UXA2022 Day 2; Justin Cheong - Design principles for online learning

Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript
is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be
copied or used by any other party without authorisation.
www.captionslive.com.au | [email protected] | 0447 904 255
UX Australia
UX Australia 2022
Friday, 26 September 2022
Captioned by: Carmel Downes & Kasey Allen

View Slide

Page 79
STEVE BATY: Thanks very much, Rich. (APPLAUSE)
That brings us to lunch on day two. Thank you, very much. Before
you run out the door and before I forget, we have a design leadership
conference coming up in November but the important part is that the call
for presenters, if you have got an idea that you would like to be up here
sharing with an audience like this one, is on and open now. I think there
is a few days left before that closes. It might even be one week but time
is running out. If you have an idea, you have an ambition to be on stage,
as Tim said this morning, get out there and share your ideas because you
will only get better if you do share them. It is fun up here, right, Rich? It
is all right. There you go. Lunch, an hour. See you back here afterwards.
Thanks, very much.
(LUNCH BREAK)
STEVE BATY: Come on in everyone and take a seat. Let's get the
afternoon underway. Come on in. Come on in. Come on in. All right.
So the next four sessions will all be here on stage. The very first of those
is Justin from Visual Academy who will be familiar to some of you, but
Justin, welcome to the stage. Justin will be talking to Australia about
design principles, frontline learning. Please join me in welcoming Justin.
Thank you. (APPLAUSE)
JUSTIN CHEONG: All righty. Okay. Hey everyone, I'm Justin. Today I
will be talking about design principles for online learning. This talk will be
most relevant to you if you are a trainer or learning designer or even if
you're just interested in the topic of learning, which I suspect many of us
are. First a bit of background. So for the past two years, ever since

View Slide

Page 80
COVID, I've been teaching and exploring online learning formats through
a venture called Visual Academy. So it is just covered by the captions
there. Visual Academy specialises in visual thinking which is why you see
all these drawings and people holding up the drawings to the camera.
Now before this I have been teaching workshops in person for several
years and as with many other things COVID forced me to do this all online
and that really challenged me on my approach. Mostly, it got me
thinking, there are so many online courses out there but what does an
actual ideal learning experience online look like? How long should the
lessons be in what format should it take? Should it be live or should it be
self-paced, like pre-recorded videos. Today online courses number in the
hundreds of thousands, so every learning designer out there is wrestling
with these questions. In my own attempt to answer these questions I
drew on a couple of sources of inspiration. The first was my own
experience teaching at university about a decade ago in a previous life
before UX and at one point at university I got to trial what's known as a
flipped classroom model. Some of you may have heard of it. Has anyone
heard of flipped classrooms? Got a few. We can compare to it the
traditional classroom. In a traditional classroom there is a teacher at the
front of the classroom who is like an expert or a store of knowledge and
the way the class time is allocated is - it's spent for the teacher to
distribute that knowledge to the attendees. In a flipped classroom, the
class time is instead used to focus on student activities. So rather than a
teacher delivering the lesson you might have students catch that outside
of class and then use class time itself to have facilitated interactions. So
this experience here gave me some ideas on how I can approach class
time. Later on, I came across a Coursera called e-learning ecologies by
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. They describe a set of principles for what
they call new learning and I have drawn a lot of inspiration from their

