Educational (learning) experience design is a cutting-edge trend. Its main difference from other approaches is that the focus is not on the program itself, but on the experience that the student gets.[1] And it's best to pay attention to the emotional aspect as much as to the subject itself and the ways to receive knowledge and competencies.
[2] The emotional aspect affects learning too.
Emotional influence can be longlasting. If we like learning, we master the content better, and we are looking forward for other training programs. The motivation is growing.
[3] Generally, we can distinguish two areas of experience design:
- Personalized: the focus is on each person.
- Mass-oriented: the focus is on the majority. It may seem that the mass-oriented focus is less demanding: you determine what is suitable for the majority and direct all resourses to it. If we speak about an average number of students, it may be true. But if you need to teach less than 20 or more than 300 people, it can be much more profitable to lay down a personalized approach in terms of both cost and value for your client (that is, on their retention and repeated training).
Attention to feedback from the student The most important thing in experience designing is to build a system with constant appeal to the student. First, get introductory information about the student, then offer a real individual trajectory, and ask again — constantly analyze and implement feedback results.
What should you ask first? The information can be divided into 3 important groups:
- Goal setting: individual goals of the student. Keep in mind here that you need to define real goals, not formal ones which are the easiest to name. It's more about learning to code in order to make a program which will help the student's grandmother to search for information about discounts in a store, rather than about "structuring knowledge".
- Organizational features: preferred formats and modes, features of training. What time of day is more convenient to study; reading, listening or watching; tests or essays; group or individual classes.
- Emotional background: what they like to watch, what kind of music they prefer, what calms them and what unnerves them, what colors they like. Strange? For the usual learning design — yes, it is unusual. But if you think about how you yourself would like to study, the answer to such a question already raises awareness and subjectivity of the student. And this means engagement and, as a result, greater efficiency. And when you see that your preferences have been taken into account, you get even more engaged. This was reflected in the Hawthorne experiments.
You need to adjust the learning process taking into account the feedback from your students. You can't ask for feedback and then do nothing about it — it is important to calculate resources, plan the whole algorithm.
Of course, in real life, there is often lack of fundings from the organization, and authors do not have enough time, for the fullfledged profound process with all the necessary variations. When there are not enough resources, focusing and prioritization become especially important. In case of online learning, what are the priorities? Where should we put the focus, remembering that time and money are not limitless? How can resources be saved when designing an online learning experience?
Architecture of learning processes Online learning initially is built on the salutary technologies. "Salutary" because, with the proper process architecture, they can lift a large load from professors and teachers, content authors, methodologists and administrators. This proper architecture is a big and important matter. And, of course, there are some tricks and lifehacks. Let's discuss some of them.
ChatGPT as a learning assistant Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer is a "smart" technology for maintaining a conversation. In fact, this engine combines the functions of a teacher, a methodologist and a search engine. Moreover, the focus is on the teaching and methodological functions. Students write questions and receive answers in a live language.
Surely, getting prompt answers to questions like "When do I submit the work?", "Can I use 10 sources instead of 40?" is very convenient. By the way, for most of the questions that students have, a regular chatbot, not even as high-end as ChatGPT, will be enough.
Designing educational experience with the use of cutting-edge technologies is quite easy. At the first stage, you need to think about what technology to use in different pieces of the process and the system.
Why? For example, in order to:
- give prompt and correct answers to students' questions (answering promptly is important);
- help to choose sources;
- capture the dynamics of the learning process to increase efficiency and satisfaction.
Isn't it scary to voluntarily include such a thing in the educational process? Imagine a ballpoint pen. You can write beautiful poems with it, or you can harm someone. There's something similar with ChatGPT. It is important to know the features and weaknesses, to use the tool correctly. If you do, it is not scary at all — it is very useful.