Nowadays, new educational technology products are constantly appearing on the market, and teachers and professors are increasingly creating educational videos and other educational materials for their classes. However, there is one group that is often left out of the design process: students.
“Many educational products aren’t shown to students until they’re designed,” Elliott Hedman, a consultant who works with ed-tech companies, said in a talk at the SXSW EDU Festival this month.
He points out that while most major media and consumer technology products undergo extensive testing these days, many adults are fine with a much lower standard for things designed for children.
“The budget for one episode of Game of Thrones was $15 million. It was probably worth it, it was a very good episode,” he joked. “Sometimes I get hired to read to kids in the classroom, and I get paid $80. So that’s how much we’re willing to pay for the kids’ experience in the classroom. .”
Hedman admits this is probably an extreme example, but he says the lack of testing really shows up when students are given the material. When he visits his school’s computer lab for a research project, he says: “We’ve noticed that a lot of kids are alt-ing away from educational programs and starting watching YouTube for an hour.”
Hedman, who has a Ph.D., said in an interview after the presentation. The MIT Media Lab graduate, who has been designing educational materials for more than a decade, said it’s not that edtech companies don’t test at all. But he said the testing they do is often ineffective or too limited, and they rely primarily on the families of office workers, who are “far above average in school and… It’s very white.”
He points out that there is no good incentive for edtech companies to invest the time and effort into more detailed testing with students. “They’re selling to the government, to the administration, to the district,” he points out. “They’re not selling things to kids. Kids don’t have purchasing power. Children’s voices are never heard and teachers are rarely listened to. Then they throw it into the classroom and say, We test them by asking, “Did your scores go up?”
And he argues that increasing user testing with students during the design process is different from conducting effectiveness research on ed-tech products, which more and more education leaders are calling for in recent years.
“I’m not saying effectiveness research is bad,” he says, but that most research into whether educational approaches work can “get in the way” of doing design research. states. Changes that correct defects.
The ideal approach, he says, is to put an ed-tech product or learning material in front of a diverse group of students and videotape them as they use the tool, without researchers in the room. Designers should then make small improvements based on what they learn and continue to do so iteratively throughout the development process, he says. In that sense, it’s more like co-creation with students than an adult creating something and assuming it will be useful to children.
Experts are also calling for more teachers and educators to be involved in the development of ed-tech products.
Instructors as designers
Increasingly, instructors are creating their own learning materials. For example, if you’re trying a “flipped classroom” approach where students study basic material at home to free up class time for more interactive activities, such as short video lessons. . And some experts say students are too often left out of the design process for these materials as well.
“The challenge with using materials that don’t have a good user experience is that it makes learning more difficult,” says Kayla B. McNabb, assistant director of teaching and learning engagement at Virginia Tech. “If we want our students to do well in our courses, we need to lower the barriers for them to participate in the learning experience.”
Mr. McNabb received his Ph.D. He co-authored Rhetoric and Composition at Virginia Tech. paper In 2021, we are calling on educators to make greater efforts to incorporate user testing when designing learning materials.
In an interview with EdSurge, McNab said that in many cases, what instructors learn by playing a short sample of a video they’ve created for a class to a few students is often about the user experience, not the content. And in many cases, problems raised by students can be easily fixed and applied to other projects.
“Maybe the transition to video is too uncomfortable,” she says. “In that case, add a different header image to make it more clear.”
McNab said one of the big challenges in universities is that many instructors aren’t trained in how to teach, let alone design, materials. But she said even just a little time spent sharing some of the course material with students and getting their input could help instructors make changes that greatly improve effectiveness. I am.
“The number one thing people can do is ask for feedback,” she says, noting that it can be effective at any point in the development process. “It’s always better than nothing.”
She also suggests that if instructors can’t find students to test the material, have a colleague test it or present it at a conference. “Any feedback is better than no feedback,” she insists.
changing times
The need for product testing could become even more important as companies rush to add new AI capabilities to their products, Hedman said.
“The way kids use AI tools is very different than we think,” he says. “I want companies to be careful: we’ve never shown kids anything like that. This is going to be very important as companies rush to introduce AI-infused products. ”
But doing so would mean a change in culture for many companies, he says.
“In an ideal world, we would want the student voice to be at the heart of every ed-tech company,” he says.
One way to address this challenge may be to increase collaboration between university researchers and the edtech industry, argues user design researcher Yu-Chen Chiu: Recent posts on Medium. Her goal, she claims, is to “develop impactful products that are not only ‘effective’ but also ‘easy to use’ and ‘desirable.'”
Student engagement is also important now that there are more ways than ever for students to find information online and use AI chatbots. This means that instructors can focus on their area of expertise rather than spending more time on specific content or details that can change rapidly or that students can find elsewhere. The focus should be on teaching skills and mindsets.
Fundamentally, the rise of AI means many teachers will need to update the materials they created in the past, and we expect more educators to involve students in that redesign process. she insists.
“That doesn’t mean you have to drop everything and get a master’s degree in instructional design,” McNabb says. “This means we need to think explicitly about user experience throughout the course.”
