Students Helping Students Discord — DML Final Group Project
by Jasem Alkhaleel, Max Moua, Carlos La Rosa, and Cassie Salem
These past few years have brought many challenges, but we believe as students one of the most unforeseen issues is the ability to regress into the overwhelming workload that college life plunges us into, alone. College can be intense, and we believe any student that claims it was a breeze is a flat-out liar. Even students considered smarter than average and who excel under pressure can struggle to keep up with the advanced curriculum necessary to achieve the learning objectives required for a degree. With remote learning, students have little to no interaction or communication between each other outside of class, so they do not see each other as learning resources which is unknowingly crippling their own advancement. Having the ability to hang around after class to talk to the teacher, or listen to the one person that always has questions, is gone now because of the remote structure. Even having the ability to sit in a room and listen to other people talk about school has been taken away.
As a team we have developed a public server (open network) for college students, alumni, teaching assistants, learning assistants, potential college students, and intellectuals of all kinds to connect with each other and share information (everyone can join). We hope this will allow students to share the burden of work by working collaboratively with each other to solve problems, whether they be arithmetic in nature or simply life struggles that they may be dealing with (academically oriented-ish). We believe that Students Helping Students will open up opportunities for all kinds of students, from ones who want to engage and interact to ones that just want to passively interact with certain subject matters (peer-supported). It will be run by volunteers and members who genuinely enjoy learning and want to perpetuate the facility to do so. The channels are student oriented and will continuously be updated based on the usage and preference of current members of the server (interest-powered).
Initial interviews were done with stakeholders such as potential distributors and members of the server that were able to guide us to the conclusion that the server would indeed be useful. An initial test server was outlined and then set-up to get a feel for what the final product may end up looking like. The initial interviews guided the design process, specifically the welcome messaging system and channel subjects and layout. Accepting terms and conditions were set up to prevent the server from turning into a source for cheating or illegal distribution of course content or textbooks. Originally a direct message was sent out to the students who joined the server welcoming them a little more personally (the massage was made and distributed by a bot), however, user feedback said that the massages were “annoying” and were sometimes blocked if the student hadn’t yet fully joined the server (hadn’t accepted terms and conditions) so we removed this feature altogether (production centered/learning happened by doing).
A student leveling system was also introduced at the request of early members of the server, and took quite a bit of work to integrate smoothly with the initial interactions of the server (fostering engagement). The idea is that members of the server can interact in whatever way they choose, whether that be a passive or active role. Extremely active students are digitally rewarded by being moved up a level in the student leveling system, which gives them minor increases in access and abilities on the server in general, like gaining the ability to react to things or to use complex emojis or gifs. If the student simply spends time interacting with the server, not necessarily posting or replying, they are still actively working towards moving up in student level. We also understand that the bots can only maintain the server without human intervention so well. They sometimes mess up, or need a code update and so an actual person needs to step in and maintain the bot. We anticipate having a student moderator that can help maintain the entire server long-term. Ideally they would be in charge of the channels as well as student moderation (disrespectful students are actually getting removed, the leveling system is allocating members appropriately, etc).
After further developing what we considered a solid first draft of the server, we had a handful of additional students (our users) verbally assess the functionality and give feedback. The major feedback manifested in the form of not knowing what the point of the server was, and not having explicit enough instructions to get started if they wanted to use it. After incorporating their feedback and editing the server to reflect the initial feedback, we invited an additional group of users to join the server and give feedback on the usefulness and minor details regarding the student leveling system and channel descriptions. We were able to incorporate their feedback by editing the channels themselves as well as adding significantly more text to better explain each feature of the server.
There are already a few well distributed online resources for connecting students online. MoocLab is a “study buddy” website that matches students with potential virtual study buddies. It then provides them with a public zoom room for quiet studying together. StudyStream essentially does the same thing by simply providing the option to join an already open “study room” — which is simply a server on a public virtual video streaming platform — or to create their own room on a new server. This platform focuses more on the online space rather than specifically connecting you with other people. Both platforms lack a continuous chat functionality in which all students can not only message each other but keep track of those messages for all else to see. Even when new members join they are able to see the entire history of each channel currently available on the server. The Discord platform itself also allows screen sharing and video chat in addition to our set-up voice and text-based channels, proving that it is every bit as capable as the other available online connection options marketed for students.
Final feedback and thoughts on the project include questionable sustainability and the challenge of getting enough people on the server initially to have it be a “go to” place for students to overcome obstacles and seek help or advice. These concerns can be addressed by continuous cross-platform distribution of the invite link to the server, and potentially even a small website that can facilitate the invite link publicly so that when students google search for help, our server link pops up in response. Additionally, extra content and general interaction with the server will also encourage more engagement in a way that lets the members know that others are there to respond when something does come up and they want to reach out to others for help.
