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Christopher Douce

TM356 new tutor briefing 2018

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On 8 October 2018 I helped to deliver an online briefing to introduce new tutors to TM356 Interaction Design and the user experience, with a number of module team and staff tutor colleagues. What follows is a really brief summary of what was covered during this session.

I’m posting this blog for a couple of reasons: (1) so I can effectively share notes with everyone who attended, (2) so I can look back to see what I did when I helped to run a briefing, and (3) so I can easily remember what I’ve done when I get to that part of the year when I have my annual appraisal!

Agenda

The structure of the briefing was as follows: begin with some introductions and an ice breaker (so the new tutors can meet each other), present an overview and background of the module, and then present a summary of the module materials. The next part was to say more about the role of the tutor and the way that the module applies something called the Group Tuition Policy, including a description of all the key learning events. At the end there was a Q&A session.

The main ‘presentation’ part of the session was recorded, but the icebreaker session and the Q&A wrap-up session was not.

Tools

One of the slides mentioned the key tools and technologies that could be used for learning. These were: Open Studio (for the sharing of designs), discussion forums (module, cluster, tutor group), Adobe Connect for online tutorials (with the tutor, cluster forums, and module wide events), and prototyping tools (such as Balsalmiq).

Module materials and philosophy

A significant part of TM356 is based around a project; students are asked to think about an interactive product, which can be the focus of their investigations. There is also an emphasis on ubiquitous computing, iteration and prototyping.

The module consists of four blocks: an introductory block, a requirements block, a design block and an evaluation block.

Block 1, the introductory block has 4 units. These have the titles: Unit 1 - What is interaction design? Unit 2 - Goals and principles of user-centred design, Unit 3 - The ‘who, what and where’ of the design context, and Unit 4: Interaction design activities and methods. 

Block 2, requirements for interaction, also has 4 units: Unit 1 - Knowing the Users, Unit 2 - Exploring activities and contexts, Unit 3 – Data gathering for Requirements, and Unit 4 - Establishing Requirements.

Block 3, design and prototyping: Unit 1 - Understanding and Conceptualising Interaction. Unit 2 - Interface Types. Unit 3 - Design becoming concrete through prototyping, and Unit 4 - Conceptual design: Moving from requirements to first design.

Finally, Block 4, evaluation, has the following units: Unit 1 – Introduction to evaluation, Unit 2 - From data to information, Unit 3 - Planning and conducting an evaluation, and Unit 4 - Module reflection.

Tutorials

The module has three clusters (groups of tutors) which are broadly split across the UK. This module does have face to face tutorials; there is one towards the start of the module, and one towards the end. Here is a summary of the current group tuition plan:

  • Interaction Design - getting you started
  • Project choice workshop (module team)
  • Preparing for TMA 2: practising skills - data gathering for requirements
  • Prototyping and the development of concepts
  • Design Hackathon (module team and some tutors)
  • Prepare for TMA 3
  • Preparing for TMA 4: practising skills for evaluating your design
  • Preparing for exam: revision sessions (one block per cluster, and shared)

The design Hackathon is an event that is organised by the module team that is intended to expose students to collaborative design work. Suitable materials and electronics will be provided, and a topic for design activity will be agreed by the team beforehand.

At the event, tutors will help facilitate the students' work and reflections, in preparation for TMA03. For the 2018 presentation, the Hackathon will take place in Milton Keynes and Edinburgh at the same time, and students who were not able to attend physically will be able to connect to an online room and view presentations from both face-to-face groups to get some idea about what happened during the event.

Q&A and wrap up discussion

I didn’t make notes during the Q&A session, but I do remember a few things. I remember using the screen sharing tool in Adobe Connect to show tutors different parts of the TutorHome page and the module website. I also remember mentioning the importance of the tutor’s forum, highlighting a resources area, and a discussion about the introductory letter.

I’m also pretty sure that I emphasised that every tutor should make good use of their staff tutor (their line manager): their job is to answer questions about anything, and address any worries that they may have.

