Intensive Program 2 – Immersive Onboarding Design Using Engaging Web Apps – Karelia UAS

Teaching team: Seppo Nevalainen, Antti Hurme, Aninha van der Linden, Muriel Fabrèges, Julien Strignano, Carly McLaughlin, Simon Devos-Chernova, Radu Mariescu-Istodor, Stephan Plat, Nina te Riele, Antoine Pelicand, Guillaume Bouleux

University and degree programme: Karelia University of Applied Sciences, Business Information Technology & Information and Communications Technology

Course: Immersive Onboarding Design Using Engaging Web Apps

Timing: 17.02.2025 – 21.02.2025

CLIL pilot type:  Implementation – Intensive Programme

CLIL assignments:

• Day 1:

• To understand the key characteristics and success factors in working in multicultural teams.
• To design a code of conduct for a multicultural team.
• To understand the main elements of student onboarding.
• To understand the main elements of gamification.
• To design a process of how to gamify student onboarding with a given design template.  

• Day 2:

• To understand gamified web app design process.
• To create necessary design documents for the implementation of a gamified onboarding web app.
• To prepare and pitch team’s idea of a gamified onboarding web app.
• To understand main principles of UX design.
• To understand main principles of UI design.

• Day 3:

• To become familiar with the basic principles of data privacy protection for apps.
• To design UX and UI of the team’s gamified onboarding web app.
• To create a poster presentation showing the chosen design for the team’s gamified onboarding web app.
• To start creating the content for the team’s gamified onboarding web app.
• To start implementing the functionality for the team’s gamified onboarding web app.

• Day 4:

• To continue implementing the functionality for the team’s gamified onboarding web app.
• To create user instructions for the team’s gamified onboarding web app.
• To test the team’s gamified onboarding web app’s functionality, UI and UX.
• To prepare and carry out a presentation of the team’s gamified onboarding web app for the coaches/teachers.

• Day 5:

• To prepare a presentation stand of the team’s gamified onboarding web app for wider public.
• To carry out a presentation session of the team’s gamified onboarding web app for two student groups and interested passers-by. 

Language: English

Introduction of the CLIL implementation with 10 CLIL parameters

• Sequence:

• The intensive week was structured so that individual lessons, workshops, project work times, and presentations formed smaller sequences within two intertwined large sequence, one related to content and one related to language, lasting from day 1 to day 5. During days 1 & 2, students were first given lessons/workshops on student onboarding, gamification, and web app design. After these lectures, students were provided group working time before presenting their own design ideas for the app prototype to be developed. During days 2 & 3 similar sequence was carried out for  UX and UI design, ending with teams’ poster presentations in day 3. During days 3 & 4 again similar sequence was carried out, this time regarding implementation of the app prototype. On a larger scale, similar approach was adapted. During day 1, students were given lectures and workshops on multicultural communication, and during days 1-5 they were expected to apply the lessons learned to practice while participating in their own team’s activities, and when presenting their work for others during days 2,4, and 5. Also regarding the content, namely the gamified student onboarding web app, the whole week’s sessions/events formed one big sequence, namely ideation-design-implementation-launching of a gamified onboarding web app prototype.   

• Concept and Task > Language:

• Apart from day 1’s initial lessons/workshops providing the necessary info and background to communication-related issues, learning and using the language was tied to the content-related tasks and activities needed to ideate, design, and develop the gamified onboarding web app.  Students were expected to create their code of conduct during day 1. During following the days they were expected to use and refine their own team’s code of conduct while communicating with each other in order to perform the content-related tasks. The presentations students were expected to give and were given language feedback for concentrated on describing the progress of students in their gamified onboarding app development.

• Guided multimedia input:

• The intensive week had Teams-environment in which teachers were able to provide materials and instructions. The environment had also discussion channels for different purposes. Each student team was provided with their own discussion channel for team’s internal online communication and file sharing.

• Key language:

• Since the intensive week was multicultural and had students with varied nationalities form four different partner universities all from different countries, English was chosen as the language used for all the activities of the intensive week.

• Instructions:

• Instructions for teams’ carrying out teams’ communication and collaboration (language) were provided in the lectures of day 1, and then elaborated/refined throughout the week by coaches that each of the student team had been assigned with.
• Instructions on ideating, designing and implementing the gamified onboarding web app (content) were provided gradually, at the end of each workshop that preceded unsupervised team work sessions. In the implementation phase, technical coaches also provided instructions and held brief ad-hoc demonstrations as needed. Through the Teams-environment of the intensive week, students were also given some material and material links to some selected themes useful for their own development efforts.

• Interactions:

• Student-student interactions were facilitated so that they could happen organically throughout the intensive week in several occasions during each day. After each lesson/teacher-guide workshop, students were given time to progress their team projects by themselves as a group, while coaches were not directly intervening in their work but stayed in the background yet reachable in order to provide support if the teams needed it.

• Thinking:

• Members of the student teams needed to continuously understand, manage, and communicate to each other the entire development effort: creating an idea, transforming it to a web app design, and implementing it to an actual functional prototype that then was introduced to an outside audience.  

• Supported output:

• During the intensive week students needed to provide their output in variety of ways both in a written form and orally.  During day 2 student teams were required to verbally pitch their app idea to other teams and teachers. During day 3 the student teams were asked to create a poster presentation of their refined app idea with text elements, illustrations and mockups. During day 4 the student teams were required to prepare a presentation stand in which they utilized written and graphical material in addition to providing verbal presentation of their design and possible first prototype of the app, and answered to possible question from teachers and other student groups. During day 4 the students produced similar output for a larger outside audience.   

• Feedback:

• Three main tools for gathering students’ feedback were used. during the last day of the week students were asked to fill two different online questionnaires. First one was more detailed Microsoft Forms-online questionnaire and it concentrated on the students background and their experiences about CLIL-styled learning/teaching used during the intensive week. Students were asked to fill this questionnaire in their own time while they were preparing for their final day presentation stand sessions. Second questionnaire was a bit shorter and was used to gather more general feelings and experiences of the students concerning the intensive week. This questionnaire was presented and asked to be filled during the final summary and feedback session of the week. Finally, before closing the week and departing, students and teachers were divided into groups, one group for all teachers and one group per each participating organization. For each of these groups, a focus group interview as held.

• Team teaching:

• During the beginning of the week, language and content teachers provided introductory lectures for the different topics separately. After the introductory lectures, coaching of the workshops and student’s own working sessions were organized in such a way that both content and language teachers were available to help the student teams whenever needed. Assigned coaches of the student teams were mainly language teachers while content teachers circulated among the student teams freely. Whenever any student team needed help, they were free to approach their own assigned coach or any of the content teach coaches. If needed, language and content coaches then co-operated to try to fix the issue the team was facing.
• The feedback of the presentations and poster sessions was first discussed and agreed upon with content and language teachers and then  presented to the student teams.     

• Further development ideas:

• The time reserved for all the tasks at hand was a bit short. During five days onboarding and gamification were introduced to students and they were expected to ideate, design and develop a functional prototype of a gamified student onboarding web app. This meant long days, and quite a narrow time window especially for those technical students who were in charge of developing the functional prototype. In the future this should be considered, for example by prolonging the duration of the intensive week or by utilizing the blended part before the actual intensive on-site week better.

Download the file here: Digital Technology Essentials and Working in International Teams