumulative grade)
• missing/past due (counted toward cumulative grade)

FINDINGS BY USER GROUPS

Kindergarten-2nd Grade

Overview

Children at the younger end of this age group can be — how to put this delicately — total drama queens. Parents of this age group reported that helping their children navigate school-based software sometimes involved tantrums, tussles, and tears.

Parents of this age group do the most hands-on mediation of their children’s schooling, from logging them in to controlling the mute button during class sessions. They interact with school-based applications daily or more.

Key Interactions

The top interaction reported by parents was submitting work for their children, mostly by taking photos on their phone and uploading the images to their child’s LMS. Parents reported doing this because

• their child was excited about showing the teacher work and would submit copious amounts of it left to her own devices.
• in SeeSaw, the interaction for typing in work required manipulating text boxes, which was too frustrating for the child, leading the parent to abandon it in favor of submitting photos of handwritten work.
• the teacher had prepared a notebook of hard copy materials that students completed and submitted via photos each day.

More fundamentally parents submitting work because the exchange of physical objects afforded by the classroom needs to be replaced by an exchange of electronic objects, which at the moment requires skills like taking photos, attaching, and uploading files. These interactions have been designed around the skill of adult users.

But parents are also uploading photos of student work because the manuscript tasks typical of this age group simply aren’t widely supported by electronic technology at this moment. Perhaps the growing remote educational market will spur the mass market development of stylus or other “writing” technologies that build a bridge between handwritten work and the digital workspace. I personally would find it unfortunate to eliminate handwritten work from the curriculum.

How might we

• facilitate student independence by designing interactions that are age appropriate and/or that follow universal design principles;
• create easy ways for parents and children to get handwritten/drawn work into the system;
• allow teachers to set limits on student submissions (and create other “boundaries”) that reduce need for adult supervision.

3rd-5th Grade

Overview

Parents of this age-group interact less frequently (fewer than 5 times per week) but for more reasons than parents of K-2 grade students. Parents in this group are starting to track individual assignments and want to know how students are doing on them.

The face-to-face classroom acts as a facilitator, a concentrator, and an organizer. In that sense it helps children with executive function. Students see what others around them are doing and there can be implicit and sometimes explicit pressure to participate.

Remote learning at home means that there are fewer contextual clues, which places greater burden on students’ executive function. It’s quite possible that the greater number of tasks I saw among parents of 3rd-5th graders reflects the increased executive demands associated with organizing and tracking the tasks assigned to this age group.

Key Interactions

• checking on missing and completed work
• helping find assigned work or work schedule

Other interactions

• looking at student work
• helping with homework
• contacting teachers

How might we

• allow parents to quickly find assigned (upcoming) work at the day- and week-level;
• allow parents to see past all assignments so they can help their child catch up when needed;
• allow parents to quickly find submitted and missing work.
• facilitate easy communication between teachers and parents, including questions about specific assignments? (Right now parents might see an alert that there’s feedback, open an assignment, and then have to go somewhere else to communicate with the teacher).

6th-7th Grade

Overview

Between 6th and 7th grade students begin switching classes. This represents a jump in the number of teachers and subjects that students — and at times parents — have to navigate. For students with attention and executive functioning issues, the need to navigate multiple classes, especially when they are organized differently, can present hurdles. One parent related that her son, who has ADD and Autism, repeatedly submits work to the wrong teacher and needs help resubmitting it. “Tell me how this is even possible,” she said.

Parent interactions with school applications in this group were often triggered by becoming aware of a child’s low grade. Parents would then try to help their child get on top of the work by getting into the system to see upcoming and missing work, as well as by looking at teacher feedback to see if they could help their child better meet expectations.

In Canvas, teachers organize their classes different ways, so I don’t know where to find stuff. Some put assignments under Assignments, some under Modules. Some teachers use folders, others don’t. (Parent of a 7th grader)

Key Interactions

• Check grades
• Check on missing and completed work

How might we

• allow teachers pedagogical flexibility while maintaining common naming conventions and basic site navigation across classes;
• allow parents to quickly see submitted and missing work.
• allow parents to set preferences about when and how to be notified about grades, including custom requests like “notify me when my child’s grade [on any assignment/in the class] is a [insert grade] or below”;
• facilitate communication between teachers and parents, including questions about specific assignments (Right now parents might see an alert that there’s feedback, open an assignment, and then have to go somewhere else to communicate with the teacher).

Looking forward

Learning and managing school software doesn’t have to add to parent burden. What if school-based software increased parents’ clarity about what their children are learning, how they are doing, and how they can help? What if it helped parents feel less stressed instead of more? Listening to parents can help improve the conditions families live and work in. It can help improve the working conditions of teachers. And it can help with the education of our kids.