CoLearn
Timeline: Jan 2025 - Jun 2025
Brief: This case study project was completed in collaboration with the Junior Designer program and the Educators Alliance, both at the UCSD Design Lab.
Role: Led research synthesis and contributed to the platform's visual identity, alongside a team of 4 designers.
The Problem: Teachers feel isolated and students don’t feel like the system is meeting their needs. There’s mutual empathy: Despite their frustrations, students recognized that teachers face systemic constraints that limit how innovative or personalized their curriculum can be.
Solution
CoLearn is a platform built to help educators find and build relationships with peers they trust. Instead of another resource library or top-down training tool, we designed around peer networks, shared resources, and reflection tools that support collaboration and teacher-driven change through shared experimentation.
Teachers start with a short onboarding survey (11 questions) about their role, interests, and challenges. Once matched, educators can chat directly or join group discussions, with support for peer feedback and ongoing collaboration over time rather than a single one-off connection. Educators can also browse local events hosted by the Educators Alliance, extending the sense of community beyond the platform itself.
I developed our interview questions and led synthesis across empathy mapping sessions with educators and students, 8 teacher interviews, and a survey that got 46 responses, alongside insights the team gathered from the CAYS Conference and through our ongoing work with the Educators Alliance.
Research
As I synthesized the research, these frustrations kept tracing back to one root cause: isolation. Teachers weren't struggling because they lacked ideas or care for their students, but because they had no real space to share what they were facing, problem-solve with peers, or learn from people going through the same thing.
Problem/Synthesis
Curriculum reform is slow and deeply political, leaving a widening gap between what schools teach and what students need. Creativity is consistently undervalued in this system, and neither teachers nor students have the tools to bridge that gap. A few themes kept surfacing across our interviews and survey responses:
Curriculum rigidity that left little room for teachers to adapt to their students
Declining student interest and engagement
The broader tension of teachers wanting to support their students rather than teach to the test, while being held back by limited time, tools, and institutional support.
Testing & Validation
We tested the onboarding survey and early concept with 7 educators. 6 of the 7 felt CoLearn would help them discover new teaching ideas faster than their current methods, a strong early signal that the peer-matching approach was addressing a real gap. The testing also pointed to two things we needed to refine: users wanted a clearer line between mentorship and peer relationships within the matching experience, and older educators showed more hesitation toward the platform. That hesitation was a good reminder that trust, clarity, and simplicity couldn't be afterthoughts in the design.
Impact
The project concluded at the testing phase, as we didn't have the runway to iterate on the mentorship/peer clarity or older-educator hesitation findings before wrapping. We presented CoLearn to the Educators Alliance and Design Lab faculty, and the findings helped inform the Alliance's ongoing work supporting educators in San Diego.