Mark Bassett – Auckland University of Technology Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau
Learning specialists typically avoid dwelling on the negatives, but I feel there’s something we need to talk about. Let me repeat for dramatic effect: Students could not care less how you organise your online resources! Hopefully, I’ve intrigued you enough to delve into a conference paper I’ve recently published with two colleagues on this very subject.
Shimmering diamonds of learning content
Over decades, many of us have poured our efforts, skills, knowledge bases, hearts, and (waxing/waning) grasps on reality into creating online resources to support students’ learning. If we’re lucky, we work with colleagues who have also poured just as much as us, and with whom we have engaged keenly in frequent long (even unending) debates about the ideal way to curate and organise our shining and shimmering diamonds of learning content for students to self-access.
Perhaps more than one of you will have said something like “I think we’re best off using the student journey to sequence all our resources – students are used to thinking about that process, so it will be easy for them to navigate if we organise things that way.” And probably others of you have said at other times, or in opposition, “We should use drop-down menus that have all our content in thematic groups – this will let students see what else is available in case they need other content.”
And I dare say that some of you have participated in numerous to-ings and fro-ings between perspectives like these over various team configurations, leadership regimes, and years (oh the years!). Doubtless the arguments in such debates are well-intentioned, well-thought-out, and well-articulated, but… they are also well-opinionated, and pretty much exclusively, based on our opinions. How many of these debates have included students?
Bringing students into design work
I do not wish to criticise – we are all doing the best we can with the tools and time that we have – but it’s probably not a stretch to assume that almost none of the decision-making about the design of your online resources has involved students in the design process. How could it? You’ve already got more work than you can handle, so how could you possibly spend time on tracking down students to talk with, spend more time on actually talking with them, spend even more time on aggregating and analysing what they said, and then spend yet even more time on implementing that in the design of your online resources?
Well, this is something that we have made time for at AUT. Our department, Te Mātāpuna Library and Learning Services, has embraced user experience (UX) research as integral to our practices and spaces (online and on campus). This has meant that our team of academic literacy specialists and information literacy specialists are actually supported and expected to co-design resources and services with students. We carry out UX projects regularly in order to test how well the content we’ve created works for students and to find out what they actually want before we start creating other content.
Something we’ve found out from our UX with students is that they “don’t know the hierarchy” of our resources (there, that’s a student included in the debate). A little analysis of our student data, in fact, would lead us to suggest more strongly that they actually don’t care about that hierarchy. If anything, they find all of our various well-intentioned attempts to be confusing, frustrating and exclusionary – we have been asking them about this since 2018, and we now no longer will because the answer is always the same.
Psssssshhhhhhhh – what’s that sound? It’s the air rushing out of our arguments, and we can relax. Not only do we now have actual student data about how they experience our resources to use in our design, but we also have the most wonderful argument neutraliser! “I see what you mean, but how do you know that? Have you ever asked or seen how they use our resources on their own? No? Well, the students who we asked told us that…” – and on we go into new directions where we can ask students to co-design content, and where we’re not wasting time on how to organise it.
Want to read more?
To find out how our students actually want to engage with our online resources, please read our concise, five-page, paper that we have just presented at this year’s ASCILITE conference– click on the DOI:
Bassett, M., Chapman, E., & Wattam, C. (2023). ‘I don’t know the hierarchy’: Using UX to position literacy development resources where students expect them. In T. Cochrane, V. Narayan, C. Brown, K. MacCallum, E. Bone, C. Deneen, R. Vanderburg, & B. Hurren (Eds.), People, partnerships and pedagogies. Proceedings ASCILITE 2023. Christchurch (pp. 286 -290). https://doi.org/10.14742/apubs.2023.462
You can also contact Mark at mark.bassett@aut.ac.nz