IFLA #wlic2012 Designing an interactive virtual learning environment (VLE) with a learner centered approach

Final post for today from the IFLA World Library and Information Conference in Helsinki, Finland. The wifi connection went down during Li Wang's presentation this morning on Designing an interactive virtual learning environment (VLE) with a learner centered approach, so I'll catch up with it now.
Li Wang described the process of developing an academic integrity tutorial, and it was a great example of a learner centred design process. They identified 5 personas for their students with typical characteristics and motivations. They then produced paper prototypes of the tutorial, and elicited feedback from learners. Using a paper product was effective for getting more feedback. They then developed activities, did user testing and went through several user testing phases before moving into the full pilot stage. They will also evaluate the pilot. For each user testing stage they have just four or five students each time, but of varied demographics.
Some of the issues they identified were:
- some people want to try the test without doing the course, so they have put a link to the test on the home page
- "students don’t read" – so they've added speech bubbles and graphics to highlight key point and take learners through the story
- students didn’t use left the navigation panel in the tutorial, but did use the back button. Therefore they put in links at the bottom of each page, linking to the next and previous content
- students didn’t open “accordian” pages (i.e. where there was a plus sign indicating more pages under that heading). It turned out that most people don’t know this means extra information. Therefore they made it more obvious that there is information under the top link
- students were confusing activities and tests (so thought they’d already done the test, when they had just done the activity). Therfore they are tring to make it clearer which is which.

The course website is at http://flexiblelearning.auckland.ac.nz/academic_integrity/

The full paper, with lots of details is at: Designing an interactive virtual learning environment (VLE) with a learner centered approach LI WANG (The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand) wlic2012

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