In April, Dr. Constance Stanley of the University of Colorado gave a day-long workshop titled “50 Ways to Teach with Impact” to the Chicago Area Faculty Development Network. To my surprise, the workshop presented techniques grounded in user-centered-design best practices. The workshop was geared toward instructors teaching in a face-to-face classroom; however, many of the strategies could easily be transferred to an online class. As a former user-experience analyst and current instructional designer, I found the bent of the workshop to be a welcome integration of these two disciplines.

Whitney Hess wrote the blog post “Guiding Principles for UX Designers” for UX Magazine that went gangbusters in the Twitterverse. Her guiding principles correlate nicely with Dr. Stanley’s “50 Ways to Teach with Impact.” Let’s take a look.

By taking the student perspective and needs into consideration, the instructor becomes a user-experience designer of the classroom environment. Dr. Stanley provides numerous techniques that emphasize engaging the student at multiple levels so as to “hook” each student. This is similar to the best designs, which allow users easy and seamless access to a service or product.

Details on Dr. Stanley’s strategies:

Pre and post interviews: To get a feel for the prior knowledge and assumptions of the students, instructors require that students take an online survey with questions about the content at the beginning of the course. With the results, the instructor now “understands the problem.” Tweaking the content and its delivery to make it accessible and engaging for a particular class of students is “attempting to solve the problem.” The post interview gives the student a sense of “where they have come” and gives the instructor valuable feedback on their content-delivery choices or user-experience design.

Metacognitive Activities: Dr. Stanley stated that, “these activities ask the learner to observe ‘the way things are’ versus ‘the way I make them as a learner.’” In other words, students are put into situations that ask them to reflect on their process and understanding of the content. Examples of these types of activities are: self-assessments; selecting from a choice of activities based on their preferred modality of learning; or having a dialogue with peers about their understanding of the content. By creating these opportunities, instructors provide pathways for students to access the content in simple and intuitive ways.

VARK (Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic) learning preference assessment:Students and the instructor answer a quick sixteen-item questionnaire to find out their learning preference. The instructor receives the student results anonymously. By knowing the breakdown of learning preferences within a particular class, the instructor can adjust the delivery of the content to meet student needs. In addition, the instructor can be cognizant of his/her own learning preferences so as not to tilt the presentation of content towards that modality; thereby “acknowledging that the user is not like you.” The assessment is available at: http://www.vark-learn.com.

Influx of Information/Multitasking: Being empathetic to the bombardment of information students are faced with via text messages, e-mails, twitter feeds, etc. is essential in understanding the “user.” Designing a course experience that capitalizes on these devices and information streams encourages students to participate, because their frame of reference is being acknowledged. Rather than competing, play along with it. Poll Everywhere presents a content-related question to the student that is answered via text. Instructors can project the real-time results on a screen in the classroom or present them in an online collaborative environment. Multitasking and information overload are part of our students’ realities; so let’s use the very devices and technologies that vie for their attention.

The instructor as a user experience designer—I like that idea. Through the strategies presented by Dr. Stanley, instructors get a sense of the audience, their needs, and their preferences. Using these “specs” to inform the design of content delivery will lead to student engagement and participation. As one of the pioneers of user-experience design Donald Norman said, “Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.”