 I'm Sarah Hurley and the Director of the Learning Services here at the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. Before I start, I just want to give a little context about where I'm coming from. The School of Public Health has had fully online courses for about 13 years now, which I might actually be underestimating, and we currently have about 80 fully online courses. We don't operate on a teach-to-fish model as some do, so we have a lot of very intensive work going on with faculty. So we've gone through these different periods of scaling, and that's presented a bunch of challenges that I'm going to talk about a little bit in this context. My personal background is, so I've worked at the School of Public Health for a long time, and in the last couple of years as Director, I've tried to bring together the instructional design background I have, the teaching background I have, and web development, which was the first part of my career is front-end web development, advertising, stuff like that. We want to look past widgets and tools, though they're very important, because what my goal is for our students, because we're talking about some students who are in fully online programs, they come to campus once or never or twice, and we want them to not have to work to understand the systems they're supposed to use, and we're still working on that. So what are we doing here? I am kind of a storyteller by nature, so the yes side is what we're going with, and if you're down with that, I think we'll have a good time. If you want data, there's a ton of other sessions for that, so you can play with your phone. Or maybe it'll be fun and different. As I said, we've been developing online courses for a little over 10 years and have many successes and failures under our belts. I'm happy to talk about any of them. Right now, we have all our online courses, hybrid courses in face-to-face support sites in Moodle. We've been through WebCT, we've been through WebVista, so we know change is ongoing and inevitable, and so what we try to do is make sure that our practices overall can be independent of a given system. And I'm sure I would, oh, I have a couple more things to say there. I just want to say we're both indebted to and constrained by Moodle, and in enacting the things that we do based on our research of our student population, and we can't do any much to customize it for ourselves, so we're really thankful to the Office of Information and Technology at the University, but that does come with a trade-off, because we want different things than other schools. We use things differently than other schools, so it's always a negotiation and a compromise. So we have to think creatively overall. So I'm talking about UX, in the other part of my life, because I do 5,000 things, I run a web conference here called MiniWebCon, we're on our ninth year, it's great, if you live here you should look at it. And so in case user experience is somewhat new to you, I want to highlight just some words you may see thrown around with some frequency and distinguish between them because they are different. So UX and UI are often joined together, but they are very different. User interface design, often graphic design, visual design, front-end coding. User experience, a lot of folks doing user experience come from psychology backgrounds, they come from information architecture backgrounds, they're really thinking about the design of the space, not in aesthetic terms, but in terms of the way you move through content. So like I said, Moodle, we don't have a lot of control over the user interface of it because we're compromising and sharing and collaborating with all the other schools. So what we do have control over is the usability of our own courses and the user experience that we can construct within Moodle because everything has constraints. Usability can sometimes come under either of them, but it's an oversimplification. It's about ease of use, which implies testing. Usability is a whole area separate from these two things, but they all work together because it's all about making it easy for people to just use what you're providing so they can engage with what you actually care about, which in our case is education and content. If you don't do usability testing, you know a site that hasn't done usability testing because you go to it and you get really angry because you can't do what you need to do. You don't know how to do what you need to do. I'm very handsome. I feel like this can have such severe consequences in a variety of settings. And actually there's a talk that is going to be given by Eric Meyer who's a tech guy but called Designing for Crisis. It's going to come out next year. I strongly just put that away in your head and look at it. But in an educational setting, it has such consequences because it can make your user feel stupid. If they can't figure out your system, if they can't figure out where to go, the course interface can make your learners, because they are users who use the interface, but these are the people you're trying to teach, can make them feel stupid. So we don't want that. You're usually going to find a UX person at a creative agency. They tend to be a little rarer in academic circles, though I see this coming a little bit more around. It's really unfortunate that it's taken us so long to get there because their insights are really valuable. An instructional designer shares a lot of perspectives. A lot of the UX stuff sounds an awful