Project Description
Student Information System (CDCR)
Introduction
Business Problem
- Recidivism is when an incarcerated person goes to jail once and then is a repeat offender and finds themselves back in jail again.
- 40% of inmates in California are repeat offenders. The main thing that correlates with lowering recidivism is education.
- As inmates become more educated, they become less likely to commit crimes.
- Teachers currently spend an enormous amount of time doing data entry.
User Problem
- Education within CDCR is not particularly well funded, leading to a lack of time and resources for teachers.
- Teachers spend half of their time doing data entry in antiquated systems that were made for custody officers to manage incarcerated persons one at a time.
- Old systems do not give educators any data, making data-informed decision-making impossible.
Solution
The solution is a desktop based application that not only brings all the information teachers need into a simple and organized view, but also allows them to take actions on an entire class, shortening the amount of data entry needed from 30 weeks per year down to 1.
Success Metrics
- # students assigned classes
- # of Milestones and Education Merit Credits
- # of Certificates
- Education-based data that enables stakeholders to make better decisions.
Expected Result
- Students can get the help they need.
- Teachers will spend less time on data entry and more time on teaching.
- Leadership has accurate data and can make informed decisions.
Logistics
Scope
The project started out with a $10 million dollar budget and grew from there. The initial idea was that it would cover all educational programs, but there was little data to suggest that this scope could be covered with the available funds.
My Role
Lead Solo Designer.
Team Make Up
| Team Role | Hours |
|---|---|
| Product Manager | Full-time |
| UX Designer | Full-time |
| 10 Fullstack Devs | Full-time |
Solution
Primary Pages (College)
- Students Tab
- See all students at an institution and basic information about them.
- Can click into a detail view of each student and take action on the student.
- Link Tab
- Where the user links up a class and an assignment.
- Classes organize students in the SIS
- Assignments control inmate movement within a prison.
- Linking these two allows for tons of actions to be done in one step.
- Where the user links up a class and an assignment.
- Classes Tab – (taught by an external college professor)
- See all of the classes at an institution and basic information about them.
- Can click into a detail view of each class and can take actions on all the students in the class.
Primary Pages (Other Programs)
- Students Tab
- See all students at an institution and basic information about them.
- Can click into a detail view of each student and take action on the student.
- Assignments Tab – (taught by internal CDCR employee)
- See all of the assignments at an institution and basic information about them.
- Can click into a detail view of each class and can take actions on all the students in the class.
Student Detail View (All Programs)
- Top of the page and right-hand drawer.
- Both display general information about the student.
- The right-hand drawer contains new and editable information
- Assignments – Everywhere the inmate is assigned to go in the prison.
- Completions – not live, see drafts
- College Classes – All College classes ever taken per term.
- (EMC) Education Merit Credit (6 months off)
- Can be requested by a teacher and approved by a supervisor here. No bulk requests.
- Testing – Certain programs require detailed information on testing to provide a milestone credit. (1 week off)
- Certificates – Users can request and approve these here, depending on their role.
- Awarded for good behavior and can be taken to committee hearings or court. No bulk requests.
Class / Assignment Detail View (College)
- Class & Assignment Details
- General information for the class and the assignment is displayed at the top of the page, but can be minimized.
- Eligible Students
- Students who can be placed into the class.
- Class Roster
- Students who have successfully been placed in the class.
- Grades
- Users can add grades and upload transcripts from colleges.
- Milestones
- A credit that gives students a week off their sentence. These can be requested in bulk, but have safety measures built into the system.
Assignment Detail View (Other Programs)
- Class Roster
- For many programs an “Inmate Assignment Officer” gives students their prison assignments and we can pull from that system.
- To make an edit the teacher must reach out t the “IAO.”
- Attendance
- This is where the teacher can take daily attendance.
- Teachers love being able to do this in bulk and then make small adjustments.
- Components
- A teacher can select which components the student is working on here.
- 95% of the time a student will only work on 1 component.
- A component is a large part of an Educational Program and does not change frequently.
- Components are made up of Modules and Standards and can have up to 300 graded items per component.
- A teacher can select which components the student is working on here.
- Gradebook
- Where teachers give out grades for their students.
- Only 1 component can be shown at a time.
- (EPR) “Education Progress Report)
- A report card for the students.
- If performance is unsatisfactory, the teacher is required to provide justification.
- Milestones
- The milestone request and approval process is similar across all programs, but the requirements vary.
Configurator & Associated
- Program Description & General Information
- This was initially a vast list of requirements from stakeholders, which was narrowed down to this for MVP.
- The grayed-out options will be editable later.
- Curriculum Builder – additional features include.
- Save & publish drafts.
- Create components, modules & standards.
- Add a title and description to any component, module, or standard.
- Modules and Standards are shown below the Component.
- Standards seen are dependent on the current module selected.
Desired Outcomes
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Increase the amount of time teachers spend teaching and lower the time spent on data entry.
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Improve data compliance & more accurate student progress tracking.
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Move CDCR towards data-driven Education!
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Improve data quality so OCE leadership can make better decisions with better information.