View Slide

Page 81
work as well. So I highly recommend their course and their book if you
ever want to dive deeper into this topic.
So with all of this in mind I want to share with you what I've learnt
for the past couple of years about online learning formats and just for fun
I'm going to split the rest of this talk into two section, each corresponding
to a metaphor with some drawings as well just to stimulate your thinking
a little bit. These metaphors are a bit playful so I hope you have fun
following along as I walk you through them. Sound good?
Okay. Let's start with the first metaphor. Learning as downloading.
I want you to imagine for a moment that you are, in fact, a robot and as
a robot what learning means for you is simply downloading and installing
some software package and once you have installed a package the
outcome is that you are now able to perform some new action or have
some knowledge that enables you to perform an action. So that's
learning as downloading for a robot. Now let's change the viewpoint.
Let's say instead that you are a teacher but your students are all a bunch
of robots and because they are a bunch of robots your role as a teacher
therefore is essentially to try and help every robot install some software
package so they can all reach an outcome. That outcome might be now
the successfully now able to bake a cake or speak French or some other
skill acquisition or knowledge acquisition but, again, learning as
downloading. All right. So how does this metaphor compare to reality?
On the one hand if you've ever been a teacher or tried to teach someone
something this might feel familiar in that you often do want the people
you are teaching to just try and get something that you've got so that
they can also arrive at some outcome and as a learner it might also feel
familiar in that when you learn something it often sticks with you. It is
almost as though you are permanently installed some package in your
brain that you can access over and over. However, it also feels like there

View Slide

Page 82
is something deeply problematic with this metaphor, and there is. Which
is that for better or for worse, probably for the better, people are not
robots. People are diverse. We all have different learning preferences
and we don't really all have one standard operating system to download
the same software package to the way that computers do. Some of us
prefer learning with peer, some of us prefer learning alone and so on.
Therefore, as a teacher or learning designer, even if you are aiming
for the same outcome for everyone who comes through to your class,
like, for example you need them all to be able to perform heart surgery or
something, you need to know that the way that you help each learner get
there to be able to do heart surgery is going to be different because - and
this is the tricky thing to remember, how someone gets to that outcome
or that learning is probably different how you got to that learning. This is
the first principle about learning design, which is that we all learn
differently. As a teacher or learning designer it's therefore vital to
consider diverse learning preferences. Listed here in black are some
dimensions like mimetic learning, social learning, kinaesthetic learning.
You sometimes hear people distinct wish themselves as one type of
learner or another, some might say, "I'm a visual learner". Most people
are a bit of everything. When you set out to improve one of the day
mentions, let's say the verbal content in your online course, you will most
likely boost experience not just for the purely verbal learners but for
everyone else who learns at least a little bit verbally as well. Now for
online learning practically speaking when you are a learning designer and
you are trying to decide which media things to design for your
pre-recorded videos, the absolute ideal that I think you can aim for is to
offer all of them to be truly learner centric and as Ted Drake pointed out
yesterday aim to make it multi-modal even if it takes some extra work to
do so.

View Slide

Page 83
In my case, what I ended up creating with Visual Academy was a
choose your own a-d-v-e-n-t-u-r-e-course. This is not what I named it
but what a student later described it in a review which I thought
described it nicely. If you think of a self-paced learner who learns
through video content, the ideal experience for that learner is a
well-produced video. That is not too long, it's chunked into topics, maybe
even offer some exercises to help them cement the concepts. To engage
different modalities I also made an article version for every lesson,
which - for when a learner prefers to read instead of watching a video and
while I made this article - this article modality to be a perfect substitute
for the video where it is complete with images and words I have had
learners report to me that sometimes I will consume both, they will watch
the video and read the article because it helped them better reinforce the
concepts. So this is for the self-paced learner. Okay, but what about the
live learner.
Well what live learners are often after is the social element, that is
both the appeal and the accountability of being able to learn with other
people. Now if you want to have an experience to offer both the live
learners and the self-paced learner, the really simple thing is to make
your life experience a viewing of the video. In our case we'd have
roughly a 20 minute session where we'd come together to watch a video,
which would be the same video as the one watched by the self-paced
learner and then the remaining time would then be spent doing an
exercise together. It is almost like watching a short film together or
watching TV together but virtually and then discussing it with your friends
afterwards or something like that. In our case doing exercises.
Personally I found 20 minutes to be a nice amount of time for the online
attention span in 2022. It might seem short for a live event these days
but in an online course one really cool thing you can do is repeat this

