User Study 02: What troubles instructors most?
With large spectrum of courses, from fabrication to game design, from photography to 3D model, IDeATe welcome students from various majors: art, technology, music, business… Students with different background gather together and collaborate to explore and create. However, the broadness of topics and inclusion to students also become new challenges for instructors.
In order to get a more comprehensive understanding of courses, we selected 4 instructors teaching different topics and also 1 Administrative Director to interview. Based on the topic given by Professor, we firstly focused our interview topic on the Gallery, the official documentation platform used by IDeATe. However, after several interview, we found that the Gallery may not be the core problem of IDeATe. We then adjusted our direction and focused on “what trouble stakeholders most” as our main topic.
We then used affinity diagram and diagnostic map to analyze and synthesis our findings and ideas. We found that problems on Instructors are more focused on “teaching process” : how to balance students workload with documentation requirements; how to help students develop skills; how to encourage students to learn more…
— One interesting finding is that nearly all instructors include documentation as part of their assessments; however, different instructors utilize documentation for different purposes.
“ I would definitely prioritize documentation in my fabrication courses if it can be a great self-reflection tool to help students review and make improvements. — Pro.Olivia”
“I give students templates of documentation because it is easier to view and assess their work. —Pro.Daragh”
“I ask students to do presentation in front of the whole class to report their working process every week and get some feedback. — Pro.Robinson”
Conclusion: For instructors, what troubles them most definitely will be “how to improve their teaching process. Moreover, among all of the factors,documentation is an important and rather common problem for instructors in their teaching process.
Personal reflection
Analysis process: the analysis process is super tough. We firstly cut quotes from transcript as our raw source in affinity diagram. Soonly, we found that quotes without contexts are really hard to interpret correctly. We spent much time in referring back to transcript to understand quotes. The better way to do affinity diagram is: listen to the recording and write personal understandings at the same time. Quotes from transcripts can then be linked to personal understanding.
Presentation process: In presentation, telling a story is more important than tell others “how much work I did”. The photos of process can work as the credibility to persuade audience but shouldn’t interfere with the storyline.