User Quotes after launch
“The launch of the Student Information System means that our amazing teachers can spend less time at a computer and more time working with their students! It is a red-letter day for the Office of Education!”
“Being involved in the inception of the SIS development has been a thrilling experience.”
“SIS has me very excited for the future! It is enabling me to step away from the computer and spend more time with my students.”
“The Student Information System is a College Coordinator’s dream come true!”
Quotes per Topic
Classes / Assignments
“I love it!”
“Yes, I am not going to have ot do 50 clicks per person!”
“This is a lot easier so far.”
“This is really nice. I like this view. It is way more logical than what we have in SOMS.”
“That’s awesome! Class details has all the information I need.”
“We are used to doing things by individuals, not by classes. This is amazing.”
Grades / Milestones
“I can request all of these at once!”
“I can enter grades and milestones for the whole class all at once! Oh my god! That is pretty mind-blowing!”
“I think this is wonderful, for my Assistant Principals who are going to be approving these and for College Coordinators.”
“We do not have to put in the comments every single time!”
“This is so user-friendly! I love how so much of it is in bulk!”
Speed
“This is a game changer for sure!”
“It seems silly to get excited about something like this, but it is sooo much faster!”
“I think this is great! This is a lot easier to navigate!”
“This is on the right track! It’s so much easier to move around and manipulate than SOMS.”
“Well that could not be any faster.”
“This is so cool! You are saving us hours and hours.”
Process Overview
Discover
There are 34 prisons in California. Each Warden has the final say on every process in their institution. The DOM or “Department Operating Manual” is a loose guide, but Wardens have the final say, leading to a significant variance of processes across the state.
There are several educational programs including:
- Adult Basic Education 1, 2, 3
- College
- E – Learning
- Transitions
- High School Diploma
- High School Equivalancy
- Vocational Programs or (CTE) 30 +
- PLMP
Define
There are several areas across multiple programs where there are similar needs. These include:
- Attendance Entry and storage
- Class Creation
- Assignment Creation and link to classes
- Gradebook and grade entry
- Curriculum definition and updates
- Milestones and Education Merit Credits
- Certificates and Education Progress Reports
- Stored Completions
- Testing
- Student Details
Develop
- College had the largest number of unique use cases, so this is where we started.
- We also had to read and write back to a custody software created in the early 2000’s, which was extremely limiting and had never been done before within the organization.
- Initially, we planned on doing each program 1 at a time and using what we had built previously when applicable.
- We knew institutions across the state had extremely unique processes.
- When funding for CDCR was cut, we moved to trying to do the rest of the programs with 1 single, open, and flexible design. This had a massive impact on our solutions.
- We ended up taking 8 separate, researched solutions, and then turned all of those into a single solution while the education department scrambled to standardize processes.
Deliver
- College was the first program to be tested, delivered, and pushed into production.
- After college, there was stakeholder misalignment over who would be responsible for maintenance and operations, in addition to other topics.
- This created churn and 3 large-scale directional changes for the project.
- This left the team with production-ready software, validated by users, that was not allowed to go live due to internal debate.
- The team delivered the complete college program in addition to other key features for programs ABE 1-3, HSD, GED, Transitions, & E-Learning.
Discovery & Strategy
The Beginning
- The client was not familiar with agile or user-centered design. Educating clients was helpful, but as stakeholders changed, more could have been done here to ensure understanding and alignment on software development processes.
- The current software was built to support custody officers, not for measuring student progress.
- The flows were focused on single inmates and custody-centric, prioritizing control.
- Nothing in the current system could be done as a group action, and the educational content was spread out within SOMS.
- Admin tasks took away from teacher-student time, and data collection methods were inaccurate.
- Processes were redundant and took hours instead of minutes.
!!Technical Impacts on Design!!
- The SOMs application is something our team had to read and write to. These technical hurdles impacted design.
- One of these hurdles was that the database we wrote to was different than the one we read from. There was no way to know how long it would take until we could read back the information we just given it.
- SOMs old enough that current devs had little understanding of its inner workings. This led to multiple re-designs as we discovered that one technical solution would not work as we thought.
- APIs and databases we connected to could not be changed, and some of the rules in these systems could not be changed, impacting the overall design.
Definition & Research
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It was clear that an off-the-shelf solution would not work.
-
The problems were too complex for any one stakeholder or user to understand.
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Roles at each institution were defined differently, and several institutions had custom roles that were not seen anywhere else.
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A large investment in internal change management would be required.
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It was also clear that we needed a flexible solution until our stakeholders could start to standardize processes across the state.
User quotes from Discovery
- “We have to do milewtones, grades, and transcripts for each student; it takes forever.”
- “I love my job here so much. I think we are making huge strides to reduce recidivism.”
- “Soms has so many clicks all the time. Course Transcripts takes a huge amount of clicking. Clicks for each student’s class. It is a lot of work
- “I have never heard of the IAO creating Assignments.”
- “We spend a lot of time doing student-by-student entries, which can take quite some time.”
- “We have to enter each of those courses into a digital transcript for each student. I just did 360 for the summer; each one has to be done individually.”
- “There’s a lot of redundancy and duplicate entries for the waitlist.”
