Written by Last year, my action plan centred upon restructuring my Communications Technology class in order to allow students to spend more time focusing on their own areas of interest. While this is still a work in progress—so far, I’ve revamped my first two units to try to cover a broader base of basic skills—my hope is that in January we will be able to begin independent exploration of our areas of interest. This is a big project for me and is likely to take up most of my attention this year, as I figure out along with the students how to best track and monitor their progress, support them by providing resources and small group instruction, and manage the logistics of 19 students each doing their own thing.
In the meantime, however, I’ve begun to think about how I could begin work on a second action plan—one on a slightly smaller scope, to give me a new area to focus on as well. Although I was saddened to miss the second F2F session at the York School and the design thinking process that everyone else had the chance to engage in, I have been giving a lot of thought to another problem that I could tackle in my practice. I keep coming back to the idea of the user experience (UX) in my course management software. At The Country Day School, a few years ago we moved from (the very expensive!) Blackboard LMS to (the very free!) Google Sites as a learning management platform.
The shift created quite the bumpy ride for both teachers and students. Some of the challenges included the following:
- Teachers had to learn a completely new system for communicating digitally with students, and the platform was neither very user friendly nor intuitive to learn;
- Although we created a basic template for teachers to use to ensure some consistency across teachers’ sites, the varied levels of comfort with the software meant that some sites were far more easy to navigate and use;
- Students had to learn how to navigate this new platform, and the customizability of Sites meant that, despite using the same template as a starting point, every teacher set up their site differently.
- Shortly after we introduced the new system, Google Classroom came out. Many teachers began using this platform in addition to/instead of Sites, which led to confusion for students about where to go and how to work with both platforms.
To add another layer of challenge, we originally set up all of the school sites according to a single naming convention, so that it would be simpler for admin to gain access to and navigate to any site. Now, as the new Google Sites has come out, the user-friendliness of its new interface means that teachers will likely want to switch to that. However, the new Sites live within Drive, and making the switch to that will complicate things further. Not only will teachers need to learn yet another piece of software (albeit one that is much more user-friendly!) to make and manage their classroom resources, how will we ensure consistency among teachers and ease of use for students? Still other teachers are asking students to use a variety of digital portfolio products. Herein lies my HMW question:
I know it doesn’t have much of a ring to it, but in the world of digital design, the user experience is king: Can your customers quickly and effortlessly find the information they are looking for? Does the design work intuitively?
Here’s a link to a great article by Design Shack outlining the importance of UX: Why does user experience matter?
“UX is the experience, emotion, intuition and connection a user feels when using a site or product.”
Do our students feel frustrated when navigating their class sites? Do they intuitively know how to interact with it or does it require concerted effort? And will they actually use them if they are difficult or frustrating to work with?
Thus, my action plan for 2016-2017 will centre around a) ensuring that my own class resource Site is intuitive and easy to work with, especially given the chaotic nature of the second half of my course and the need to have resources that are easy to find, and b) trying to develop a strategy for all teachers to improve the UX of their sites.
I’d love to hear what your schools are doing in terms of learning management software and the requirements and/or best practices for teachers in terms of the setup of their digital spaces. Please share!
Hey Jennifer,
This is a fantastic post. I love the simple visual layout and the very easy to follow questioning. Rosseau Lake College is also about to enter this Brave New World of LMS rebooting. I successfully retained “buy-in” from our entire teaching staff to switch to Google Classroom this semester. While I haven’t used Google Sites extensively yet, I am yearning to discover an LMS system with far more analytic potential (we really need achievement data in a real-time feedbacky way!).
Although it is not my Cohort21 Action Research Plan, LMS researching is on my list of things to do as Academic Lead. I am currently looking at Edsby, PowerSchool, Hapara, Sesame, etc. These all come with price tags and long-term training investment, so for now, Google platforms make sense for us. I am eager to continue to share ideas with you around this, and can’t wait to hear more of yours.
Thanks for the comment, @edaigle. I think that the move towards more portfolio-based assessment is really powerful and something I’d like to see implemented across the board. It seems that each LMS has its own strengths and weaknesses, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to find something that does it all??
