Nuclear Education HUB
After working for several years with the European Nuclear Education Network(ENEN), creating courses and projects for universities, managing applications, it became very clear that there is a clear gap between the teachers initiating the courses/trainings/workshops and the students for whom they were created. There was a one way approach, with little to no interest in the students behaviour, wants and needs.
Our primary goal was to provide an engaging and user-friendly experience that motivates and supports teachers and students alike to engage in acadamic growth.
Along with my colegue Octavian, I set out on a quest to discover a digital solution that is simple, easy to comprehend, yet interactive and useful, aiming to promote academic growth. We collaborated through the research and exploration phase, where we came together to explore and analize insights, findings and opportunities.
Connecting teachers with students
We began by understanding the target audience of the platform, such as students, professionals, and institutions involved in nuclear education and training. We wanted to reach a broader audience and quantify findings, so a survey was the first step in the research journey.
We asked students about their learning goals, preferred learning methods, and challenges they faced when looking for educational training and vocational training.
We asked teachers how they promote courses, their needs in managing listings, and any challenges they face with content presentation.
Starting from a very positive premise, we outlined our research goal:
“Explore the experiences of students and teachers with nuclear education and identify solutions that could support them in better connecting the needs of each to the others offerings.
What are the most frequent and significant challenges or obstacles encountered by users interested in nuclear education, be it from the students point of view(such as having to look in multiple places for different courses, not having clear filtering options, not having enough information about courses, etc.) or the teachers(such as not being able to bring their courses in front of a wide audience, not being able to tranc performance of courses, etc.)?
Additionally, what would motivate each of them to use a nuclear education platform?”
While using the above to shape our initial survey questions brought great results from students, we found that it didn't work so well with teachers., mainly due to their limited availability. Recognizing the need for deeper insights from teachers before moving on to the generative phase, we sought alternative methods. ENEN (European Nuclear Education Network) provided an opportunity by facilitating our presence at their annual conference.
This allowed us to conduct in-depth interviews with over 20 educators from leading global universities in the nuclear field, ensuring the crucial feedback necessary for our research.
As we were looking at a lot of unstructured and complex data, we had to organize data into clusters, get deeper insights, identify patterns.
of students cite difficulty finding relevant courses as their main challenge.
prefer a blended approach, combining online and face-to-face.
of teachers name course promotion and visibility a major challenge.
of teachers report content management as a barrier.
With the research organized into clear clusters, each one was reframed as a "how might we" question, turning raw insights into concrete creative prompts. From there, we opened up into ideation, generating a wide range of ideas around each cluster. The yellow notes capture that thinking, and together they pointed toward several strong opportunities to pursue.
Where it started: the limitations of apply.enen
There wasn't really a competitor to analyze; nuclear education is a niche field, and no dedicated platform existed for promoting its courses and workshops. In the absence of one, teachers and organisations were left posting courses on their own individual websites, with very limited visibility and little to no supporting features.
I had already been running courses and workshops through apply.enen.eu, a rudimentary platform where teachers could post opportunities and students could apply. Managing that process manually: posting courses by hand, tracking applications one by one, is where I first ran into the exact problems the Nuclear Education HUB set out to solve. It became clear there was room for something far more capable: a platform where both teachers and students could build real profiles, not just submit forms, and where posting a course or applying to one was just the entry point to a much wider set of features.
Key takeaways
Having lived inside the old process, the priorities were clear from the start: teachers needed a way to manage courses and applications without manual overhead, and students needed a profile-based experience, not a one-off form, so their learning history, applications, and certificates could live in one place.
It's time to get visually creative
The design started with building the user flow.
Constraints and limitations:
This was a complex project running under real-world constraints. As part of a consortium, every major step needed approval from consortium members before moving forward, which meant decisions had to be well-argued and validated, not just designed. Budget and time were limited too, so ambition had to be balanced against what could realistically be delivered.
With a project this bold, the possibilities were nearly endless, but that was exactly the risk. Rather than trying to build everything at once, the approach was to prove the core concept first: get the foundational platform working and demonstrate real value, which would then justify greenlighting the more ambitious features down the line.
Usability Testing Intro
The first real test wasn't even a formal one, it was watching teachers try to use the existing WordPress dashboard to manage their courses. It was a disaster. That experience became the clearest signal in the whole project: teachers needed a dedicated, purpose-built dashboard, not a generic CMS bolted onto their workflow.
That single finding reshaped a major part of the platform. We designed a teacher dashboard that let educators create, edit, and duplicate courses, lectures, and workshops, and handle applications directly: reviewing, exporting, approving, or declining them. It also included a permissions layer, so organisation admins could grant management rights to the right people within their team.
The same process revealed the same need on the student side. Students needed a home for their own journey through the platform, so we designed a student dashboard where they could track and manage applications, define their interests and profile, receive accreditations, and set alerts for courses matching what they care about.
Teacher Dashboard flow - course/lecture/workshop creation, editing, duplication; application review/export/approve/decline; admin rights management.
Student Dashboard flow - applications tracking, profile/interests setup, accreditations, course alerts.
HUB Platform Guide
See the project in action below: