… and how it helps us design better learning experiences
Learning something new is exciting and scary at the same time. Above all, when your school or even university years are a distant memory. The prospect of many study hours ahead, especially when learning a totally new skill, can be daunting. Finding the time to schedule learning in a busy daily schedule can be a challenge in itself. But the promise of discovering a new world of knowledge or enhancing you skill set to give your career a new boost can also be very motivating.
Two weeks ago I started an intensive 5 months online course to become a certified UX Designer. With my PhD almost finalised, I felt like exploring a more practical approach of how people interact with technology and see how I can combine it with my learning design background. After being “the teacher” for more than a decade now, I went back to being “the student” (well, I’m still teaching my online courses in parallel, but that’s another story). As excited as I was about the new topic, committing to learn for several hours daily felt a bit scary. But I was happy to discover that good habits die hard and my learning skills were back in no time, helping me not only go through the first two very intensive weeks but actually enjoy it.
Here are a few initial thoughts, as I try to make sense of the interaction between UX design and learning design:
Having the “user” in the center of your design resonates with the student-centered approach that I’ve been working on through the past years. Active learning methods involve the student learning by “doing something”, be it playing a game, collaborating with peers or creating something. But all too often, as instructors, we focus on the content, the knowledge we want students to acquire, and spend too little time on imagining the process. Here is where I think UX design come is handy.
But first things first: if you design for your students you need to start by getting to know them better. This is often easier said than done, as we often only get to know our student cohorts on the first day of class, when the course is already planned. This is why it is very important to create opportunities for students to reflect on how they learn, on what works and what doesn’t; this is useful both for them- to make studying more effective-and for us as instructors as it enables us to better understand the needs, behaviours and goals of our students.
Information architecture (a term I just learned and can totally relate to) is extremely important both in developing learning materials (think textbooks, presentations, handouts, etc) and in designing learning experiences (lectures, seminars, games, debates, etc). As I have been teaching complex topics such as EU decision-making for quite some time now, I know all too well how important it is to make complicated processes easy to understand and remember. How you structure the information and the sequence in which you present it have a great impact on how students learn. An important UX design step is creating user flows. In an educational context this means imagining the process students follow when going through the course, step by step. This allows us to identify potential pitfalls early on (and subsequently simplify the design) while preparing us to smoothly guide students through their learning journey.
Once the course structure is built, the next challenge is building engaging learning experiences. Interaction design, another UX concept, helps us focus on “how” students learn. How do they interact with the content? How do they interact with each other and with us as instructors? What support do they need to make this engagement effective? I am looking forward to diving in this particular topic and getting insights I can then translate in my own course design.
First and foremost, in the past two weeks I started seeing learners’ experience as a story. As storytellers, we have a lot of power in deciding where the different paths head to, but we need to focus our decisions on learners’ goals, providing them with enough space and options so that they can end up writing their own story. The balance between our “master story” (i.e. the course design) and the many learner stories is the measure of a successful experience.
While the principles of UX design are applied mainly to digital products and services, I find them valuable for both online and face-to-face learning experiences. What I find most interesting at this point is exploring how to design learning spaces that seamlessly blend the affordances of technology and the immediacy of the face-to-face setup.
I will continue to reflect on the convergence of UX and learning design as I make my way through the second (and more extensive) part of the course. For now, I find it fascinating to learn more about our everyday use of technology and how we can shape decisions and behaviours with sound design principles.