[DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Leading Design

Mon Nov 30 16:36:08 PST 2009

Hello
Regarding the Contextual Inquiry work (aka interviews) for Learning Activities that Amber alludes to, I wanted to give an update to the community. 

The following schools responded to Stanford's initial call in September for participants: Berkeley, Indiana, Marist, Michigan, Mount Holyoke, Texas State (San Marcos), Virginia Tech, and Wyoming. There were a few other schools who were interested but were unable to participate actively.

So far, we have conducted 11 interviews among 4 schools and expect at least 3 of the remaining 5 schools to be sharing their findings in the next two weeks. We've had a few group meetings with interviewers to discuss individual findings and my colleague Jackie and I are in the process of analyzing the interview notes for themes and differences. This analysis will be used as the basis of a writeup, which will include descriptions of personas, or fictional archetypical users.

Even with only half of the schools reporting, themes and characteristics are emerging. However, before committing disembodied, half-formed statements to a spreadsheet, we want to stick to our original plan devote time to fleshing this out. We hope to finish this write up and share it with the Sakai community by the end of January. I missed one or two T&L calls, but I believe the spreadsheet is not necessarily tied to a time frame or driving immediate production, so I hope that's fine.

As it is, there are some teams on this project that have had delays that may worry that we won't take their findings into account. I strongly suspect that we'll have your user types mostly covered even if we were to start writing today, if not the detail of your workflows. However since the Stanford UX team is analyzing over the next 3 weeks before winter break, then doing writeups in January, we'll have ample time to course correct if your interviewees notes arrive in 3 week and are radically different. Workflow details will become more important starting in February, by which time you will probably be done.

We are having our final meeting tomorrow for interviewers to share results. We plan to schedule a meeting in 7-8 weeks to share our analysis with the wider community. We're hoping that even schools that didn't participate in interviews will recognize the user types we describe, even if the person you know is slightly different (teaching French rather than Spanish), but will add user types if necessary. 

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing, Stanford University

----- Original Message -----
From: "Amber D. Evans" <adevans at vt.edu>
To: "Clay Fenlason" <clay.fenlason at et.gatech.edu>
Cc: "Sakai UX" <sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org>, "pedagogy Learning" <pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org>, "Samantha Blevins" <sjblevin at vt.edu>, "Teggin Summers" <techambe at vt.edu>, "keli amann" <keli.amann at stanford.edu>, "Jacqueline Mai" <jamai at stanford.edu>
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 8:39:01 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] [DG: User Experience] Leading Design

Clay, 

(I'm reposting this to the larger Sakai community at your request.) 

I hope that I and my group are not tragically late to this game, as we've been working with Stanford on collecting interviews as part of their Assignments and Test & Quizzes Contextual Inquiry/Fluid research design. My 3 person team and I will be spending much of today and Tuesday compiling our user persona notes form those interviews. I know that many other schools are also contributing to the Stanford UX project and may have similar questions or capability to contribute to the larger T&L Sakai 3.0 capabilities. Once done, my team and I would like to share resulting composite persona info with your group (and we have already started adding a little bit to the Google document ). 

We just wanted to make sure that we didn't entirely miss the boat on this one, since the timeline is not entirely clear as to when this kind of user data will no longer be needed ... as your blog posting indicates , it's a constant on-going project, but I also recognize that at some point things have to be settled in order to move forward. We have noticed that much of what we could contribute has already been identified in the list, and only a few more ideas of value may be added (from us). If you could let me know how my colleagues and I can best make learning capabilities contributions (or other things) at this stage, it would be appreciated. Thanks! 

Sincerely, 
Amber D. Evans 

Training and Documentation Coordinator, Online Course Systems (OCS) 
= = = 
Learning Technologies, Virginia Tech, 1220B Torgersen Hall (0292), Blacksburg, VA 24061 
540.231.8053 | adevans at vt.edu | http://amsdiane.blogspot.com/ 
= = = 
"Non scholae sed vitae discimus" ("We learn not for school but for life") -Seneca 

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 7:03 PM, David Goodrum < davidgoodrum at rocketmail.com > wrote: 

It's been interesting to see the level of collaboration the document has seen and how it has evolved because of that collaboration. 

According to Google docs, there's been at least 15 collaborators on the document... likely more, since no login is required to edit it -- it is a totally open brainstorming document right now. 

The spreadsheet is certainly not exhaustive nor complete, nor is that the intent for this phase. It currently does not necessarily reflect the best capabilities of Sakai 2.x; it does not reflect what all is missing or frustrating about Sakai 2.x; it does not reflect all of what Sakai 3 should aspire to; it doesn't even fully represent what teaching and learning goals should be supported in Sakai 3. So what's the point? 

With 60+ rows right now, it begins to represent a fair cross section of many ambitions Sakai 3 perhaps ought to have in the teaching and learning space. 

And it attempts to show how different levels of complexity and functional capabilities both link together and link back to a basic teaching and learning goal, hopefully expressed in everyday language. 

Perhaps a bad analogy for the document would be the recent cell coverage maps... Ideally, our teaching and learning map would look like Verizon's 3G map... with nearly the whole map filled in. This brainstorming document today is more like the AT&T 3G coverage map: a lot of white space still to be filled in, but there is coverage of many core areas and outlines of many others. 

For now it's a place to play out some ideas. 

Got a teaching and learning idea? Something instructors want their students to do? Something students wish instructors would do? Something that develops collaboration and cooperation among students, encourages active learning, gives prompt feedback, emphasizes time on task, communicates high expectations, or respects diverse talents and ways of learning? Then add it to the brainstorm. 

- David 

From: Clay Fenlason < clay.fenlason at et.gatech.edu > 
To: Sakai UX < sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org >; pedagogy Learning < pedagogy at collab.sakaiproject.org > 
Sent: Wed, November 18, 2009 7:28:43 PM 
Subject: [DG: User Experience] Leading Design 

In recent weeks I've been trying to promote the maturation of the 
learning capabilities spreadsheet [1] that David Goodrum has 
championed. At the same time I've heard concerns that it might come to 
naught or not be listened to. Just a couple days ago Josh Baron was 
asking me when and how I thought the spreadsheet might actually be 
used to inform the design. I told him, "It's happening right now." I'm 
not sure he believed me, so I made a blog post with evidence: 
http://sakaipm.wordpress.com 

~Clay 

[1] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlfbHxo2qpHEdHRuSnowVGMwWE9HY1MtVjFpY1dtS0E&hl=en 
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