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Christopher Douce

Day in the life of a STEM staff tutor (reprised)

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Wednesday, 15 Feb 2017, 21:14

This blog post echoes a blog post I made in June 2015. The earlier blog was designed to accompany a presentation that I gave to the Computing and IT student support team, who were then based in Birmingham. Since I gave that talk, things have changed: the Birmingham office is just about to close and the functions have relocated to the Open University Manchester Student Recruitment and Support centre.

This post has a similar aim: to accompany a presentation that I gave to my student support colleagues to given them a feel for what Computing and IT staff tutors do. An important point is that every staff tutor has, of course, slightly different roles and responsibilities. Our exact mix of duties and responsibilities depends on our own expertise and interests. 

Another point is that every day can be very different. Here’s what I wrote last time: ‘the below narrative is a collage of aspects from different days. I’ve written it this way so give a sense of the diversity of things that we do. It’s not representative, since every day is different, but it does give a taste of what kind of things a staff tutor gets involved with’

Blitz the inbox

I wake up at any time between 7.00 and 8.00am; I often watch the travel reports whilst I eat breakfast. Now that I’m a home worker, I do find the travel reports strangely satisfying; I take a life affirming moment to reflect that I’m not in the middle of one of those huge snarl-ups on the north or south circular roads.

One of the first things I do is triage my inbox to decide what is important. The exciting thing about being a staff tutor is that anything could happen. I look after approximately sixty associate lecturer contracts (or tutor groups) across three different levels of study. To give an impression of scale, a tutor might (of course) have anything between 18 and 20 students. 

My key objective is to get to the messages that are important. So, glance through announcements about conferences and drainage issues. I delete messages that offer reminders about events in Milton Keynes, even though I’m not working in Milton Keynes. I shift-delete emails about fire alarms and electrical testing, and start to read messages, dropping updates about new procedures into folders (I don’t read things in depth if I don’t need to).

TM356 tutor telephone call

The first scheduled event was a chat with a TM356 tutor. Our tutor has been raising some really good points about the design of some online sessions; he’s also very experienced too. We shared views about how things are going on the module, and I make a note about some things that I need to bring to the module teams attention.

After our chat, I receive a delivery: it’s my new desk. To make things easier at home I’ve been reconfiguring my study area, and this has meant trying to find a bigger work area. I haul a big new desk into my lounge and start to puzzle about what the next step needs to be: my desk needs varnishing. I make a mental note.

It is a busy morning: I email a tutor about organising an additional support session, and then send off another email, this time to AL services in Manchester about transferring TMAs from one tutor to another due to a tutor being away on sick leave; a few days earlier I had found a tutor who was willing to cover.

AL CDSA

A Microsoft Outlook reminder popped up on my screen: it told me that there was an AL CDSA (appraisal) was due in fifteen minutes. I started to get everything sorted out: I opened up the tutor’s draft CDSA form that he had sent to me and the tutor’s ALAR report in a different screen (I have a two screen setup; my new desk will allow me to have three screens!) I familiarised myself with the contents of the ALAR report: turnaround times were very good, and the student surveys were very good (but like with so many student surveys, not many students had responded; this is always a problem that isn’t easily solved).

I get everything sorted out for the CDSA and give the tutor a call. He was great to talk to; he was committed and dedicated. I asked him what kinds of things I might be able to do to help him in his job, and told him to contact me if he has any suggestions about what AL staff development events might be useful.

Academic work

After a drop of lunch and a bit of TV it was onto the afternoon stint. Now that the key emergencies had been sorted out, it was time to get onto some academic work. For me, the term ‘academic work’ can mean a whole range of different things.

Over the last year and a half (or so, perhaps a bit longer) I have been a deputy editor for a publication called Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning (Routledge).

The journal has an interesting history: it began as an internal OU publication that shared information about ‘the OU approach to teaching and learning’ amongst its many staff. As time has moved on the journal’s remit has broadened, adopting a more international focus. It is still an Open University institutional publication but it is one that is more outward looking. It does, however, maintain its core focus, publishing research about distance education, technology and educational practice. 

