Problem of Practice + Empathize

I am examining a problem of practice in my professional context where we observe students struggling to navigate the curriculum. This exhibits itself in many different ways: confusion about where relevant course materials are located, how best to interact with the course materials, which materials will be assessed, when events are scheduled, how certain activities are assessed, etc.

I have personal ideas of what would help students more easily interact with the curriculum, however I wanted to better understand the needs of the students.  To do this, I interviewed people from three different “user groups” who bring different perspectives on this problem.  First, I interviewed a curriculum assistant, who helps course faculty in compiling their course materials and scheduling sessions. Second, I interviewed a faculty member who works in several courses and observes students navigating the curriculum.  Finally, I interviewed a student who had completed the first two years of the curriculum (which is the area I focus on professionally) and learned what he found was most difficult about navigating the curriculum.

When I interviewed these users, two main themes arose from the responses.  First, all three users remarked about how there was inconsistency in how course activities were implemented and weighted.  Examples included how specific content (Anatomy) was assessed only as a quiz for several of the first courses in the curriculum, and then the same content type was suddenly assessed only on final exams.  Another example was how discussion boards were utilized differently between different courses, and how the change in expectations could cause confusion for students.

A second theme that all three users remarked on was that the D2L course structures were inconsistent from course to course.  It was expressed that this made it difficult for students to know where to look for different types of content, and how to gauge was “important” content versus not important.  Going into this interview, I expected for this to be a primary factor in difficulty navigating the curriculum – however, the only user who indicated this as a priority area to address was the faculty member.  The curriculum assistant indicated that in general, she felt courses had a pretty similar organizational structure, and that students could “figure out” where content was.  Additionally, the student indicated that, though D2L course structure could be improved, it would be of minor benefit to the student. 

I was most surprised to hear from the student that they felt the biggest difficulty to navigating the curriculum was inconsistency in weekly schedule.  He indicated that events would be held on different days and different times of day from course to course and semester to semester.  Because of this, students couldn’t assume any pattern to the schedule and were constantly needing to check the calendar.  This was especially problematic when the students were trying to build routine toward self-study. 

In conclusion, I found that my presupposed “silver bullet” of creating a highly refined D2L course only addresses some of the problem related to student confusion in navigating the curriculum.  I believe that a larger issue is the highly “siloed” nature of our curriculum, and the fact that lead faculty of each course are generally unaware of how material is covered and activities are implemented in other courses. This requires a broader review of course scheduling and logistics. However, I do feel that an opportunity exists to provide “best practice” recommendations to course faculty from within D2L templates.  This, paired with an emphasis on consistency from administration, may lend itself toward more consistency of logistics and scheduling throughout the curriculum. 

You can view my research notes, along with the interviews and interview transcripts, here.