View Slide

Page 84
daily, which we actually do at Visual Academy and it can fit nicely into
people's routines for that daily practice. By the way it turns out I wasn't
alone in trying this format. Ever since COVID turned everything online,
this style of learning has popped up in many cases from universities to
even conference events. I believe some UX Australia events in the past
couple of years have done something similar as well. It's sometimes
called the Watch Party format or the viewing party format. That is still
evolving so we will see what we land on.
One bit of feedback I got in doing this, which was interesting, I
would have these live learners who really love coming together every day
for 20 minutes say to me by the end of the course, hey, I really enjoyed
that, I enjoy coming live, why do you even put videos up on the platform
and - I don't get it, we just learn live. Equally I had the self-paced
learners, who might be introverts who would come to me saying why do
you have these live sessions, I really enjoyed the videos on the platform.
That is how I know it struck a good balance in Kate erg for different
learning preferences.
This is your choose your own adventure learning for the live and
self-paced learner. Going back to the learning downloading metaphor.
People don't learn or acquire knowledge in the same way as if we are all
downloading the same software package. People also don't just learn on
their own. People learn dynamically, with each other and often as a result
of making things seeing what other people make, getting feedback on
what they are doing themselves. So in the online learning environment
what this maps to is using different platforms for project boards, breakout
rooms and my suggestion here is actually just offer as many of them as
possible and see what works and then if one of these don't really make
sense for your particular learning experience it will become pretty
apparent after running your course for a few times. Some learning

View Slide

Page 85
platforms have these features inbuilt. Like Skill Share has a section
where you can see a wall of people's project submissions. And even if
you are not using a platform like Skill Share you can create your own
environment using the off the shelf solutions. Just to give an example, at
Visual Academy we use Kudoboard for our exercise gallery. It was
originally designed for virtual birthday cards and goodbye cards but turns
out to be really good for letting students share their drawings and see
each other's work. That is a metaphor of learning is downloading or
perhaps to show that learning isn't as simple as downloading but haven't
said that if anyone in the audience secretly thinks we are all robots or if
you secretly identify as a robot, just at least remember we are all very
diverse robots so the key learning principle is to differentiate the media
formats and as many interactions styles as you can.
So that's one metaphor. Now let's look through the lens of a
second metaphor, classrooms and libraries.
Classrooms and libraries. I would like you to go back in time and
think back to your school days. If you recall while at school there were
two places where learning primarily took place, the classroom and the
library. Again, over simplification. There are plenty of other places we
learnt but let's focus on these two. In the classroom there was a focus on
the curriculum and in the curriculum concepts would be unlocked
step-by-step. Only after you got the foundations at one stage were you
then moved upwards into the next, kind of like walking up a staircase.
And then there was the library. Learning at the library was less rigid.
You could search for books on topics that you liked or were curious about
and you could build your knowledge outside of a curriculum. Again, all
really simplified but the rough idea is that there is a space for step
learning and there was this other place for let's call it search-based
learning. Now when we look beyond schools into universities, most

View Slide

Page 86
campuses kind of look like an expand version of school, right, like they
might have bigger, more facility, but they are also basically have
classrooms for stepped curriculum-like learning and separately reference
libraries for search-based learning. Anyway, what's so special about this
metaphor, what is so interesting about it? To answer that I'd like to ask
you to imagine one more thing, let's pretend there is a parallel universe
somewhere in the galaxy, there is a place that's identical to earth,
however, in that world they don't have the internet and we do. What's
the difference between this world and that world with no internet? I think
the difference is that in our world the internet is the library. It's not just
any ordinary library, it's a very, very big library that has no closing hours,
it's got all the media formats you want, for better or for worse, articles,
videos, YouTube, it has a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and can be
reached by you anytime, anywhere you have an internet connection. All
of its knowledge is available at your fingertips if you have a Smartphone
and know how to search the catalogue. This ubiquity of access changes
everything for the classroom and library model.
So this creates the month potential for a learner's learning these
days to be dominated by the internet. So, for example, a learner might
first come to learn about a concept like, say, chemistry, like the first time
that they learn it instead of being at school might be through the internet
rather than the classroom. In such a world a learner might only go into a
classroom when they decide they want to explore a topic with more
structure and that might be an online course. So in this way rather than
the library being the secondary place of learning it may well be that the
classroom becomes the secondary place of learning. Just something to
think about.
You know, if I revisit this first metaphor just think about the
interaction where let's say you are a professor and you are trying to

