This article is a sequel to an overview of UXDL and Design Thinking. If you have not already done so, we encourage you to review that overview before diving into this section. That page is designed to introduce you to the basic concepts of UXDL (User Experience Design for Learning, a design framework which lays out some general principles that have been found to make online courses and activities work better for students) and to provide you with guidance about how to use that framework to design improvements for your own teaching.
What's at Stake? What Novice Students Need Online
Novice students, we know, have particular needs that sharpen the imperative to design effective courses. By definition, novice students often lack the familiarity with our campus norms and expectations that they will gain through their years of experience in our classrooms. Many lack the momentum and confidence that will come with success and progress through their courses and that will help them overcome their reluctance to attend office hours and otherwise feel as though they are intruding on their instructors' time. At this stage in their college careers, they have yet to build up peer and professional support networks that can help them answer questions and find their way to appropriate resources, such as dedicated help centers. These students face unusual pressures, ranging from the disorientation of entering a new, too-often intimidating environment through financial stress and the prospect of racking up substantial debt with fewer promises of repayment than past generations. An increasing number start their college career working and/or supporting families while attending classes. Others are veterans, some who have lived through years of warfare. And many have disabilities, including those that may not have been diagnosed or which they have not yet acknowledged and begun to address.
Online learning heightens the stakes -- but also, we want to emphasize, provides powerful new ways to provide support -- for each of these aspects of the novice students' experience. Students who lack experience with college courses may struggle even more when they must navigate a syllabus without the ability to raise their hand and ask questions. Students who are reluctant to visit an instructor during office hours may find it even less conceivable to ask that daunting professor to schedule 1:1 time on Zoom. Students with disabilities, who encounter a Carmen course full of documents they cannot access or make sense of, may feel even more discouraged and less likely to persist.
Rounding out the picture, the majority of students starting at the university have recently lived through the sudden, disorienting, and often traumatic lurch to emergency online delivery that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. That historical rupture heightens the importance of providing high-quality online learning in our own courses. Some of these students may have been among the fortunate who attended schools that provided high-quality online courses delivered by attentive instructors alongside engaged peers, in which case they will be expecting our online courses to be at least as good. Or possibly they attended a district which provided none of those benefits, or they were unable to take advantage of high-quality emergency online teaching because they lacked high-speed internet or other necessary technology -- in which case, the prospect of online learning may insight some level of trauma that only well-designed and supportive courses can assuage, easing their anxiety and enabling them to thrive.
On Digital Natives
You may have heard of "digital natives." You may have heard that new students these days were all raised with technology and spend so much time on their phones that they don't really need us to worry about them. If anything, we can count on them to help us, should we run into technology glitches. This is a myth, which you should remove from your thinking.
While true that each generation develops a different relationship to technology than those before and after it -- indeed, the most compelling definition for the elusive word "technology" remains "tools invented since you were born" -- you cannot count on every student in your course spontaneously knowing just what to do and how to navigate barriers. For one thing, the ways we need students to use technology are different from the ways they use technology in non-academic situation, much as reading for pleasure goes only a little way toward preparing students to read scholarship. More to the point, not every student is an 18-year-old fresh from a K-12 institution in the United States: increasingly, our students are returning and working people, some older than we are, who bring a wide range of experiences and gaps with technology use. Further, not every student sees and hears the world the same way -- or at all. Disabilities of various kinds mean that there is no ideal or perfect user to design for, or at least, designing for such a construct would mean leaving out large swathes of the people who might otherwise benefit from our learning.
UXDL and Design Thinking
As a reminder, the UXDL Framework is a set of principles developed at the University of Waterloo by a team of instructional designers intended to make the complex practice of user experience design available in a manageable form for educators. It adapts the UX Honeycomb model originally developed by Peter Morville in 2004 for a distance learning environment.
How to Apply UXDL to Support Novice Students
So how do we use the UXDL framework to address the needs of novice students?
Below we will walk through three examples that our team has developed, utilizing the UXDL framework to address the most important early needs for novice students. As you will see, the application of the UXDL framework is a practice that fluctuates and varies depending on the content in question. Design remains an art more than a science.
With that caveat, as a general rule, we propose a 5-step model for applying the UXDL framework:
- Abstract the situation to identify what students need most.
- Identify the dimension(s) of UXDL that are most salient for the task.
- Review the general principles for that dimension of UXDL and connect them to specific experiences that students will have.
- Identify the corresponding features of Carmen and figure out how to optimize them for the students' actual experience.
- Rinse, repeat until it feels ready to present to students.
We could say more, but we think it will be more useful to see how it works in practice.
ASC Distance Learning Course Template for CarmenCanvas
Our team has developed a template for Carmen courses, which we hope will give you a head-start on the kind of design work we are describing here. That template contains pre-built materials, which include prompts to guide you through the process of adapting each item for use with your students in your own course. Click on this link for more information about this template, including step-by-step instructions about how to import it into your Carmen course(s).
The Applications
So what do these students need to succeed? To illustrate the benefits of design thinking, we will focus here on the novice student’s initial contact with an online course, addressing three essential elements:
The Landing Page
Also called the homepage, the landing page is the first thing students see when they enter your course. And as the old advertisement says, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. What students encounter here will have long-lasting impact on their experience in your course. The landing page needs to provide students an experience that will both motivate and prepare them to engage and excel in the course.
Course Navigation
Course Navigation is both a first-day design challenge and a decision that will impact students' experience throughout your course. Often, the first thing students want to do in a course is explore what awaits them, clicking around to see the assignments and other materials. Then, throughout the term, it becomes the basis for everything they will do in the course. On any given day, they will need to go to the course and find the materials they need to do their learning. Later they will want to go back and find specific materials, such as a reading to cite for an essay or a quiz to study for a larger exam. The course navigation needs to make it as easy as possible for students to understand and undertake that work, so that they can focus their energy on learning, rather than anxiety at feeling disoriented.
The Syllabus
The syllabus is a perennial challenge, especially for new students unaccustomed to interpreting the multi-page, quasi-contractual documents that govern their courses. Given the importance of the document -- it literally contains policies that can result in their removal from the university -- the importance of good design is tremendous. The syllabus needs to present a massive amount of information in ways that students can actually make sense of it all.