Looking Back: Lessons from the Practicum

This past week, I got the opportunity to present our work in collaboration with the Teaching and Learning Lab at HGSE, where we worked on Re-Imagining the HPL Field Studies. Looking back at the process leading up to this presentation, here are a few reflections that I have:

1. The Practicum Experience: My hope for T127 was to get the opportunity to work on an ongoing project at the Teaching and Learning Lab to get an overview of the entire design process. However, since the project timeline did not match the course timings, we got to choose what we wanted to work on, based on our interests and goals. Although this did not seem ideal initially, it was a blessing in disguise. The flexibility of this project gave me the opportunity to contribute to every step of the design process, which was of great value to me and my team.

2. The Team: One of the most important aspects of an effective team is to have a shared goal. From the start, we were aligned on the output we hoped to create through this project - an interactive prototype built on Articulate 360. We were equally committed to learning about and working on each part of the design process. We held weekly meetings to share our individual ideas and collectively determine the best path forward based on feedback from our team lead.

3. UX Research: Looking at the project timeline, we spent the majority of our time interviewing the multiple stakeholders involved in the creation and execution of the HPL Field Studies. This move was crucial in informing our design decisions, the impact of which we saw during the project presentation. As we interacted with HPL Learners and Learning Designers, they were able to draw connections to their own experiences of engaging with the Field Studies, allowing them to better understand the design choices made.

4. Prioritising: In the initial stages of the design process, we came up with a number of ideas based on learner feedback. However, given the short timeline, we had to narrow this down based on what seemed to be most crucial to the HPL learning experience. Finally, we decided to work with the existing content to redesign 3 aspects of the User Experience namely - Learning Onboarding, Interactivity, and Scaffolding. This also helped us ensure the right balance of depth and breadth in our project, allowing us to showcase our designs for each of the aspects that we redesigned.

5. Constraints: Since this was not a real-time project, we had a lot of flexibility with the work that we could do. However, we wanted to acknowledge some of the constraints that the TLL learning designers worked with, which included the lack of availability of additional content for the existing field studies. So, while we received feedback from learners on the need for additional perspectives in the content, we decided to work with the existing content. Instead, we aimed to make the existing content more relevant by including reflective questions to allow them to draw connections to their own experiences.

6. The Feedback: The input provided by our team lead was instrumental in the design process, as it helped uncover some of the missing pieces that were overlooked. One such feedback was that our designs were effectively able to showcase 'what' we were trying to achieve, but not 'how' we were going to achieve that. This helped us ensure that our designs also explained how we hoped that the end user would interact with the product.

7. Implication for future work: Having gone through this process, I now see how the ADDIE model is more of an iterative process, rather than a one-time design framework. Currently, we are still prototyping our designs, but receiving questions, feedback, and insights at this stage was valuable in helping us rethink the designs, especially if given more development and testing cycles.