like the Addy model, but I would say that a UX designer because of their pairings with user interface designers, graphic designers, actually thinks more about aesthetics, which I think our office could do more of. The university could do more of. The field of instructional design could do more of, but it's challenging. I know one slide isn't going to orient you to a whole field, so that's why I said it's doing injustice to this. And one slide. These people are a really great place to start. They help Twitter accounts. They write, they give talks, they put their slides up. So Google is your friend in this. Whitney Hess is actually one of my personal favorites, and I'm actually going to mostly use her as a frame for this. In 2011, she gave a talk on the philosophy of UX, and I like this definition a lot. So because user experience is about design, we're designing these spaces, right? So I want my users, my students, to have a certain experience. And if I care about them, I need to treat them respectfully well. I need to care about them. This shouldn't be rocket science, but it kind of is. And so with this in mind, I want to tell you why I hate syllabi. I don't know if you noticed, but students don't always do what we want them to do, like read 30-page administrative documents. So if they do something wrong, miss a deadline, plagiarize, cheat, or what we would consider those things, the answer is often like, I didn't know. And I would argue that actually in some cases that's true. So what is the response of people in the institution to those I didn't know? Did you read the syllabus? It's in the syllabus. It's in the syllabus. If we say this, have we done any of these things? These are five guiding principles for UX designers by Whitney. We haven't tried to understand the problem. Like have we read the syllabus? I don't know if we have because it's a boilerplate. We have to use it. So we haven't found out if there's a way we display information that's wrong. We may have hurt them with a poor grade because we didn't understand how to get them the information they needed. And we haven't made things simple. We haven't, like, said that students are not in our own heads. They haven't been teaching this course for 10, 15, 20 years. They don't see syllabi for 80 courses. We absolutely have not had empathy. And, you know, people know me and I get a little passionate. So let's go back to Hess's definition here. So is responding to an individual student's problem with, it's in the syllabus, something that's going to change the experience of students in future semesters? No. Is a student going to not read the syllabus in future semesters? Yes. So the other thing is, it's for online. So I'm talking about online. Does this even mimic, like, read the syllabus, the in-class experience you have? First day of class. You go in, maybe get a 10-minute lecture. The rest of the time is, like, don't plagiarize. Here are the due dates. Here's the book. Make sure you have it. Hi, I'm Professor X, Y, Z. Most of the class, and then they send you on your way, because they're like, eh, an hour's good enough. So by making that choice to not change how we respond online to these same challenges, we're effectively saying that the needs of the people in this environment are irrelevant. Reading the syllabus is not a solution to the problem. The problem is the design of the experience. Okay, so on the flip side, the user is not superhuman. So people who have said this around me know that, like, laser beams shoot out of my eyes when someone says, our students are digital natives. Please, applaud. Don't ever say that again. Never. So the data around the fallacy of this idea is so easy to find. I'm not even going to cite it. Google it. I'm going to show you something. This is a screenshot of a presentation in VoiceThread. I cut out her face, because I think this is so... It's humiliating for us. It's humiliating for students. This student is probably 23 years old. I'm sure she has an iPhone, Android phone, something. I'm sure she has a Facebook account. Maybe she has Snapchat. I don't know. She couldn't figure out, even using the instructions we developed, how to upload slides to VoiceThread. I credit her for being fairly ingenious in this analog solution that she created for the class, because the faculty person didn't really care. They just wanted to know, excuse me, the content. This is still a problem, because students need to know how to use the tools they're expected to use. So what I like to do is think like a UX person in this. What was the experience of this student? You can imagine what it would be like, because I'm sure we've all been in a situation where we felt confused, stressed out. She certainly wasn't able to perform in a way that probably felt good. You know, was she supported in developing her skills in those tools? Kind of, but not enough, clearly. So why does this happen? I guess it depends on who you ask. Some people might say that she didn't plan well enough. That's fair. She could have asked for advice on how to use the system. That's also fair. I don't really care though, because I'm not interested in her specifically from my role. That's her instructor's job. If her instructor's job was like, you should have read this and learned how to do that, that's great. I'm interested in what we can do to prevent stuff like this from happening again. So I would say without test runs, she didn't have an authentic experience. And people leave things the last