I spend about an hour looking through the status of the submissions. I try to match up newly submitted papers to reviewers. One paper has been reviewed, and there is a positive ‘accept’, which is always good news. I read through the reviewer comments and have another quick read of the paper before making a final decision.

When this is done, I get onto editing a PowerPoint presentation for an online tutorial that is scheduled to take place later on in the day. I send a couple of pictures I have taken from my phone to my laptop, open up the PowerPoint, and then drop them in. I then convert the PowerPoint into the native OU Live format, and upload the new file as an OU Live preload, just to make I’m fully prepared.

I receive an email from an associate lecturer colleague that I’m working with. We’re working on a tutorial observation research project that is funded by something called eSTEeM, which is all about Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics education. My colleague has started work on a literature review and it looks brilliant. I look in my diary and I fix a time to have a chat about how things are going.

One of the things I really enjoy doing is AL development. I enjoy it because it’s great speaking to all the tutors. At the start of the month I ran a TM470 AL development session for purely selfish reasons: I am a tutor on TM470 and I wanted to run some tutorials, but I was also very aware that other TM470 tutors are significantly more experienced than I am. Put simply: I wanted to steal some of their good ideas, and a way to do this is to find a way to get tutors talking to each other. To do this, I ran an online staff development event.

After the event had finished, I had to do a couple of ‘wash up’ tasks. The first one was to send AL services in Manchester a list of associate lecturers who had attended. The second was to write a quick blog post about the key findings, and share that post to all tutors. I spent the next couple of hours going through the recording of the event, making notes, and putting everything into a blog summary of the TM470 AL development event (blog)

Evening

I try not to work evenings (or weekends) but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. It was one of those nights.

At the start of TM356 Interaction Design and the User Experience, some tutors were worried about an event called the ‘Hackathon’. The OU group tuition policy stipulates that each face-to-face event must have an online alternative. The thing is, the TM356 face-to-face Hackathon takes an entire day, and you can’t have an online equivalent of an event that starts at 10.30 and ends at 16.30; it just wouldn’t be humane!

With a blessing from the module team, I made the executive decision to create three ‘parts’ to a longer running online equivalent. After making this suggestion, I realised that I was going to making a substantial contribution to the pedagogic design of these ‘parts’. 

The tutors were asking, quite rightly: ‘how are these sessions going to work?’ 

I made a decision: showing and demonstrating a teaching idea would be significantly easier than writing a document that tutors would then have to try to decode. I had prepped a session, uploaded a session, and I worked with a tutor to deliver a session.

My fellow tutor had some brilliant ideas; we tried a ‘dialogic approach’ to teaching, which means: ‘we asked each other questions’. Listening to two voices is always, in my opinion, more fun than listening to one.

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Christopher Douce

TM356 Hackathon

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Thursday, 16 Feb 2017, 14:55

Every computing and IT department in a university has its own unique focus; some might pay lots of attention to the design and development of hardware. Others may place emphasis on programming languages and the foibles of operating system design. 

The OU Computing and IT degree programme places a special emphasis on the connections between computing and people. In some ways TM356 Interaction Design and the User Experience is a module that totally reflects this focus: it is all about the process of designing interactive devices and systems that allow us to address real problems that people have to face.

The TM356 Hackathon is all about design. Although a lot of OU teaching is at a distance, the Hackathon is unique in the sense that it is a face-to-face teaching event that allow students to meet with module teams and computing researchers.

But what is a Hackathon? ‘Hackathon’ comes from an obvious combination of two words: hacking and marathon. The hacking bit comes from the idea of creatively meddling with technology. The marathon bit means that the participants will expend quite a bit of (positive) energy doing this over an extended period of time.

In essence, the Hackathon is an opportunity to create some physical designs to some real world problems by working with other people over a period of a day. An important question is: why physical prototyping? Why not do some sketching (which was the focus of the module, M364, which it replaces)? The answer to this question is simple: computing is more than just a website; it has moved from the desktop computer and into the physical environment. Physical prototyping helps us to envisage new types of products and devices; it encourages participants to develop what is called ‘design thinking skills’.

