Applying Design Thinking Approach to Improve Online Education

COVID-19 has transformed face-to-face learning interactions and forced children to stay home and connect through online education. During COVID-19, the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia established the Madrasty platform as the new gateway for distance teaching and learning for the 1st to 12th grade for the 2020–2021 school year. However, students have faced many issues with the platform related to usability and features. This paper aims to improve the design of the Madrasty website educational in Saudi Arabia during online education through applying the Design Thinking approach as a foundation to extract the requirement set for a design prototype with complete features options to support remote learning. In addition to investigating the level of depression between the physical school attendance and remote school attendance in Saudi Arabia, this comparison is to consider adding the feature of mental health states to the educational website for remote learning. The authors studied the issues in Madrasty and proposed the newly updated platform, including a set of new features to resolve the problems in the existing platform. Usability testing was conducted with two types of users- teachers and students. The usability testing consists of two phases: 1) a list of tasks to measure features’ usability, and 2) a post-test questionnaire to measure users’ level of satisfaction. The result shows an excellent rate in the number of participants in both groups regarding the number of clicks and time to perform the tasks.