View Slide

Page 87
explain something and suddenly your student pulls up the phone to see if
your information is up to date or maybe if there's a better way to explain
what you just explained, even from - on the internet as you are
explaining it and at some point you wonder, "Why do I even bother?
What is the role of a teacher anymore when learners can have access to
all information at all times?" This brings me back to the main principle in
this section which is - this brings me to the main principle in the section
which a related to what we saw earlier in that analogue of the flipped
classroom. The principle here is to flip the idea of a classroom from being
a place of knowledge distribution as the primary activity, still important
but not primary, and instead for the teacher to focus less on your core
value to students as being how much you know or how complete your
knowledge is. Instead, your value should come from your ability to
facilitate interactions and feedback between students. It also comes from
your demonstrating resourcefulness, that is showing your ability to find
things rather than to know things. And designing quality experiences that
are unique from what's just out there on the internet. Often that is about
creating meaningful interactions and cultivating qualities in your students
like curiosity and courage. In the Visual Academy course one way we do
this is by peer assessment where we get learners to do a project and we
ask them to ask and give feedback to one another. Pictured here is
Eduflow so if you are ever creating your own learning product and want
an out of the box solution, Eduflow is pretty good for that. You can see
on the left a student can look at a project and on the right they can have
some text books where they can reflect on the boxes and give feedback
to one another.
Facilitating interactions like this is going to be vital. If we zoom
back out to this metaphor, while it is obvious that the internet has
transformed the relationship between classroom and library, it helps to

View Slide

Page 88
remember that there are many things a learner cannot do by simply being
in the library and that's where the value of the classroom lies. The
classroom becomes a unique place to experiment, interact, collaborate,
get feedback, synthesise your knowledge, all the things that aren't just
simply downloading stuff into your robot brain. Right, so coming back full
circle these are our two metaphors and accompanying them to two main
principles of differentiated learning and facilitating interactive activity. As
a final note most of these ideas I have shared today are very, very new.
Having the internet at our fingertips and how that transforms the
relationship between information, search and classrooms, it has only been
a phenomenon for a couple of decades actually having the internet at our
fingertips and how that is going to change the classroom and where the
online classroom sits in all this is still all evolving. Therefore, while it is all
still evolving the best thing you can do as a teacher or learning designer
is to remind yourself that you, yourself, are still learning. I'm still
learning doing this whole online teaching stuff and one thing I've done,
this conference was as good an excuse as any to ask my former student
for some feedback. How can I evolve the experience and what have been
the outcomes since finishing your training? Here are some more,
including some of the former students' challenges since they completed
the training. Shout out to the former students who shared this with me,
thank you, and I hope you enjoyed that. Thank you everyone.
(APPLAUSE)
STEVE BATY: I just have to be really careful about that speaker. Thank
you, Justin, that was really awesome. Our next speaker this afternoon is
Joel Perigut. Joel is ready, while he makes his way up to the stage I have
been told no singing please - I've been told it is Joel's birthday. Happy
birthday, Joel.

View Slide

UXA2022 Day 2; Justin Cheong - Design principles for online learning

UXA2022 Day 2; Justin Cheong - Design principles for online learning

uxaustralia
PRO

More Decks by uxaustralia

Other Decks in Design

Featured

Transcript

UXA2022 Day 2; Justin Cheong - Design principles for online learning

UXA2022 Day 2; Justin Cheong - Design principles for online learning

uxaustralia PRO

More Decks by uxaustralia

Other Decks in Design

Featured

Transcript

uxaustralia
PRO