What follows is a short summary of the first ever TM356 hackathon event that took place at the London School of Economics on Saturday 4 February. In this post I’ll try to give everyone a flavour of what happened. I’m writing this so I remember what happened, and also to give other TM356 students a feeling as to what might be involved.

Introduction

The day was introduced by module presentation chair and Senior Lecturer Clara Mancini. Clara said that an important aspect of interaction design is collaboration. The Hackathon event enables different students to work together to gain some practical hands on experience of prototyping. This experience, it is argued, can help students with their own TM356 projects and help them to prepare for their tutor marked assignments.

There were three key parts to the day: a tutor led discussion about projects, a series of short presentations by researchers, and the actual hackathon workshop where everyone works together on a specific theme. The event concludes with a tutor led discussion about how students might begin to tackle their assignment.

Project discussions

Since there were nearly thirty students, we were all split up into different tables to begin with our ‘project discussions’. During the module students are asked to create a prototype design for an interactive product. An important thing to note is that an interactive product doesn’t have to be a website: it could be anything, since interaction design and computing is gradually moving away from the desktop and into the environment.

The table that I sat at had some really interesting project ideas: a system for an improvised comedy group, a mobile friendly design for a government website, a remote control for people who have physical impairments, a tool to log and scan documents, and a navigation and route planning system. 

Looking at research projects

A number of OU research assistants and research students were also invited to the Hackathon. Their role was to share something about their own interaction design research projects with a view to inspiring the Hackathon project work. Researchers were sat at different places in the Hackathon room. Students were invited to meet the researchers, who were either working on their doctoral work, or on post-doctoral research contracts, to find out more about what they were doing.

There are two projects that I remember: one was about the creation of digital prototypes using electronics and cases made using 3D printers. The second project was about electronic fabrics or electronic textiles (e-textiles, Wikipedia), which could form the basis of wearable computing platforms. We were shown a camera that could be worn as a necklace, and a device that hospital patients could use to make subjective measurements of pain.  The electronic textiles were used in a research project about how to motivate groups of people who have special educational needs.

The Hackathon

The theme of the Hackathon was: ‘wearable technologies for health and well-being’. We were encouraged to think about the different ways that the term ‘well-being’ could be considered. We were also encouraged to think about issues that might affect wearable technologies, such as: demands on comfort, how we might pay attention to a product or a device that is worn, how it relates to the environment or the activity that we are engaged with. There are also practical issues to consider, such as how to organise input and output, cleaning and charging.

All the students were given access to a range of prototyping materials: this included card, paper, coloured pens, pipe cleaners, string, as well as some basic electronic devices, such as Arduinos. Marian Petre, a professor in the department made the important point that it wasn’t about the end result, it was about the thinking and the decision making that led to the creation of a prototype.

Photograph of materials that can be used to create a physical prototype

As a short aside, any student who has taken an OU module called U101 Design Thinking: creativity for the 21st century (Open University) would be familiar with some of the design thinking (Wikipedia) ideas and skills that the Hackathon and the module team were trying to expose and develop.

All the students sat in tables with either a tutor, researcher, or module team member. To get everyone going I suggested that the group should try some ‘divergent thinking’ before going onto doing some ‘convergent thinking’. To put it another way: we brainstormed what was meant by the terms ‘wellness and wellbeing’ before choosing a topic and exploring it more depth. When we had settled on an idea, we then went onto building a simple physical prototype.

Of course, our prototype didn’t doing anything: it was all about understanding the broad concept of use, and understanding the design goals and trade-offs. During the process, we would also uncover requirements and learn more about the potential user, the activity, and the environment in which the product would be used.

Presentations

At the end of the design activity all project groups were asked to make a short presentation about their prototype.