minute, and I'm just going to say this because everybody complains about students leaving things the last minute. Every single one of you does it too. Faculty, have you ever gotten a... Okay, so our office does the last stuff, and I get requests from faculty two days before a grant deadline. Oh my God, we need to know how to develop this thing. Okay. How much is it going to cost? I don't know. What are you doing? Whatever. This particular thing is a fairly recent problem that came up. So I'm going to go back a number of years to early iterations of what our office calls getting started and finding help. So if you go to the Whitney Hasard, I have a list of resources at the end. My slides are up on the site. Grab them. You can even see what I was supposed to say because I script everything and then I go off the rails. I encourage you to read her 20 guiding principles because they're also really good. This is an old version. It's not the first version. In 2009, we were growing our programs. And so the number of courses we were developing exploded. We were increasing instructional designers much more slowly than the explosion was happening, but that's a whole other story. And this strain on resources really put the courses at risk of falling apart. Like that students wouldn't get communicated the same kind of things. Instructional designers, even if they're like together, they all do things a little differently. So we did need some things that were consistent. So this was developed as a way for us to know that at least, excuse me, students were getting oriented in the same way. Note that I didn't say this was an exceptional experience or delivery model, but it actually did help. We've seen over time, we have a giant survey that goes out to students every year. And over the last six years, every year those reviews have gotten better for their online course experience. Because every year we're trying, you know, in addition to developing and running all these courses, like, okay, when can we have a chance to improve the environment around them? So we still have problems. And this is going to mortify people who were at the thing yesterday with our solution, but it is what it is. Students didn't see the Table of Contents block. It blends in with all the navigation. They didn't see the little arrows at the top. So sometimes they thought this was only one page. The problem is to understand how to use Moodle books at this time. You had to like read a Moodle book. So if you didn't see the Table of Contents, if you didn't see the little arrows, then you saw one page. The other problem is a lot of this just pulled from the syllabus, like the student conduct code, which is like blah, blah, blah, blah, academic dishonesty. I don't know what that means. I mean, I know what that means, but come on. It's legalese. And so we wanted to call attention to plagiarism in an additional place, but we didn't actually do anything to de-jargon it. The other problem is that each class had its own book, its own version of this thing that at one time was all the same, and then it devolved. Because how do you update 80 of the same thing? So it was totally unsustainable. Our solution, sorry, is a Google Doc, because we can change it in one place. We rewrote it, this particular document based on student feedback. Totally informal. Sorry, user research was informal. We just need a functional product because we'll iterate over time anyway. We don't want faculty to worry about this stuff. We just want a thing, throw at them, orient them. This was part of it. So we rewrote it a little bit based on what students were saying, based on problems that were emerging over and over again. And this isn't like the most stunning visual design ever, but it's nice. It's clean. It's clean. Clean design is good design. And so the intro is now like a line instead of a paragraph. Read less, bullet point more. This isn't their education. This is their context. So the first thing we redid is the getting help section before. It was like if this, then this. If this, then this. What if Moodle is down and you're panicking? What if you can't submit your assignment and you're panicking? You don't want to go through a branching logic that you actually don't understand anyway because you don't understand the internal workings of the University of Minnesota. It's shocking. So instead of like asking them to make decisions, we tell them when places are open and we're go, they can pick whoever it is. They can email all of them. It doesn't matter. We'll get them to what they need. So, and also the clarifying when people are available is a really important piece. We also changed the language of the student conduct code, avoiding jargon. So we just like it got real big and then we edited it. So we would, I really like when Dave talks. Dave and I have very shared philosophy in advocacy for students. I like to go into things without assuming that they need to be chastised. I like to assume their best intentions. I don't care if they have the best intentions or not, but I want to treat them like adults with respect. I used to teach composition. I learned a lot doing that. And I learned how afraid, I learned how afraid students are of certain things and they mask it. They mask it with strategies to compensate, but there's a lot. That could be a whole other talk. The things I learned from teaching comp. So we just wanted to take those top three issues. Put them up there. Do you know what these are? Just ask. Here's a