teaching by proxy
TRANSCRIPT
Teaching by ProxyRedesigning General Assembly’s part-time UXD curriculum to increase the likelihood of student and instructor success
Jessica Greco @grecasaurus
How I redesigned a design curriculum
Jess GrecoIndependent UX Consultant
Jess GrecoIndependent UX Consultant Instructor @ General Assembly
What is General Assembly?An educational company that helps people pursue meaningful work by teaching the most current and in-demand skills.
15 locations across 4 continentsDesign, Programming, Data Science, Product Management
Fall 2015
😛😍🎉
The Course• Part-time User Experience Design
(UXD) course
• Project-based learning experience
• Aims to train the next wave of experience designers
• Taught by practicing designers
• Thousands take the UXD course every year
• Wide variety of skill sets and career goals
• They’re all committed to making a change
The Students
Why refresh the curriculum at all?
• Students and instructors were asking for schedules that were easier to fit into their busy lives
• Students found long evening lectures to be tiring
• First-time instructors found that the bare-bones curriculum required a lot of customization
• Lots of variation in student feedback across locations and instructors
Challenges
Mark Graveline Product Manager
Julie Kerner Instructional Designer
Aaron Neeley SME
Pre-Work
Roxanne Mustafa SME
Homework
Jess Greco Lead SME
Lesson Planning
The Team
1. Bring student feedback scores up
2. Decrease lecture time; increase class time for activities
3. Make the course easier for new instructors to teach
4. Adapt to the shortened timeframe of the course
Goals
It is hard to design a curriculum, but it’s even harder for students to redesign their lives.
Students faced unique challenges 😬
Students needed to trust they’re getting the best education possible, regardless of location or instructor.
⭐
Students also struggled to relate what they learned in class to the real world.
😳
Could the classroom experience better reflect what it’s really like to work as a designer?
💡
Being a great designer isn’t the same as being a great instructor.
Instructors had different challenges
How could we help instructors help their students more effectively? 💡
It’s important to leave instructors the space to share their unique experiences.
What We Did
The biggest challenge students faced was taking in feedback and then actually taking action.
We switched to an iterative, sprint-based course structure.
😠😤😦
#1
Iteration 1: Learn the process and theory behind design thinking on a practice project.
Develop a hypothesis about a topic of student’s choosing and validate it.
Refine the concept, and the interface itself, then validate again.
Iteration 2:
Iteration 3:
10 weeks of 3+ iterations
Working iteratively pushed students to validate early and often.
@grecasaurus
Students became more comfortable working in quick, imperfect cycles.
Students had a hard time staying focused during lectures, especially after a long day of work.
We flipped the classroom.
😐😞😴
#2
CLASS TIME (2 hours) HOMEWORK (varies)
Concepts + Lecture Time Practice Activities Work on Personal Project
Old Curriculum
CLASS TIME (2 hours) HOMEWORK (varies)
CLASS TIME (2 hours)PRE-WORK (1 hour) HOMEWORK
Concepts + Lecture Time Practice Activities Work on Personal Project
Old Curriculum
New Curriculum
Sometimes the hardest part is having the confidence to just begin.
@grecasaurus
Students found the time spent on activities really helpful. When teaching creative people, talking is rarely enough.
We created fun learning activities for each lesson, and facilitation guidelines to match.
#3
It’s easy to forget how much your students don’t know.
students are creating their own knowledge through experiments and learning to make decisions
this shifts the conversation from opinion-driven decisions to an evidence-based rationale
Expanding topics (like user research synthesis, design patterns, responsive and native mobile design, motion and gestures) better prepares students to work as designers.
We updated the content to teach the most relevant topics.
#4
Supplemental content also helps resolve common challenges.
Developing the voice & tone of a project
Not enough storytelling: onboarding, microcopy
Lack of value: Hooked model for habit formation
Lack of simplicity: decision fatigue
We spent time learning software.Students kept asking to spend time learning Sketch and Invision.
#5
Spending time on software leveled the playing field for those
without prior experience.
💎
This was completed in eight weeks.
🏆
Was the pace too fast? too slow? Did we spend enough time on each topic? Was the content useful? Did the activities make sense together? Would this actually improve anything?
I hoped it all made sense
Then I was asked to teach the pilot course. 🚀
By Week 8, my students were so much further ahead than expected.
“It was nice to reach out for help while working in class and get instant feedback.”
Their feedback reflected a newfound confidence.
“It felt like what I would be doing at a job.”
Positive student feedback has increased by 51%
Based on the 8 classes that have completed since Nov 2015
👍
students felt happier and
more confident
Lessons I Learned
Don’t spoon feed your students the answers. Let them create their own complexity and then resolve it.
Make it real without the risk.
Lesson 1
Question your assumptions about what needs to be taught when.
Skills are learned quickly, but developed over time.
Lesson 2
Provide enough context for instructors to understand what they’re doing, so they can learn to improvise in the future.
Instructors (might) need guidance too.
Lesson 3
Being a designer is about working quickly and purposefully to validate solutions, not just sitting at a desk.
Teach the process by doing the process. Repeatedly.
Lesson 4
You can’t avoid teaching a topic even though you personally may not enjoy it.
Planning and teaching can be a tool for self-reflection.
Lesson 5
The way design is taught is evolving
Making decisions +
Explaining why that decision
was made
Help students navigate uncertainty, without resolving it for them.