Photograph of TM356 students describing their Hackathon project

I’m not going to say anything about what each project was about since I wouldn’t want any of the design to unduly influence any thinking that might go on within any future events. Instead, let’s just say that the projects had very different objectives and they were all brilliantly creative.

Final points

Towards the end of the Hackathon and just before everyone got stuck into going through the third TMA (which was all about design), I noted down a few points that were made by the module team: the point of making makes you become aware of issues and limitations; you begin to think about electronics, materials, size of products and the environment. Design thinking is relating to uncovering the needs of the users and starting to think about practical issues. The design process is, of course, iterative. In the process of design, the prototypes become objects of communication.

The face-to-face Hackathon is complemented by a series of three online events that aim to address similar issues. The first online session presents the idea of a conceptual model and allows students to discuss prototyping approaches. The second online session enables students to speak with one another about their projects, and the final session explores different interface types. Rather than being equivalent to the face-to-face Hackathon, these sessions can be considered to be complementary; similar issues are discussed and explored in different ways.

If you are a student studying TM356, I hope this short blog post gives you some idea about what it is all about. I also hope that it will inspire you to attend the session. There is a lot to be gained by coming along!

Acknowledgements: the Hackathon was designed by the TM356 module team and run with help from research assistants and doctoral students from the School of Computing and Communications. Special thanks are given to and associate lecturers who play such an invaluable role and all the students who came along at the first TM356 Hackathon.

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Christopher Douce

AL Development: Sketching and Prototyping, London

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On the evening of 8 December 2016, my staff tutor colleague, Asma, set up and ran an associate lecturer development event for tutors who were working on a number of design modules. Incidentally, this was also one of the last AL development events that were run in the London regional centre, before it closes at the end of January 2017.

I usually take notes during these AL development events, so I can share some notes to everyone afterwards, but I became pretty busy chatting to everyone which meant that I didn’t have the time. This blog post is, subsequently, a pretty short one, since I’m relying purely on my fallible memory.

The event was advertised to design tutors in two Open University regional areas: in London, and in the South East. Although design tutors were the main ‘target group’, the event was also open to tutors who worked on a module called TM356 Interaction Design and the User Experience (OU website). The aim of the event was to share tips and techniques about prototyping and sketching. These techniques could then, in turn, be shared with students during face to face tutorial sessions.

The session was really informal. It was, in essence, a kind of show case. Different activities and demonstrations were placed throughout the room on different tables, and participants were invited to ‘experience’ sets of different activities. One activity was all about sketching using shade, lines and texture (if I remember correctly). Another was a scene where we could practice still life drawing. In fact, we had a choice: a set of shells, or a set of objects which represented our location.

A collection of objects that represent London as a tourist attraction

I remember two other demonstrations or ‘stands’: one was about the creation of physical prototypes and another was a show and tell about how different drawing and sketching techniques could be used to represent different product designs. I was particularly taken by the physical prototyping demonstration: we were shown card, bendy steel wire (which could be easily bought in a hardware store), and masking tape. The wire, we were told, could be used to add structure to physical objects; pieces of wire could be bent and twisted together, and taped onto the back of segments of card, to create the surfaces of objects.

I tried my hand at sketching, but I have to confess that I didn’t get too far: I soon became engaged in discussions about how these different techniques might be useful during a longer tutorial about physical prototyping. Another thought was: how could we replicate these kinds of prototyping and interactive activities when we have to use online tools? Or put another way, how could we run sessions when students can’t physically get to a classroom. It is clear that there no easy answers; I now wish that I had made better notes of all the discussions!

Not only were we all exposed to a number of different techniques, some of the tutors also had an opportunity to catch up with each other and chat about how a new module was going.

An interesting question is: could it be possible to run an online equivalent of this session? The answer is: possibly, but it would be very different, and it would require a huge amount of planning to make it work: things don’t spontaneously happen in the online world like they can during a face to face session.

Although the office is closing, there are different planning groups that are starting up to try to make sure that essential associate lecturer development activities still continue. I’m not sure when there will be another face to face session quite like this, but I do hope we can organise another one.

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