Slides from my talk at Interaction16's Education Summit about redesigning General Assembly's part time User Experience Design curriculum to increase the likelihood of student and instructor success.

1. Teaching by Proxy
Redesigning General Assembly’s part-time UXD curriculum
to increase the likelihood of student and instructor success
Jessica Greco @grecasaurus

2. How I redesigned a
design curriculum

3. Jess Greco
Independent UX Consultant

4. Jess Greco
Independent UX Consultant
Instructor @ General Assembly

5. What is
General Assembly?
An educational company that helps people
pursue meaningful work by teaching the most
current and in-demand skills.

6. 15 locations across 4 continents
Design, Programming, Data Science, Product Management

7. Fall 2015
😛😍🎉

8. The Course
• Part-time User Experience Design
(UXD) course
• Project-based learning experience
• Aims to train the next wave of
experience designers
• Taught by practicing designers

9. • Thousands take the UXD course
every year
• Wide variety of skill sets and
career goals
• They’re all committed to making
a change
The Students

10. Why refresh the
curriculum at all?

11. • Students and instructors were asking for schedules that
were easier to fit into their busy lives
• Students found long evening lectures to be tiring
• First-time instructors found that the bare-bones
curriculum required a lot of customization
• Lots of variation in student feedback across locations
and instructors
Challenges

12. Mark Graveline
Product Manager
Julie Kerner
Instructional Designer
Aaron Neeley
SME
Pre-Work
Roxanne Mustafa
SME
Homework
Jess Greco
Lead SME
Lesson Planning
The Team

13. 1. Bring student feedback scores up
2. Decrease lecture time; increase class time for activities
3. Make the course easier for new instructors to teach
4. Adapt to the shortened timeframe of the course
Goals

14. It is hard to design a curriculum, but it’s even
harder for students to redesign their lives.
Students faced
unique challenges 😬

15. Students needed to trust
they’re getting the best
education possible, regardless
of location or instructor.
⭐

16. Students also
struggled to relate
what they learned in
class to the real world.
😳

17. Could the classroom
experience better reflect
what it’s really like to
work as a designer?
💡

18. Being a great designer isn’t the same as being a
great instructor.
Instructors had
different challenges

19. How could we help
instructors help their
students more effectively?
💡

20. It’s important to
leave instructors the
space to share their
unique experiences.

21. What We Did

22. The biggest challenge students faced was taking in
feedback and then actually taking action.
We switched to an iterative,
sprint-based course structure.
😠😤😦
#1

23. Iteration 1: Learn the process and theory behind design
thinking on a practice project.
Develop a hypothesis about a topic of
student’s choosing and validate it.
Refine the concept, and the interface itself,
then validate again.
Iteration 2:
Iteration 3:
10 weeks of 3+ iterations

24. Working iteratively pushed
students to validate early
and often.
@grecasaurus

25. Students became
more comfortable
working in quick,
imperfect cycles.

26. Students had a hard time staying focused during lectures,
especially after a long day of work.
We flipped the classroom.
😐😞😴
#2

27. CLASS TIME (2 hours) HOMEWORK (varies)
Concepts + Lecture Time Practice Activities Work on Personal Project
Old Curriculum

28. CLASS TIME (2 hours) HOMEWORK (varies)
CLASS TIME (2 hours)PRE-WORK (1 hour) HOMEWORK
Concepts + Lecture Time Practice Activities Work on Personal Project
Old Curriculum
New Curriculum

29. Sometimes the hardest
part is having the
confidence to just begin.
@grecasaurus

30. Students found the time spent on activities really helpful.
When teaching creative people, talking is rarely enough.
We created fun learning
activities for each lesson, and
facilitation guidelines to match.
#3

31. It’s easy to
forget how
much your
students
don’t know.

32. students are creating their own
knowledge through experiments
and learning to make decisions

33. this shifts the
conversation from
opinion-driven decisions
to an evidence-based
rationale

34. Expanding topics (like user research synthesis, design
patterns, responsive and native mobile design, motion and
gestures) better prepares students to work as designers.
We updated the content to
teach the most relevant topics.
#4

35. Supplemental content
also helps resolve
common challenges.
Developing the voice
& tone of a project
Not enough storytelling:
onboarding, microcopy
Lack of value:
Hooked model for habit formation
Lack of simplicity:
decision fatigue

36. We spent time
learning software.
Students kept asking to spend time
learning Sketch and Invision.
#5

37. Spending time on software
leveled the playing field for those
without prior experience.
💎

38. This was completed
in eight weeks.
🏆

39. Was the pace too fast? too slow?
Did we spend enough time on each topic?
Was the content useful?
Did the activities make sense together?
Would this actually improve anything?
I hoped it all made sense

40. Then I was asked to
teach the pilot course. 🚀

42. By Week 8, my
students were
so much
further ahead
than expected.
“It was nice to reach out for
help while working in class
and get instant feedback.”

43. Their feedback
reflected a
newfound
confidence.
“It felt like what I would
be doing at a job.”

44. Positive student
feedback has
increased by 51%
Based on the 8 classes that have completed since Nov 2015
👍

45. students felt
happier and
more confident

46. Lessons I Learned

47. Don’t spoon feed your students the answers.
Let them create their own complexity and then resolve it.
Make it real without
the risk.
Lesson 1

48. Question your assumptions about what needs to be
taught when.
Skills are learned quickly,
but developed over time.
Lesson 2

49. Provide enough context for instructors to understand what
they’re doing, so they can learn to improvise in the future.
Instructors (might) need
guidance too.
Lesson 3

50. Being a designer is about working quickly and purposefully
to validate solutions, not just sitting at a desk.
Teach the process by doing
the process. Repeatedly.
Lesson 4

51. You can’t avoid teaching a topic even though you personally
may not enjoy it.
Planning and teaching can
be a tool for self-reflection.
Lesson 5

52. The way design is
taught is evolving

53. Making decisions
+
Explaining why
that decision
was made

54. Help students
navigate uncertainty,
without resolving it
for them.

55. Thank you
Jessica Greco
jessica.greco@gmail.com
@grecasaurus
👏👏👏