site. You might have to take a test. No big deal. So all of this has led to the development of our student resource site. And I will note this is actually in development. It is not done. I don't have awesome, beautiful thing to show you that's like this with data. So just remember Whitney's quote, which I should just wear on my head. So what we wanted was this sort of single point of education that teachers can direct students to to get whatever they need for their courses that our teachers didn't have to teach them. Our teachers are experts in like avian flu, not in how to give an online presentation. Like, anyway. So we decided if they struggle with performance, we want them to go to a single place because then if they still struggle with performance, we can change that place and not go to every single class and be like, what do you say? What do you say? What do you say? So part of this is understanding what the goals of our users are and sometimes they really want to learn the content but let's just be real when I say this having hot cough. Sometimes they just want to get through your class. They don't care. That's okay. I've taken classes I don't care about to get degrees because that's what I cared about. Part of this is understanding the faculty's goals. So we also need to know what the students struggle with and how they struggle. And this is where we're really moving now. We finally have enough staff. Like we're really able to engage in this stuff. Faculty don't want the burden of tech support. Ideas want to set up scaffolding and have the students be ready for what they need to complete. So these goals all align really well. Let's pull training content out of the course. So our first iteration is like a series of resource links which is, you know, that is what it is right now. We're working very hard on it though. So why are math and writing skills? The top ones here. Those are what our students are struggling with. That's what they're needing help with. It's actually more than the technology. So our faculty have the same complaints. So our students and faculty issues align. And I want to point out that the math and statistics skill are really important to us. So I want to point out that we're still working with our teachers because this is also a point of how important language is when you're communicating to students when you're thinking from a user experience. So technically for course in the School of Public Health algebra is remedial math. Seventh grade. However, what if you're coming to the School of Public Health and you're doing math since you were 18 years old? You need a refresher in algebra unless you're a giant nerd who does math puzzles for fun, like me. Claiming it, it's good. People may not have even done Solve for X. They may not have solved for X in 18 years. 19, 20, 30 years. We have students returning in the middle of their careers. So these are refreshers. That's just respectful of our students. We also added simple, repeatable, contextual graphics that can serve as a quick scan. We need visual metaphors paired with text. Never assume that the visual metaphor that works for even most of your students works for everybody. We also needed to do this because, you know, literally you can do like the tabbed interface that hides everything. You can do the listy list. Tabbed we really struggle with because you can't search. You can only search the forums. So unless you know exactly where you need to go, the tabbed thing hides things and it was frustrating to our users. So Control F, I think somebody else said Control F was your friend the other day, but Control F can also be able to visually scan calculator's math. So there are real risks in this site. One of which, like I said, we've been doing this a long time and so we've faced risks of like content bloat because whatever you do, you have to maintain. So we draw from others. We'll do some things ourselves. We're doing some things ourselves. But College of Liberal Arts is doing digital badges. We're going to be pulling in their presentation badges from them. Colin, who spoke the other day, has developed those with, I think, Allison and Allison Lincoln and Andrea in CLA. The libraries has a bunch of like five-minute tutorials that are just in a resource list on their site. Let's package those together and get students through because what happens too is the librarians, nobody teaches our students how to use citation managers. Like these are all educational problems. Then they come to librarians when they're doing their master's or their doctoral work. I have 2,000 citations. Here is a stack of papers. What do I do? It pains me. It pains my soul because then they have to enter all of those. They could have been doing it over time. So what we need to do is move away from lists and do what has says is just present few choices, guide them through. So that's what we're working towards right now because we can't have a list heavy thing. We have to move to these are the discrete experiences that we have based on the struggles you have reported to us. All right, so that's iteration three. I'm going to try to wrap up because I talk a lot. The joke that emerges around badges. There you go. Girl's got a sash. That's fine. But what we're talking about is microcredentialing. That's all. We're just talking about having the faculty have some idea that students invested at least a little bit of time going through something. That's all. And in the end, you can also use it as holding