Can't be bothered to spend more time finding where to post so here goes!

[Anonymous]

Sorry guys I ran out of “navigation” time. I don’t want to fill up my own blog with coursework.

Making an attempt at ocTEL

Big question: why don’t TEL people respect the time of their learners? Why is UX given so little priority? There must be several reasons why most online courses are such bad experiences and the drop out rates are so high. I think it may come down to trying to provide for all learning styles but not indicating through clear navigation and guidance how learners can prioritise their time and attention.

My previous experiences with technology enhanced learning:

I’ve failed to complete three MOOCs because I get lost and bored.

In my work I have to regularly complete online self-guided training which is only useful if you make the effort to convert the knowledge imparted to a format that can be easily retrieved when needed in the future. Otherwise it is a time-sink equivalent to departmental meetings…

I’ve taught digital marketing and social media using surveys, videos, polls, discussion forums, wikis, eportfolios. I’ve studied supply chain and worked in technical support – which gives you a very clear idea of just how simple online navigation needs to be for most people.

I don’t think I do “absorb, reflect, act different” due to technology. These are just tools for human communication. I do think issues of text literacy and keyboarding or gestural skills strongly affect how learners interact when technology’s in the pedagogical mix, and that it can be a barrier as much as a source of engagement.

In digital marketing we use the metaphor of the marketing funnel, and think hard about how to increase how many people get to the end of the funnel, measuring when, and trying to analyse why, they drop out (think Khan Academy if you prefer). Now with social media, we also look at how to ensure those customers act as ambassadors to others, and how we improve “aftersales” experiences so they return. I realise such terms are anathema to most academics but unless TEL can improve in these areas the overall learner experience will continue to be characterised by disappointment and the “yield” of successful completers of courses will remain pathetic. I’m interested in using the kind of web analytics tools that digital marketers and supply chain specialists have to figure out what goes wrong with TEL so it can help provide cheaper, more interesting and more accessible education. I like pedagogy too but I don’t see pedagogy as the limiting feature in TEL at the moment.

My expectation of ocTEL based on the vague first activity, the cockup with the email lists and the confusing design of the website, is that I won’t get very far, even though I want it to work and I applaud David and Martin and ALT for trying. Also, I don’t usually have time to sit through the amount of video involved in most MOOCs, but I think Diana Laurillard is great, so I will try to watch that one… video is not easily navigable to the interesting bits…!

[Anonymous]

Oh god I had no idea it was going to remove all my p aragraph breaks! Sorry again. Can’t find out how to edit it. Ran out of time  – have to go to work now.

[David Jennings]

Hi Anonymous,

Thanks for taking the time to post this, and I’m sorry for the formatting problems (I’ve done a little work to tidy up your post, involving several html paragraph tags, which I agree is a cludgy way of having to do things – sorry).

I’ve done a fair bit of usability work, and I also had a big hand in putting this course together, so I’d like to respond to your questions — and I hope won’t come across as being too defensive.

UX design is easiest when you have a clear definition of the user population, their characteristics and the finite set of tasks that they wish to accomplish with whatever it is you’re designing.

One of the challenges is that learning rarely comes down to a finite set of tasks (except rote and mechanical skills, and even then…). More often learning involves creating an environment for an inherently unpredictable and wide-ranging set of tasks. That introduced a complexity problem: if you try and keep everything simple, then you narrow down the range of things people can do, and annoy them that way; if you make everything possible, then navigation becomes complex, and you annoy people a different way.

Add to this that this is an open course. Which means when we were designing it we couldn’t predict who our users would be. We could say that it was people “teaching in Higher Education” but that still leaves the user population very uncertain. Some of our international participants, we’re finding, are not familiar with the term Higher Education. So trying to design with such a range of possibilities in mind further adds to complexity and navigation issues.

One last thing. Learning isn’t the same as using a bottle opener or a text editor. Sometimes it’s supposed to be hard and present challenges. OK, I don’t mean it’s supposed to be hard to find out how to format a paragraph break — that is annoying. But not everything should be intuitive all the time. If you don’t challenge your intuitions, are you really learning at a deep level.

So what you have here is a maybe a bit Version 1.0, maybe a bit beta in places. There are some things we can only really test with large numbers of users, and you can’t really organise iterative prototyping with 1,000 learners (or, put another way, maybe that’s partly what we’re doing right now).

To finish, I will be a little defensive. We do respect your time, honestly. Thank you for taking the time to articulate these thoughts, and I hope my reply does them justice, at least partly.

[Author]

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