Assignment 4
Learning Design Concepts & Recommendations
For the final assignment, your team will collaborate on a series of activities to develop your mentoring design concepts and to provide a set of insights and recommendations to OEF for their learning service. We will start the activities in class but your team should also schedule time to meet out of class to complete each part of the assignment. The artifacts your team generates here will inform your final presentation.
PART 1: Generating Concepts Step A: Design Fictions for Collective Imagining Each group needs to jointly develop a detailed storyline that describes a learner's journey through an imagined online learning experience based on your user studies and the persona's provided, and which fits within the broad guidelines of the OEF challenge. Your story should highlight what your group thinks an ideal, well-design learning experience would be like for a learner, and be clear about the learning goals. Use a first person voice and language (e.g. I did X, I asked B for X, We selected Y, or Z was provided to me by B) to reveal what your learner is thinking, doing, feeling, and deciding along the way. Set the context, describe the learning setting and supporting social arrangements you envision as being crucial for the effectiveness of your design. You team should also be thinking about the learning science concepts we have been reading. Is your system emphasizing coaching, collaboration, or do you want to focus on scaffolding or a service that personalizes and connects learning across contexts? Your design fiction can have a stream of consciousness feel, but it should lay out a cogent, appealing sound learning experience, and have a beginning, middle, and end. Submit your Design Fiction storyline with your Experience Map on Thursday 4/28. Step B: Experience Mapping An Experience Map is a graphical representation that traces a user’s experience through a service (or learning) ecology by representing key interactions between the service and the learner. Envisioning a full cycle of engagement is always a good interaction design starting point. Goffman’s classic breakdown of face-to-face interactions into the phases -- Awareness, Attraction, Engagement, Closure, and Leave-taking -- is one way to organize the flow of your Experience Map. An experience usually begins with awareness of the opportunity, followed by an attraction phase where a user chooses to participate, and then moves on to the engagement phase of exchange and activity. An encounter usually closes with a transition and leaving-taking sequence that typically includes a suggestion or offer for possible future engagements. Designers often choose to label these phases in terms relevant to the service being developed. Another commonly used UX sequence is: Select, Join, Use, Develop, Leave. Your team can decide which breakdown allows you to best ‘connect the dots’ and map out an ideal user experience. To create this Experience Map, start by identifying the essential touchpoints in the user experience - the mediating elements that establish the relationship between the learner and the OEF learning service you are designing (e.g interactions with humans, interface elements and features, information flows via in-person/in-system media and communication channels, tool use, learning resource access, and learning object creation and sharing). Create sticky notes for each key interaction, and place these notes along your timeline in the appropriate phase of engagement. Considering using colored post-it notes to visually call-out different types or categories of interaction. You many want to organize the experience based on screenshots take from the OEF system to elaborate on. Next take your sticky notes and pull them into lanes or channels organized along the Y-dimension. See Figure 1 and the posted slide deck for examples and directions. Most of the teams left with materials to work with. If you need more, please arrange with me or the IDeATe supply room to get the additional sticky notes, butcher block paper, tape, sharpies, etc., to complete your work. Plan to present your emerging design concepts using this timeline populated with essential touchpoints as a way to tell the story of a learner's experience with your design. Step 3: A Design Hypothesis Statement We'll work on this in class on Tuesday (4/26) to complete the following design hypothesis statement for each teams' concept: "We believe that the Opportunity Education Foundation’s Next Generation Learning (NFL) platform can be designed to [ do this / support that ] for [these people] to achieve [these desired/valued outcomes]. We will know this is true when we are able to reliably gather [this feedback, these quantitative measures, and/or these qualitative insights]." To ground this hypothesis development and assessment planning, we'll draw from the class reading Documenting and Assessing Learning in Informal and Media Rich Environments (2015) by Lemke et al. DUE: 28 April (Thursday) for class presentation/feedback. Plan to submit legible photo documentation (use a panorama image capture mode if necessary) or digital version your team's Learner Journey Map by the end of the day with your guiding storyline document, and supporting Design Hypothesis Statement. PART 4 - Final Learning Design Concepts Presentation In the final class session, teams will present their design concept to OEF representatives, and an interested review panel with expertise in the learning sciences, interaction design, and educational technology. Each group should plan a 15-minute presentation that documents key inflection points in your design process, take-ways from your learning media heuristic analyses, and reference the theory-based learning principles that inspired and guide your project design. Include problem statement and design concept statement. To describe you design concept, use your Learner Experience Journey Map and storytelling conventions (be creative with audio, images, role playing, stylized photo images, sketches, an interactive powerpoint, animated paper prototype) to convey a full cycle of engagement a learner (or group of learners) would ideally experience when using your mobile learning system. The goal is create a compelling vision of your design concept for the audience. Allow for an additional 10-minutes of discussion afterwards with questions from the class and the review panel. Grading Rubric for Final Design Concept Presentations Review Panel
DUE: 30 April class presentation; final documentation addressing review critiques submitted by 5/5/15 at 5pm. (PDFs of your heuristic analysis and presentation, final written design hypothesis statement, Learning Experience storyline, and presentation deck). |
Assignment Overview
Fig. 1: Mapping Channels for a Learning Experience
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