ONLINE COURSE REDESIGN || COGNITIVE SCIENCE FOCUS

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INTRODUCTION

Adult learners taking online courses are highly motivated, but oftentimes courses are designed without much consideration for how people learn best. For my Foundations of Cognitive Science final project, I was prompted to draw upon my knowledge of cognitive theories to redesign part of an existing e-learning course. I spent some time getting to know my user in order to approach the redesign effectively. This resulted in a highly engaging and enriching learning tool that leverages emerging AR technology to provide users with a personalized and scalable interactive multimedia learning experience.

Screen Shot 2021-01-24 at 10.28.13 AM.png — Meet emma,
our student

“ I’m a 45-year-old lawyer, mother and amateur garden designer based in Brooklyn. I like taking online classes to help me gain confidence with subjects that I think I’ll enjoy, but have little experience with. ”

behavior

Emma’s a busy woman with 1-3 hours to set aside each weekend to focus on learning garden design. She likes online learning but also highly values her unplugged, offline time. In the original course, Emma struggled to link garden design to her other skills and experiences. She chose this course because it promised personalized feedback from an expert instructor.

NEED

Our user needs to learn a lot in a short amount of time by apply concepts and theory to a hands-on practice and she needs to receive actionable feedback from an expert in order for the course to meet her expectations. She’s happy to take online courses but also likes limiting the amount of time she’s glued to the screen. Considering the subject matter, the ideal course would offer opportunities to learn online while in the field. Finally, Emma needs to be motivated by building skills and feel confident that this course was a good investment of time and money.

Frustrations

Lengthy “talking head” videos were boring, so Emma struggled to stay engaged; lessons and instructor feedback were generic and often didn’t apply to her situation; instructor assumed a level of prior knowledge she didn’t feel she had, which was demotivating. She was unsure of exactly what she was supposed to be looking at when doing self-guided assignments.

“I finished each course with more questions than answers. I’m looking to gain practical skills, and this course felt way more frustrating than inspiring.”

Redesign prototype

Taking Emma’s learning needs, goals, and pain points into consideration, I reimagined the existing Planting Design with Perennials course to provide a learning experience based on a systems approach that was backed up by cognitive learning theories and best practices.

This was achieved by:

Producing an advance organizer video to establish a link between a learner’s prior knowledge + new content
Redesigning the course material to offer a stronger foundation of higher-level concepts
Developing an interactive mobile app with features to provide an immersive AR learning experience