Author: Pearson

When we discuss technology, we often refer to “user experience,” that is, the user’s sense of ease of navigation, ease of use, satisfaction with the technology, even the pleasure they derive, and the attraction they feel toward using it.[i]

When we talk about learning technology, part of user experience is a deeper layer that we might call the learning design. That is, the interconnectivity of the various features and elements and how they lead toward significant learning outcomes[ii].

I’d like to relate to you how I became interested in or how I developed an initial understanding of the relationship between teaching and user experience and learning design. This was during my senior year at the University of Michigan when I was doing my student teaching. I was assigned to a high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan to teach first and second year English. And my master teacher, who was going to guide me through this, was Shirley McKeon, who was a very gifted, very talented, very charismatic, and—fortunately for me—very empathic teacher. And part of my job was to come every morning before class and present Shirley my lesson plans for the day. And they looked something like this, where we would list the lesson objectives.[iii] And these were in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and then the lesson structure, with the time, the topic, and the teaching approach that was to be used for each activity. Continue reading →