With the demand for online learning materials ever increasing and with more content being made open and free, Higher Education Institutes are now in a position to take their robust virtual learning environments and shift focus from content to user. The new objective being to provide a Delightful user experience that will not only surprise and excite but will improve education online

Procter, Adam

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Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

© Adam Procter The Need for Delight in Online Education Materials        1 The Need for Delight in Online Education Materials Adam Procter     Winchester School of Art             University of Southampton Park Avenue Winchester Hampshire SO23 8DL           adam.procter@soton.ac.uk        With the demand for online learning materials ever increasing and with more content being made open and free, Higher Education Institutes are now in a position to take their robust virtual learning environments and shift focus from content to user. The new objective being to provide a Delightful user experience that will not only surprise and excite but will improve education online.  User Experience, Design , Open Education, Online, User Interface, Users. 1. INTRODUCTION The demand for online learning has been on the increase  over  recent  years  as  numerous  studies have shown. [1] In  response  to  this  upsurge  there  has  also  has been an increase in online education web services such  as  the  TED[2]  talks,  Khan  Academy[3]  and the  P2P  University[4]  providing  both  as  free  and open  education.  As  this  shift  for  the  learner  becomes  apparent Higher  Education  Institute’s  (HEI)  now  need  to embrace  open  education  and  become  leaders  in providing  materials  that  are  both  engaging  and necessary to encourage life long learning.  In Aarron Walters book ‘Designing for Emotion’[5] he  translates  Maslow's  Hierarchy  of  Humans Needs  to  the  needs  of  an  online  user,  (Figure1) and suggests that many user interface designs are Usable or Edible but not Delightful. “Simple and usable is great, but there’s still more we  can  achieve.  We  must  bring  web  design back into the realm of delight.” [5] 2. ONLINE HIGHER EDUCATION MATERIALS It  can  be  suggested  that  Higher  Education Institutes (HEI) are in the same position with their online material in most part if not in all. Most are usable and the content is of a high standard, but HEI’s  need  to  address  the  need  to  add  pleasure and Delight to engage the online learner.  A lecturer must be engaging to ensure the content they  deliver  is  understood  allowing  the  learner  to act upon this information. Books with an engaging tone  of  voice  can  ensure  that  even  the  most mudane of materials is understood. Often this can be  achieved  by  providing  humour,  surprise  and Delight.  Learning  online  is  often  an  activity undertaken alone and by the nature of it being via a computer often devoid of personality. ‘“Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt  to  inform,  persuade,  or  motivate particular audiences in specific situations.”[6] I have not found for my part any current HEI online learning environments that offer the learner any of these two basic elements; humour and surprise or put  in  another  way  and  for  the  benefit  of  this presentation summed up in this one word, Delight. Most will present the data in a standardised format of lists and folders (Figure 2). The content will be of high quality yet the presentation does not engage and make effective use of the delivery method. Course  content  and  delivery  styles  need  to  be tailored  to  the  platform.  Currently  HEI’s  will  use Blackboard, Moodle or a similar product to provide the content, yet these systems offer limited design opportunities and merely act as a repository for the content.   The Need for Delight in Online Education Materials Adam Procter 2     Figure 1: Maslow's Hierarchy of Humans Needs to the needs of a online user Figure 2: Some HEI Online Education Material sites As a new media becomes mainstream and is used to  deliver  information  so  new  opportunities  and challenges are opened up to deliver this content in a  meaningful  and  productive  way.  The  material designed for a lecture versus a book versus a TV Programme  has  to  be  adjusted  to  reflect  the viewer’s position and relationship to the content. Within  HEI’s  we  are  in  the  position  where technology  has  matured  and  is  both  reliable  and usable. We need to take these materials to the next phase  and  should  be  looking  to  encourage  and Delight our learners. To state the obvious humans are not Robots and a passive engagement with a list of PDFs is not conducive to maximum learning with in the online environment. 3. DESIGNING FOR DELIGHT Even some of the most tedious and tiresome tasks can become a pleasure to do when the interactions and the users position are thoughtfully considered during the design process.   Figure 3: Re-Capture  Take one online example, (Figure 3). To complete an online form you are often asked to prove you are human this is quite often done via the functional and well know re-capture system, yet the design to confuse  a  spambot  so  often  also  frustrates  the user.  