UX: Designing for Education

Instructional Design is a field of study that's directly related to cognitive and behavioral sciences. Its main objective is to maximize the experience of teaching and learning on special environments. This course is focused on VLE (Virtual Learning Environments). Many of the VLEs we have today are just file storage systems or discussion boards. Our mission then is to build interfaces, based on Ergonomics and Aesthetics concepts, that are easy to use, visually attractive and that motivate the users (not only students, but teachers as well) to participate on an active manner, not a passive one.

The course starts with an introduction to Infodesign, Human-centered design and Gestalt and Cognitive principles, so that every solution proposed can be coherently reasoned.

Before effectively proposing solutions to different learning scenarios, some "Personas-based" exercises will be done, so that the Designer can put him/herself into the role of the user.

After knowing the target audience, group exercises will happen around some specific questions: how can Instructional Design make the level of interaction among students, teachers and classmates to resemble the one they have when on conventional teaching methodologies? How can the basic principles of Gestalt and Cognitive sciences build the easiest path to things? How to work with open web standards and accessibility? How to explore multimedia content?

The course ends with rough concepts made into mock-up or prototypes, that are thoroughly analyzed via multi design thinking tools.

The student that attends this course will be able to develop user experience designs to be applied to various systems.