How to Teach Future UX Designers
.jpg)
This UX design course is the concentrator course for receiving a Career Technical Education (CTE) certification for the Arts, Media, and Entertainment (AME) pathway with a focus on Design, Visual, and Media Arts in California public high schools.The course will be a one year course with the first semester focusing on UX research and the second semester focusing on UX design. This class will be following an introductory course in which different fields within the AME pathway have been explored and followed by a capstone course.
• High financial and technological resources are required to offer a course such as this - which may be hard to get in schools located in lower socioeconomic communities
• Current distribution of educational funding of public schools in California is inequitable with the amount of funding dependent on the property value of the community the school serves (Verstegan, 2015)
• The design of the course needs to be able to be implemented in schools with little resources as well in order to provide the same opportunity regardless of the school the learners are attending.
• Ability to apply skills as they learn them
• Instant feedback from peers and instructors
• Provides the space and tools necessary to explore and practice
• Provides the students the hardware and software to learn
• Provides the students the physical scape to learn and explore
This year long course will include the following units:
Unit 1. Introduction to UX design
Unit 2. Overview of Research
Unit 3. Conducting Research
Unit 4. Affinity Diagrams for Analyzing Data
Unit 5. Defining the Problem and the User
Unit 6. Overview of Design
Unit 7. Design Principles
Unit 8. Ideation and Prototyping
Unit 9. Usability Testing and Iterations
Unit 10. Presenting of Designs and Case Studies
Unit 4 was developed after interviewing UX researchers and performing a cognitive task analysis (CTA) of the task that was to be taught. The learning objectives and learning activities were developed with the knowledge gained from the CTA, learning theories, and the cognitive, social, and behavioral characteristics of this age group.
By the end of the unit, learners will be able to:
1. Organize the information learners have gathered during research in an organized process using an affinity diagram
2. Determine who the learners will be designing for
3. Determine what the learners will be designing
During this unit, learners will participate in the following activities:
• Presentation by the instructor
• Practice of creating an affinity diagram with curated pictures provided by the instructor
• Create an affinity diagram using the research data the learners have collected so far
• Complete a worksheet that helps learners organize their information and also evaluate learning
• Present their findings and explain the reason as to how they organized their data and how this data supports their selection of who and what they will be designing
• Exit survey to measure the learner's motivation at the end of the unit
What led me to pursue this degree was my desire to be able to provide the same level of education regardless of the zip code students lived in. Through this program, I have had the greatest opportunity to start putting that into reality. My goal is to create sound instruction that can also be catered towards different groups of students. This would allow us to meet their specific needs but ultimately still provide the learners the same quality of instruction.
As I have a background in UX (user experience) design, I found that I could apply my design process for products into my instructional design. The ADDIE model tied in very closely with the UX design process in that when designing instruction, you have to analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate. Like UX design, when designing instruction, there is always room for improvement and as designers we have to remember that. By working through this process, not only do you produce sound design, but it also ensures that the instruction is going to make an impact on our target learners.
Along with the ADDIE model, Gagne's 9 Events of Instruction and Bloom's Taxonomy guide us in the actual development of the course. By applying Gagne's 9 Events of Instruction and Bloom's Taxonomy, it also ensures that we are making effective instruction and reminds us to include all of the necessary elements of effective instruction.
While working through my Capstone, I realized how much effort and thought needs to be put into creating effective instructional design. There were so many different elements that affected other parts of instruction that I had never thought of before. The writing of the capstone gave me the opportunity to practice creating a cohesive product at such a large scale. As hard as it was to get all of my thoughts down and make it work, I value the importance of creating an instructional design blueprint. It allows you to think everything through and justify the decisions made throughout the process. Moving forward, I plan on continuing to use some smaller scaled version of this Capstone to provide guidance in writing future instructions.
Bandura, A. (1993). Perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning.
Educational Psychologist, 29, 117-148.
California Department of Education (2019). The Academy Model. In Program Overview.
Retrieved January 11, 2021 from https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/hs/cpaoverview.asp#:~:text=The%20Academy%20Model,California%20in%20the%20early%201980s.
Eccles, J. (2009). Expectancy value motivational theory. Retrieved on May 23, 2015 from
http://www.education.com/reference/article/expectancy-value-motivational-theory
Mayer, R. E. (2011). Applying the Science of Learning. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Pull, C. B. (2012). Current status of knowledge on public-speaking anxiety. Current Opinion in
Psychiatry, 25(1), 32–38. doi: 10.1097/YCO.0b013e32834e06dc.
Robinson P. (2012) Abilities to Learn: Cognitive Abilities. In N.M. Seel (eds), Encyclopedia of
the Sciences of Learning (pp. 17-20). Boston, MA: Springer Science+Business Media.
Santrock, J. (2020). Essentials of Life-Span Development (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill
Education.
Seli, H. (2015). Learning designer toolkit. [Unpublished manuscript]. University of Southern
California.
Smith, P. L.,& Ragan, T. J. (2005). Instructional Design (3rd ed). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley &
Sons.
Verstegen, D (2015) On Doing an Analysis of Equity and Closing the Opportunity Gap
Education Policy Analysis Archives 23(41).