However  a  simple  redesign  of  this  process can provide Delight and usability. (Figure 4)  Figure 4: Photojojo’s verification question The Need for Delight in Online Education Materials Adam Procter 3  Here we see asking you to select the object you would use to take a photo with uses humor, users may  well  smile  at  the  idea  of  trying  to  use  a sandwich or a dinosaur as a camera. By empowering your user you can make them feel good. Aral Balkan describes this as the ‘Superman' Effect’, because you make the user feel like they were 'Superman'.   Figure 5: Schooloscope Another example of incorporating delight online is Schooloscope, which was designed to help parents find out information about school rankings. Ofsted report data is created from School Inspections to create  this  ranking  system.  This  data  direct  from Ofsted is of great value but the format can be hard to decipher. “Schooloscope  attempts  to  bring  simplicity, familiarity,  and  meaning  to  government education data, for every parent in England.” [7] By converting the data into a cartoon school house and  representing  the  data  via  varying  colour  and facial  expressions  (Figure  6)  the  undecipherable becomes  delightful  and  with  such  an  emotive decision to make, anxiety over the data is removed.  Figure 6: Data conversion 4. FOR ONLINE EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS If we think about applying the same type of design detail  for  online  educational  materials  we  would  want  to  ask  how  many  more  fans  will  you  see engaging with the same material? How much more motivation  will  you  see  from  your  learners.  How much more effective will your  ‘teaching’ online be?  Mozilla’s  Openbadges  [8]  is  a  framework  for anyone to use that allows you to create and issue badges that recognize a specific skill. The concept of badges is not new, however using this concept in online  learning  has  the  potential  to  motivate participation by providing feedback, milestones and rewards  throughout  a  course  or  learning experience,  encouraging  engagement  and retention. Increasingly,  offline  courses  are  recognising  the need  to  provide  learners  with  more  than  just learning  material  -  the  need  to  offer  a  'learning experience' aimed at inspiring learners and leaving a  lasting  impression,  thus  potentially  motivating learning. There is even more potential to achieve this aim in online courses.   Figure 7: Codeschool.com The site Code School (Figure 7) appears to have been  designed  around  the  notion  of  providing  a Delightful  experience  to  users.  Their  strap  line  is 'learn  by  doing'.  Code  School  combines  video instruction, coding in the browser and gamification to  help  you  learn  programming.  A  typical  course contains 5 levels, each with a 10-15 minute video followed  by  series  of  code  challenges  a  student must  solve  to  make  it  to  the  next  level.  Level completion  is  rewarded  via  badges  and  once complete each course provides additional rewards normally in the form of extra tuition. Each course is given a personality and theme that is often laced with humour.  One  such  course  on  Code  School  is  to  learn Node.js here you are going to need to understand a The Need for Delight in Online Education Materials Adam Procter 4 technical  and  server-based  JavaScript programming language. ‘“Node.js  is  a  platform  built  on  Chrome’s JavaScript  runtime  for  easily  building  fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it  lightweight  and  efficient,  perfect  for  data-intensive  real-time  applications  that  run  across distributed devices.” [9] The  intro  to  the  Node.js  training  starts  with  a humorous song in a ‘Billy Bragg’ style with simple animated  graphics  representing  network  traffic. (Figure 8) It is a Delightful surprise and could be considered  a  novel  way  to  introduce  server  side programming.  This  instantly  gives  the  learner  a smile and puts them at their ease. ‘“Your  online  application  is  starting  to  fail.  Its crawling on the network, just as fast as a snail, We need evented programming starting from the top. Better write some code so the world doesn’t stop!” [10] Each  course  is  personalised  and  designed differently to engage the learner via surprise and Delight.   Figure 8: Node.js Training           HEI  online  learning  materials  could  gain  from applying  such  techniques  and  ideas  to  move beyond  focusing  on  the  technology  and  start  to focus on the user and how to enthral and Delight them. An open discussion on how to bring together online HEI  platform  developers  with  user  interface designers  could  help  provide  this  next  level  of online learning materials. “The real payoff comes when we can make that remarkability  last.  When  we  can  make  people continually feel our work is worthy of discussion. When for weeks, months, maybe even years the people  who  engage  with  our  work  continue  to sing its praises to everybody they meet."  [5] 6. REFERENCES [1] Burnsed, B. (2011) Online Education May Transform Higher Ed, http://bit.ly/QpF7so (Retrieved: 03/08/2012). Little, R. (2011) Study: Online Education Continues Growth, http://bit.ly/KOknuA (Retrieved: 03/08/2012) [2] http://www.ted.com/talks  [3] http://www.khanacademy.org/  [4] https://p2pu.org/en/  [5] Author’s Walter, A. (2012) Designing for Emotion. A Book Apart, New York. [6] Multiple Authors. (2012) http://bit.ly/OBhspE (Retrieved: 03/08/2012) [7] Webb, M. (2010) Say Hello to Schooloscope, http://bit.ly/NTQUBo (Retrieved: 03/08/2012) [8] http://www.openbadges.org  [9] http://nodejs.org [10] Allam, E. (2012), http://bit.ly/QrwXRT (Retrieved: 03/08/2012)  

The need for delight in online education materials

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