Common Sense Education

Product and brand improvements to give a trusted classroom curriculum renewed relevance.

Opportunity

To update an already successful product and cement its value as an essential tool for preparing young learners for success with the internet, media, and technology.

Solution

As they worked to update the curriculum, the education content leads at Common Sense mapped curriculum topics to different animated characters that younger kids could empathize with. My role as both a brand coypwriter and a UX writer on this project was to create a system of labeling for the topics and characters that would work across the online lesson plans and printed lesson materials.

I collaborated with subject matter experts on our education team, as well as the creative, marketing, product, and development teams to ensure that the curriculum would remain consistent and on-brand while feeling fresh and relevant for teachers and students.

My role

For this curriculum update: UX writing, brand strategy. I want to be clear that I did not create any content or do any curriculum design. I worked on branding, brand messaging, and marketing copy to promote the curriculum, and collaborated across project teams during the product rollout and back-to-school campaigns.

The team

The in-house creative, brand, marketing, and product design teams at Common Sense.

Process and results

We kicked off a year-long, end-to-end refresh of the lesson plan UX and the programmatic branding around digital citizenship. The creative team started with research and discovery, design and message concepting, followed by updates to the visual and verbal identity of the curriculum that would match the content updates that the curriculum designers had made.

In collaboration with the education content strategists and curriculum designers, we created new framing around the core topics within the curriculum: media balance, privacy & security, digital footprint & identity, relationships & communication, cyberbullying, and news & media literacy.

As a key contributor to the brand messaging, UX copy, and marketing copy that would frame these curriculum updates for our audiences, I advocated to flip the descriptions for student-facing materials: Instead of talking about the internet as an abstract concept, we would frame the internet as a community, and talk about what we all do every day to participate. “Cyberbullying, Digital Drama & Hate Speech” became simply, “We are kind & courageous.” This came through in wrapper copy and design elements that labeled each curriculum topic.

The curriculum is one of the most direct ways Common Sense reaches students, supports their learning, and measures our impact. That’s why we also developed after-lesson quizzes as part of the overhaul of the individual lesson plans.

Results included:

• A 41% increase in overall Common Sense Education site traffic from 2018 to 2019, when the fully revised curriculum was live.

• Interest from business development partners in the U.S. and the U.K. to fund education research, bolster the curriculum, and launch a U.K. version of lesson plans in 2020.

• Student-facing interactive lesson quizzes that showed us—through anonymized student quiz results—that teachers were finding lessons worthwhile, and that students were remembering what they’d learned. During the school year, we saw 4,000–6,000 completed quizzes per day on our platform.

• Branded resources, from slide decks to messaging guides to classroom posters, that Common Sense staff could use and share with their networks.

above: sample lesson plan labeling and UX copy that creates paths toward utilities and lesson resources as well as key sections of lesson content.

below: screens from a lesson quiz preview, which includes an option to assign the quiz using Google classroom–the feature teachers requested most often our user research.

A closer look at engaging young learners around complex topics like, well, the internet:

After the success of the “We” statements in the broader curriculum, I was invited to write poems with the same collaborative message for kindergarten and first-grade learners. The poems are included in lesson plans as classroom posters and take-home activities.

Above: including poems in the lessons encourages kids to read or sing along and to remember what they’ve learned.

below: samples of “we” statements that use simple, memorable phrases kids know to reinforce key digital skills.