How General Education Could be Done Better
What I learned doing a journal study of a complicated program
The University of Arizona is going through a General Education “Refresh.” Faculty working groups have been collaborating informally for the past several years on envisioning a new Gen Ed, and in Spring 2020 this process was formalized with a Gen Ed team, made up of groups on curriculum, infrastructure, quality teaching and learning, and communication. We had data on how students perceived Gen Ed after they graduated (spoiler: it was mostly not-favorable), but we didn’t know how students currently navigated this program. How did they find courses? How did they decide on which to register for? How did they meet requirements? Who did they talk to?
I aimed to find some of the answers to these questions using UX methods to get feedback and understand the pain points of the current program so we can improve with the Refresh.
How We Understood the Student Experience
I worked with the General Education director¹ and faculty who teach Gen Ed courses to recruit students for a Journal Study (better known as a diary study, but I didn’t want to scare students off with the word “diary”). A journal study asks participants to record their processes on a certain task as they work on it, without interfering too much in those processes. I recruited five students from three large-enrollment Gen Ed courses who represented majors like Veterinary Science, Pre-business, Computer Science, Optical Engineering, and Arabic and Engineering (double major).
Students filled out a simple 4-question Google Form 2–3 times per day for a week in the middle of the registration period for the fall semester. I asked students to select and describe an activity they did related to Gen Ed, rate the activity, explain the rating, and (optionally) include a relevant screenshot or document. Activities included searching for classes, reading course descriptions, placing course(s) in UAccess (student portal) shopping cart, communicating with an advisor, and an option for students to write in their own activity.
Gen Ed Pain Points
I collected 53 entries over the span of the week, plus some follow up information in an exit questionnaire. I identified three central pain points.
1. Students want more information about courses
Throughout the week of daily entries, students expressed frustration with the lack of information available in course descriptions about specific classes, and described scenarios where they selected a class based on the description and came to find that the class was nothing like what was described.
In the exit questionnaire, I asked students to rank their priorities for selecting Gen Ed courses and a (maybe obvious) insight emerged: Students are practical. When it came to deciding on courses, they were most concerned about workload, access to previous syllabi, professor reputation or teaching style, and textbook cost or fees. Because a good sense of workload can usually be found on a course syllabus, a revised list of concerns would be:
- Access to a previous syllabus: workload, course details, schedule
- Professor reputation or teaching style
- Textbook cost or fees
2. The student portal needs a student experience overhaul
Finding Gen Ed courses in the student portal is challenging because of issues with navigability and searchability. In other words, the portal itself is difficult to navigate, and it is hard for students to narrow their searches. Students described the process as confusing, tiresome, time consuming, annoying, difficult, and impossible. One student’s story highlights the inability to easily narrow a search in the student portal: “If a student isn’t given suggestions as to a good class to take for Tier 1 traditions and cultures, over 150 classes show up and a student is expected to choose one class from a list of 150.” When I tried a cursory search, I ran into a similar problem (below).
Between struggling to navigate 150+ courses in initial searches to being unable to tell if a course is closed because it’s full or not open yet, UAccess needs more student testing to clarify priorities and improve navigation.
3. Gen Ed requirements need to be clearly articulated, easy to find, and connected to the student portal experience
Gen Ed requirements were a throughline for all parts of this journal study; whether students were searching for classes, talking to their advisors, or reading course descriptions, in some way students were trying to figure out how to meet the requirements for Gen Ed. While this focus is practical — students want to make sure the classes they take count for something — it shouldn’t be such a primary driver in student experience. With more clearly articulated requirements, and with a categories-based system that highlights which requirements certain courses fulfill, students can focus on more pressing priorities — like course content, workload, professor teaching style, and the cost of their education.
What Students Can Teach Us about Program Development
In the journal study, I asked students to report their specific experiences with registering during spring registration. As another part of the Gen Ed Refresh effort, one of the other graduate student researchers² held a weekly undergraduate student focus group with nine work-study students who were under stay at home orders. Most of these students were juniors and seniors and had completed their Gen Ed requirements recently. We showed students drafts of materials that faculty working groups developed for the Refresh, like a proposal for a first-year seminar course and drafted principles of quality teaching and learning. Students’ feedback was in keeping with the rest of the data we’ve collected, in the journal study and also in previous surveys. Three key insights came from these focus groups:
1. Communication needs to be student-centered, not faculty-centered
As we shared materials from various working groups, students were very honest about whether the language faculty used was working for them or not. In one example, faculty had used the term “critical consciousness” to describe an outcome for quality teaching. Two students commented on this line in the document: one asked what the the term meant, and the other inquired whether “critical consciousness” might be replaced with “critical thinking.”
As faculty (or anyone who spends a long time in and around the academy), it’s easy to forget that some of our language is inaccessible or doesn’t inherently mean something to our students. Going forward, it will be important to solicit feedback from students throughout the process of drafting communication regarding Gen Ed. This could include continuing focus groups, especially if it is possible to build that time in as part of students’ work-study programs, or soliciting student participation on working group committees.
2. Curriculum should be assessed based on its ability to be flexible to a variety of student needs and priorities
Students imagine more creative situations and “edge cases” for student experience than we typically can as faculty and graduate students. For example, we discussed a proposal for a first-year seminar course that was designed to be in-person during students’ first semester at UA. Students in the focus group asked about the possibility for an online option, for opportunities to start the course in the summer before arriving at UA, and if existing pre-college opportunities such as the New Start bridge program could incorporate some of this course content.
When we discussed the restructuring of Gen Ed credits, students asked questions about minors, transfer credits, and AP credits that had not fully been considered yet. We can continue to get student input on curriculum and program changes through surveys, but also by building in more opportunities for students to provide feedback on courses they’re currently taking, before the end of the semester evaluations. These could be framed to ask questions about the course as it fits into the larger Gen Ed program, rather than just specific questions about the teaching in the course, which is what evaluations tend to focus on now.
3. Students should be given opportunities to continually provide feedback on program development
Because we asked for feedback early enough — during the development stages of the new curriculum and teaching principles — we are able to incorporate student suggestions and priorities as we go. Inevitably, as with any large program, issues will arise that we can’t predict (like a pandemic, for example) that will require more creative solutions. Building in student input and feedback can help us stay ahead of some of these issues, avoiding as many future pain points as possible. Instead of thinking about student feedback after working groups have developed drafts of program changes, going forward we can ask more students to participate in the co-designing of the program.
[1] A big thanks to Susan Miller-Cochran, Director of General Education, for supporting the journal study, and to [2] Emily Jo Schwaller, for sharing the focus group space with me over the last few weeks.
