Design

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Designing for “IMPACTS”?

In October of 2023, the University System of Georgia (USG) announced a complete overhaul of the General Education curriculum at the 30 institutions under its purview. Throwing out the old Areas A – F, the USG has crafted an entirely new brand known as IMPACTS. According to the USG, the “Core IMPACTS is not a random collection of courses to ‘get out of the way.’ Each one provides a key part of your intellectual, academic, personal, and professional growth.”

Although the first hurdle for most institutions was to realign their general education courses within the new framework, the longer-term ramifications for undergraduate education are still developing as the new requirements must now be tied to “career-ready competencies” in direct and tangible ways. Classical liberal arts education already provides a tremendous skill set for students pursuing a university degree; however, it appears the lines need to be drawn much more boldly between the two.

Therefore, I have been redesigning one of the classes I teach: public speaking. My emphasis has first been on the fully asynchronous and online version of the course for it has too long lingered as a pale imitation of the face-to-face class. Rather than using the modality as a springboard for new ways to engage students, the course has relied primarily on attempting to recreate the face-to-face assignments through technology like Microsoft Teams while still adhering to the same traditional, one-to-many design of public rhetoric as once happened in the Greek agora.  

In this first design iteration, my approach has been to attempt to re-interpret the speech stand-bys of an introduction, persuasive, and informative genres within the vein of the skill-forward design of the new IMPACTS curriculum. My first assignment redesign deals with the introduction speech. Rather than requiring my students to tell their stories through an inanimate object, I decided to require them to write and design their LinkedIn Profiles.

To see the full lecture, please click on the image.

While I have had to create many online lectures in PowerPoint, I wanted to challenge myself and start authoring my work in Adobe Captivate. I wanted to test to see if students might experience some increased engagement if the material was presented using one of the industry’s big authoring software options. I have used Articulate 360 extensively, but my current employer only has a license for Captivate. Therefore, I hunkered down with LinkedIn Learning’s Adobe Captivate Essential Training. While I have gotten a hand on the general functionality, I am still at a loss on how to publish to the web or even our LMS. After reading multiple Reddit posts and watching a few YouTube videos, it looks like I will probably have to dive into the developer side of the Squarespace webpage I am attempting to develop. Or, at the very least, purchase some server space from Amazon. 
 

As this is part of my continuing design development, I will get this example published by the end of the semester. I am teaching this class again in the summer and I would love to have both the traditional PowerPoint and Captivate versions of my lectures available to students to see how students respond. 

What I can design and publish, however, is a questionnaire to my current class about the first assignment in particular and taking public speaking generally.

  1. I decided to enroll in Public Speaking online because (select all that apply)
    1. The face-to-face times didn’t work with my schedule
    2. I prefer online classes
    3. I had some concerns about speaking in front of my classmates
    4. I am terrified of public speaking and this seemed less scary
  2. Why did you decide to take Public Speaking? (select all that apply)
    1. It is required for my major
    2. It is required for a graduate program I wish to apply to
    3. I am interested in public speaking
    4. It was recommended to me
  3. Did you have a LinkedIn profile prior to Speech Assignment #1?
    1. Yes
    2. No
  4. If you did not have a LinkedIn profile, using a scale of 1-5, how difficult did you think creating your LinkedIn profile would be?
    1. Very Difficult
    2. Difficult
    3. Neither Difficult nor Easy
    4. Easy
    5. Very Easy
  5. Why hadn’t you created a LinkedIn profile before the assignment? (select all that apply)
    1. It didn’t occur to me
    2. I didn’t think I needed one
    3. I wasn’t sure what to include
    4. It felt intimidating
    5. Other
  6. If you already had a LinkedIn profile, did the mini-assignments help you expand or add to your profile?
    1. Yes
    2. No
    3. N/A
  7. Did any of the mini-assignments give you new information about your chosen profession or help you design your profile? (select all that apply)
    1. Researching entry-level positions in your field
    2. Headshot, cover photo, headline, and skills
    3. Write your summary
    4. None
  8. Did the first speech assignment (posting your LinkedIn profile and overview presentation) meet your expectations (i.e. was it what you expected) for your first big speech?
    1. Yes
    2. No
  9. Did you like creating a LinkedIn profile for your first speech assignment?
    1. Yes
    2. No
  10. Should the professor use this assignment again for this course? (open response)
  11. What changes would you make to the main assignment and the mini-assignments? (open response)

 

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ADDIE + User Experience

Getting Started

Having spent the last few years studying instructional design (ID) and applying it to my daily working life as a professor of communication, the connections between the ID process and the user experience process were hard to ignore. As with any discipline or profession, there are multiple models to employ. Depending upon the population or desired outcome, a designer could use Gagne’s 9 Events of Instruction, Merrill’s 5 Principles of Instruction, Kemp’s Model of Design, or SAM. However, the ADDIE model is the most common and lines up rather neatly with the steps in the various case studies we reviewed. 

The ADDIE Model

Analysis

In this step, the ID attempts to discern the needs of the learner in tandem with the learning goals. This is the “so what” part of the design process. Many choices can be made but in the analysis stage, we are figuring out if they should be done. Why? Because we may not need another version of a training module or new app to order dinner tonight. Each of the different cases provided an individual “in” to the start of the process with either personal experiences (Whiskers), problem definition (Haven), or benchmarking (book study). They all provided a rationale as well as their ultimate goals for the project. 

In ID, we conduct a needs assessment. There are several different types we can employ:

  • Performance (gap) – Is there a skill or knowledge deficiency in the learning population? 
  • Feasibility – Would the cost of a new design or training be worth the investment?
  • Needs versus wants – Is there an actual business/learning need? Is the change just new and shiny? 
  • Goal – What behavioral changes do you wish to affect? 
  • Job/task – What is the correct way to complete this action? How can we break it into its most basic parts?
  • Target population – What is our audience? Are there other audiences that might potentially benefit from the intervention/innovation? 
  • Contextual – Are there influences in the environment (outside of training and design) that have an impact on our desired outcomes? 

Design & Development

Although Design and Development get their spot on the ADDIE wheel, it can be very difficult to differentiate the ending of the Design stage and the beginning of the Development one. In Design, we are outlining the process of how the material should be learned while in Development we are actually authoring and producing the new deliverables. This part of the process connects directly to the storyboarding and mood design of the user experience process. 

Implementation

When we finally get to Implementation, we get to go live and test it out with our populations. Like usability testing, we are in the trenches attempting to find out if all of our hard work and well-crafted design has been worth it….However, as with all design processes, we need to remember that not everything is going to work as we planned and those “failures” are just more data to help make the next iteration that much better. Therefore, it is generally worth it. 

Evaluation

In the Evaluation stage, we need to measure effectiveness and efficiency. Although it is listed at the end, this can happen throughout the design process especially if we are conducting a formative assessment rather than a summative one. The reflective considerations of the designers provided in their case studies have a lot of similarities to contemplative formative assessment. Stepping back and taking in the design process and outputs as a whole provides insight into our design process as well as what potential next steps need to happen. 

Another Case Study to Consider

I am very interested in how we can better integrate user experience design into higher education. As Dr. Pullman mentioned in his first lecture, we do have student-centered pedagogy. As online learning has expanded, however, I think there needs to be more user design experience involved in the process. Learning has moved well beyond the barriers of traditional educational organizations. Learning can be mobile, ubiquitous, and required by employers. We can study independently on LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy, and other platforms. Therefore, I attempted to find an education-forward case study. The one I found was Learn2Earn.