accountability. If you don't know how to upload your slides and voice thread, but you took all the voice thread trainings that clearly get you there, did you actually take them? You can hold people accountable, but really what my purpose would be is let's get them the education they need, when they need it, when they can remember it. So the other thing is like, this is helping me avoid using Turnitin. I hate Turnitin. I'm going to tell you why. Totally steals the intellectual property of our students' work and uses it for their business model. So I don't like to use it. It's insulting to students. Sorry, I really think it is. And if we can get them on board, we're not going to plagiarize. We're going to do this because it's the right thing to do. I can avoid caving to the idea that we need to monitor our students all the time. We need to find out if they click to download something. This is the kind of monitoring I don't think any of us experienced in our live classes. The level that our faculty want to know about what their students are doing so they can judge whether or not they're doing it well, it's not okay. It's taking learning to a level that's really kind of icky and that is also another presentation. I don't like policing student behavior. I like results. Just like I don't call my staff at 9 in the morning to make sure that they're sitting in a chair and I don't call them at 5.30 to make sure they're sitting in a chair. I care that they get things done. That's what I care about with students. Anyway, so long story short, when it comes to UX, we just want to make people more awesome. We want to prepare them with goodness. Okay, so my battery went out. Do you guys turn this on from a distance? It's a big lead-up. Oh, now it's working. Okay, here's my big ending. Technology failure. So we want students to be more awesome and we want them to be prepared. We're going to do this for TAs and faculty too. We just want to employ the tools that cross user experience and instructional design work, user research, aligning goals, attention to visual design, talking to users, and generally being attuned to the fact that our students are human. Human beings. And they require empathy. And it's our job to make sure we're really hearing them when they have problems or needs. And it's our job to try to solve these problems for future students in how we design their experiences. I can take questions for like two minutes. Or I was like so complete. I have more than two minutes. Oh, it's because the gamification ran a little short. I'm a long winded. Go. This is actually more of a comment as kind of an encouragement. Great presentation. Very important topic. I've worked between users and developers for years. And usability. I've tried to describe it to people as we want our technology to work like on Star Trek. When somebody wants to know, where is Commander Geordi? They just ask the computer. And the computer says, Commander Geordi is in the holodeck or on the bridge or not on the enterprise or whatever. They don't have to figure out an interface. And for anybody who feels like, yeah, but you ought to be able to figure out stop. Students not here for that. Students here to learn. So I completely support this. And just have that in your mind. Our goal is to make it invisible, to make it seem like magic. Thanks. I'll note that, you know, I think developers sometimes get kind of a bad rap. And I'll just... There's a guy from The Nerdery who presented at ManyWebCon last year. This guy met Edwards. And he was giving a talk about UX designers. 75% of the audience was developers who wanted to understand how to communicate better and cross this. This goes back to my whole thing of, like, assume good intentions. Don't start with, like, a broken Windows policy of policing. Don't turn Moodle into a police state, because it can be. It is a Pnopticon. To pull out my Foucault. Degree's gotta be worth something. Other questions? All right. Oh. Is this on? Oh. I haven't completely formulated this question. But I'm trying to figure out how do you balance having empathy for students and empathy for faculty? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I really actually have very much both. One of the ways we do that with faculty, and I think we've done a better job with them, is really coaching them to set boundaries. I feel like some of our early online faculty, by not setting boundaries, made themselves available 24-7, that is not cool. They're human. They have children. They have lives. They have hobbies. You know, I don't want them to be little robot faculty, sad people who quit and burn out. So we tell them to set boundaries. If you only want to answer questions Monday through Friday, tell your students that. We even had a faculty person who's like, I have a five-year-old. I am primary caregiver on the weekends. You are probably not going to hear back from me quickly. She is a human. She is not there to just be yours. She's also changing policy at the state legislator. Like these are people who are doing a lot of things. So set those boundaries and come up with projects where students can provide feedback to each other and then have like sort of the high stakes come to you. You know, we are in a crowd. And students have a lot of knowledge too and you can work through that. Yeah, both ways. Also the instructional designers and our robots actually would be HEST 24-7. All right, no other questions? Thank you so much for listening to me talk about stuff.