Enabling Student Competency Self-reflection Online through MS PowerApps

Even before the pandemic, our industry struggled to create online learning experiences to enable and support student self-reflection at larger scales. At the beginning of a one-year graduate program at HGSE, 120 students were asked to create an individual development plan (IDP). To support student self-reflection, we created a PowerApps-based online learning experience that used student responses to construct individualized feedback dashboards and reports. Students were then able to use these resources as inputs when constructing their IDPs. We created a similar tool to measure cohort mood and invite students to reflect on the emotions they felt at different moments of their program. This tool also provided an additional channel to request support if needed. Part of the challenge lay in finding tools that allowed us to capture information from students and later mirror it back flexibly. Solutions in the market were costly and focused on generating aggregate-level dashboards but did not provide individual respondents with personalized screens. An in-house development from scratch was also too costly to consider and had the added risk of creating user information security issues. We chose to use PowerApps, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365 partly because these tools were already included in our existing Microsoft for Education license; therefore, the solution did not impact our IT budget.