I’m not familiar really with Edsby, Powerschool, or Hapara (though I’ve heard Hapara integrates well with GSuite for Edu), but I saw a presentation on Sesame last month at the CIS Tech showcase at the Ryerson DMZ and I was blown away by its potential, both for curriculum mapping and for assessment. In order to take advantage of the curriculum mapping tools, however, you need a school-wide subscription. I want to try out the portfolio tools, but I am very hesitant to get my students to sign up for yet another account. I don’t want to require them to visit yet another website. With the school-wide subscription, however, a student’s portfolio can follow them from year to year, which would give teachers a really great window into a student’s history.
Please do share your findings on the rest of the tools!
Jen
@edaigle @jweening I HIGHLY reccomend Hapara. We pair it with Blackboard for our LMS 1-2 punch. It is a really powerful tool. I think of BB as where the learning “story” is told and mapped and Hapara as the tool that help teachers “watch” the work/learning happen and easily facilitates feedback. Happy to show you on Jan 20th.
Thanks @jmedved! I would love to see Hapara in action on the 20th!
Jen
This is SUCH a useful question and one that–I assume–will have some sweet outcomes for your students.
We had the same dilemma in our school with Google Communities and then later with Google Classroom: with so many teachers “interpreting” the software, each had a slightly different way of using it. Some posted homework as an announcement, some did it as an assignment, some combined two sections into one classroom site, others named their class slightly differently than others. I think it was a mild form of digital chaos.
Anyway, one thing that help us was to interview students on what worked for them. What they liked, why they found that approach helpful (homework as an assignment, for example, so they can check it off as complete), and what feedback for improvement they had. The same was done with teachers. Then the data was gathered and The IT team created a set of norms and standards for all teachers to use.
It’s been a game changer over here!
Love the conversation here, and like @jmedved, I’ve used Hapara extensively with the GAFE and it’s a no-brainer for you to look into. It may be a ready-made solution to your question (not that I am jumping to solutions too quickly…right!)
The other area to explore is to embrace the messiness. I know that many universities – like Queen’s University at Kingston – and many businesses, ask their management and employees to use various platforms for different purposes. There is no silver bullet, but there are a discreet set of executive functioning skills that can support a design to your question from a different point of view.
One other thing to add, is that students aren’t your only user. You must also consider the experience of teachers and parents and admin.
Whew!
We use a system called Veracross – by the way 🙂
One of the challenges I observe when schools start talking about LMS (so-called Learning Management Systems) is that they haven’t clarified what they mean when they talk about ‘managing learning’.
Is your school looking for a way to provide resources for courses online? To improve communication teachers and students or school and parents? Streamline attendance or report cards? Create an online community to mirror in-school participation? Each of these often involves a different set of objectives and defines “learning management” differently.
Does your school want to put assessment dates onto a student calendar? How about basketball team practices? Can a student leader post details of the next guitar club meeting? Will the Guidance Dept post a link to the academic calendar for course selection? Can students help one another with homework chat? Will your gradebook share formative marks with students and gather a teacher’s anecdotes to feed into a report card? Can you advertise the Grade 7/8 dance and distribute permission forms? Or do you simply want to watch videos, read articles, post discussion threads and submit work?
Edsby has been amazing for us because it created a way for students to collaborate directly with one another online, throughout the school. Team and club groups, class pages, grade groups – these have all allowed students a leadership opportunity to engage with their community. They can create and host event signups, coordinate class breakfasts, post a link to a Google Doc if they like (and Hapara could be helpful for organizing student folders and distributing/collecting resources), but I think a good LMS boosts the sense of community, makes tasks easier, and encourages students to gain experience actively managing learning, themselves.
Good luck on this learning journey, Jen!
Thanks @acaplan, for the thoughtful and thought-provoking response! You are right on the money when it comes to the need to define the real purpose of our LMS. Right now we are dealing with that question in a real way and I’d love to chat about it live with you on Friday. In the short term, my primary goal is to ensure that my resources are laid out in a way that is intuitive, accessible, and easy to understand. The bigger goal (part B) is definitely something beyond my own current scope but something that I’m certainly interested in exploring further.
See you Friday!