Finalist 2024

Helping Educators and Young People to Build Resilience & Happiness

Today / The Resilience Project

The Resilience Project is a unique program that helps build resilience and happiness.

The Resilience Project is a unique program that helps build resilience and happiness. Together we built a world-class digital platform that equips educators to learn, plan and teach students these lifelong skills, giving 400,000 students across Australia access to life-changing skills to support their mental health.

Design Brief:

Almost half of all Australians will face mental ill-health at some point in their lives. The Resilience Project (TRP) has a mission to change this, but their off-the-shelf platform was holding them back.

TRP wanted to move away from a Learning Management System (LMS) that was challenging to scale, to a bespoke platform that could support their future growth. They wanted a platform that was intuitive and easy for teachers to use, and also removed the usability and administrative burden their internal team were facing.

This project was developed by:

  • Today
  • The Resilience Project

Design Process

We paired a human-centred approach with world-class technical capabilities to build a solution that equips educators to learn, plan, and teach students lifelong resilience skills. Through Discovery and MVP phases, the platform was iteratively developed to shape a fit-for-purpose and scalable solution.

The project had a key focus on the usability needs of teachers. Throughout co-creation and testing, we created a highly usable end product with moments of delight throughout, increasing efficiencies to help teachers be more deeply engaged in content and its delivery in the classroom.

Content strategy was key to the success of this project. Prior to this work, the education content was not designed for digital experiences. The new platform not only transformed the content strategy and digital foundations to champion this content and allow it to really speak for itself, but also allow for future content and digital experiences to be developed.

The platform was designed to tailor learning and support experiences for different users, with their focus areas and outcomes progressively realised year on year. This was achieved through iteratively building out a component library alongside the platform, allowing for multiple user types and personalisation at a user level.

Usability and operational efficiency were key, both for teachers and internal operations. Recognising how busy teachers can be, the digital program experience was shaped to be intuitive, effortless and enjoyable to teach – delivering impact for teachers, students and the whole school community through their experience of the program. It also relieved administrative burden for TRP’s internal team, freeing up team members to focus on more impactful work.

Design Excellence

The design and usability of the new platform is deeply intuitive, significantly increasing teacher’s satisfaction and engagement. Research and co-creation processes focused on ensuring they could find the right content, in the right detail, at the right time.

We ran a pilot run with 12 schools to test usability and impact for schools and the TRP team. The data we received was a true marker that we had reached our goal of making this platform scalable, usable and engaging, with feedback including:

“I wouldn’t change anything. Having all resources and descriptions on the one page makes transitions between activities smooth.”

“It’s clear, easy to follow and gives enough guidance to help personalise for our students. Just so easy to access the right things I’m looking for.”

As the platform needed to support future growth to serve more schools into the future, the architecture needed to allow for expansion. Each component of the system was carefully thought out to support current and future needs of the users, operations and learning curriculum. We leveraged a proven architecture, built on AWS cloud services, to deliver a product that can scale and grow without compromising on performance.

The CMS has been thoughtfully designed to be modular in nature, allowing content editors to compose pages from flexible content blocks that were validated through user testing. This means TRP can easily respond to changing user needs across the platform, and feel supported instead of restrained by technology.

The digital platform is streamlined and scalable, with deeply intuitive design and high teacher satisfaction. It has become a key selling point for TRP and the 2024 goal for school sign-ups was met within the first few months of launch. The operational efficiencies and reduced administrative burden allows TRP to invest time in the highest impact work, including improving their digital curriculum.

Design Innovation

The TRP platform innovates how learning platforms can be centred around educators and curriculum, unlocking new types of tailored and scalable education experiences.

There are limitations to the pedagogical strategies that an organisation can adopt when they use an off-the-shelf LMS. You can find your digital curriculum is limited to the structures and capabilities of that LMS, leaving an organisation unexpectedly coupled to the evolution of that chosen LMS. Keeping educators and the curriculum at the heart of the platform’s design allows the unique model at The Resilience Project to capitalise on the promise of digital.

It also is grounded in long-term, scalable and sustainable performance for users and TRP. Each component of the system has been carefully thought out to support current and future users of the platform, built on a proven architecture that adapts to high traffic and user growth without compromising on performance.

The CMS has been thoughtfully designed to be modular in nature, allowing content editors to compose pages from flexible content blocks that were validated through user testing. This means TRP can easily respond to changing user needs across the platform, and feel supported instead of restrained by technology.

The frontend is backed by a user interface (UI) design system made of custom, themed components. Adding to the future-focused flexibility of the platform, the UI package is decoupled from the application, meaning it can be reused across multiple digital channels in the future.

Design Impact

Everything TRP does is driven by their purpose, to inspire happiness and change lives. The digital platform and its focus on embedding user needs has significantly scaled the reach and impact of this goal.

We know that about 1 in 3 kids, from primary to secondary school, currently have high levels of depression, anxiety or both. Part of TRP’s program is a survey from Resilient Youth Australia, which assesses the mental wellbeing and resilience of students each year.

Through COVID in 2020-2021, the University of Adelaide used this survey data to compare the mental wellbeing of 83,000 students who were doing TRP’s program against 80,000 students who weren’t. While they saw anxiety and depressive symptoms increase and life satisfaction decrease at non-TRP schools, anxiety and depressive symptoms stayed level at TRP schools and life satisfaction actually increased, which was really significant.

TRP has now rolled out to over 30,000 teachers at nearly 1,100 schools, with nearly 400,000 students participating. The platform was an essential factor in the success of existing school retention and the rise in new school sign ups. The TRP Education team has been freed up to spend less time on administration and even more time serving and supporting schools.

“You really empowered and enabled us to take the hub and the approach forward. This will not only allow us to reach more people, but to do so in a way that creates an amazing level of impact for them.”

The digital platform is streamlined and scalable, with deeply intuitive design and high teacher satisfaction. It has become a key selling point for TRP and the 2024 goal for school sign-ups was met within the first few months of launch. The operational efficiencies allows TRP to invest time in the highest impact work, including improving their digital curriculum.

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