UX of Learning Management Systems

A while back, I wrote about what it means to incorporate UX principles into instructional design. I mentioned that the faculty perspective is often absent from these conversations, meaning that the UX of creating a good UX for students… is bad for instructors. I encountered a perfect example of this while helping to build a course site in NYU Classes, a Learning Management System (LMS) powered by Sakai.

NYU Classes has a tool called “Lessons,” which allows faculty to create structured sequences of material for students. This allows the faculty to have control over how and when content is made available to students, and provides an organized, logical way for students to access course content.

A screenshot of the Lessons tool interface (Source: NYU IT knowledge base)

One feature of this tool makes individual content items “required,” meaning that from the student view, an asterisk will appear next to items that have not been completed. Once a student completes the item, a green check mark will replace the asterisk:

A page created in the Lessons tool which contains “required” items

In a course where students are asked to complete several discrete tasks for a given unit/lesson, this functionality leads to a better experience for the learner, as it allows them to track their progress. But setting this up is cumbersome for an instructor!

One would think that the option to “require” a content item would appear on the screen when you are creating that item. Instead, you have to create the item, and then edit that item to access options that do not appear on the initial screen. See screenshots of the process below:

Adding content to a page — notice there is no option to “require” the item.

Once the content is on the page, there is a very light-grey “edit” icon.

Now we can “Require” the item (and add a description if we want — something that also wasn’t available on the original “add item” screen).

Finally, we have the asterisk appearing next to our content item.

Now, imagine teaching a course like the one shown in these screenshots. There are almost 30 class sessions, with an average of 4–5 “required” items per session. If you’re an instructor, you’re going through the process shown above 120–150 times. This is exactly the kind of course in which tracking progress would be most helpful to students, yet it’s incredibly time-consuming for the instructor to set up.

If we want to practice “good LX” at our learning institutions, we need to think about the UX of creating learning experiences. I don’t think we can reasonably expect faculty to adopt processes like the one I just showed you as “best practices” when they are inefficient and, quite frankly, annoying.