- “I would love to prioritize checking in with students as opposed to doing data entry all the time.”
- “We cannot add the completion date to a class transcript. We have to add today’s date and change it toward the end of the term.”
- “It seems like we are doing the same process over and over again.”
- ” I’m envisioning a situation where we have a class that we create, and we just populate the students into it instead of individually entering each field for each student.”
- “We’re in the 4th week of school, and I just finished entering all of my course transcripts yesterday.”
- ” Your roster is in SOMS, so all of that has to get done, and it’s very easy to miss a piece of it because you’re waiting for SOMS to update for that day.”
- “We were being asked to give out laptops even though we don’t have Wi-Fi to support it, which is kind of strange, but there are various reasons for doing that.”
- “Teachers need to have their own system for tracking homework.”
- “There’s a lot of redundancy and duplicate entries for the waitlist.”
- “I would love to prioritize checking in with students as opposed to doing data entry all the time.”
- “We cannot add the completion date to a class transcript. We have to add today’s date and change it toward the end of the term.”
Analysis & Ideas
What is an Assignment at CDCR?
- Assignments at CDCR are how inmates are tracked within the prison system. The term “assignment” can not be used as something a teacher gives a student to do.
- No matter where you’re going or what you’re doing, it requires an assignment. This is combined with a physical ducat, given to the inmate.
- If you are an inmate who is going to class of any kind, that period of time will be defined in the EOMIS or SOMS software as an assignment.
- These are done one at a time by either a College Coordinator or an Inmate Assignment Officer, depending on the educational program.
- Some educational programs have a complex waitlist.
- The ducat system and waitlist were big problems according to users, but proved to be too technically complex to be integrated into the scope.
What is a class at CDCR?
- The concept of a class only exists within the “Student Information System”; it does not exist within (EOMIS / SOMS).
- Colleges that work with CDCR are organized by class.
- “Classes” had to exist in the SIS, so that College Coordinators could take bulk actions that impact the entire class.
- The SIS class links to an assignment in the SIS and auto-assigns all students in the class.
- The SIS enables multiple bulk actions, which speeds up user workflows by several orders of magnitude.
Design & Iteration
Initial Mockups
Top User Problems
- No bulk actions
- Easily accessible information
- Streamlined processes
- CDCR has an internal wait list system that impacts all assignments.
- The waitlist system is not used in the same way at all institutions.
- In order to work with the waitlist system, we would have had to rebuild it.
- The decision was made not to work with the waitlist system after completing research.
- This led to manually putting students into assignments and classes for certain programs.
- This created more work for users at various institutions.
Second Iteration Prototype Mockups
College Class & Assignment Detail
Classes & Links
Student Detail View
Implementation & Collaboration
- The most challenging part of this project was a change of leadership within the “Office of Correctional Education.” The new department head was not familiar with the project or agile software development.
- From this point on, stakeholders were misaligned, and politics drove many product decisions.
- The overall direction of the project changed 3 times, which presented several challenges.
Stakeholder Misalignment
- The “Office of Education” (OCE) is a part of the “Division of Rehabilitative Programs” (DRP).
- “Enterprise Information Services” (EIS) is a separate division responsible for IT and software at CDCR.
- DRP goals were not aligned internally. DRP and EIS were not aligned as well.
- My team and I were in less-than-ideal circumstances and still managed to get a solid product into the hands of our users.
Evaluation & Observation
Prototype Feedback
- Testing of multiple programs with users was successful with primary user flows.
- Secondary flows varied more from institution to institution.
- Feedback was overall positive, and users were able to accomplish their goals within prototypes.
- From institution to institution, we not only found variances in how users performed their jobs, but we also found variances in what jobs were responsible for which flows.
- Building each separate flow for each separate user at each institution was not viable or within scope.
Metrics
- We could observe users being able to perform their duties faster than ever before. Over 90% faster.
- Internal confusion about roles and who was responsible for which part of the process created so much chaos that users were more stressed out than ever.
- Performance Metrics were all over the map with no easily discernible pattern.
- Most users were performing better when they had a Principal/leadership that was a stickler for details and required things to be done in a very specific way.
Change Management
- Change Management is critical. Having stakeholders understand and know how to do this internally is key.
- A big challenge was that when stakeholder leadership chose a direction, change management at the institutional level did not happen.
- At the institutional level, not all flows were done in the same way, or by the same role, or even in the same division.
- This meant Institutional changes needed to be coordinated across divisions of one of the largest employers in California.
- Unaligned internal stakeholders will slow things down and cause churn.
- One internal stakeholder planned on completely removing the role of the user, but was still a decision maker for this project.
- “OCE” decided not to add a needed user role to the SIS because the role only existed at half the institutions.
- This passed all their responsibilities to SIS users.
Conclusion
Stakeholder Alignment & Change Management
- Stakeholder Alignment is critical
- Change Management knowledge and ability to implement are critical.
- Users ended up having a ton more free time, but little direction on how to use it.
- Politics are necessary.
- Breaking things down in multiple ways can help when there is a large stakeholder group.
- Goal is to create understanding and facilitate action items within the group of stakeholders that they can then hold themselves accountable to.