Exploring how we in the OER community can improve the relationship between user experience and instructional design.
As internet technologies evolve, the web environment continues to offer instructional designers and teaching faculty new opportunities, challenges and insights regarding the delivery of learning materials to students. For example, often the notion of "delivery" is shifting to "interaction" in a variety of important ways. What can we learn from the field of user experience that should inform our learning design process? Although it has long been known that integrating user experience with software development processes can be a tricky proposition, the notion of applying that expertise to the course design process is relatively uncharted territory. What from the learning sciences and design principles should not be compromised for improved user experience? Is there really a tradeoff or is that notion artificial? Most importantly, what kinds of processes can designers use to keep learning environments relevant as technology continues to change?
This session will explore how the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University works through these issues and will describe the process we developed to incorporate the perspectives of both user experience with learning science into the course design process. The OLI is an open educational resources project that began in 2002 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The project is also supported by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Lumina Foundation and The Kresge Foundation. OLI was recently awarded additional funding from the Gates Foundation in conjunction with Creative Commons and the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in part to foster a greater collaboration user experience specialists and course designers.
The presenters will share some of the challenges that they had along the way and what is being done to surmount them. They also share lessons learned and successes that forward our understanding of how these perspectives can integrate in practice and why we believe it is vitally important to students that we do so. In part, the solution is to realize the gains to be made by utilizing input from both domains of expertise, and to re-frame the notion that user experience and instructional design are at odds with one another, rather that they both are interested in improving outcomes. Lastly, the presenters discuss their ongoing work to iteratively improve both our understanding of best practices from the instructional design and user experience fields and the processes by which we combine both fields as we strive to improve course design.