Final Reflections
In this final reflections page, you can read about each of the team member's thoughts about the final stages of the process as well as a more holistic reflection upon the entire design process itself.
Team Reflections
Thoughts on the Final Phase
After the Design phase, we executed both the Development and Evaluation phases one after the other due to time constraints. The following are some of our reflections on this final stage of the design process.
Walking through the design, test and evaluation process, I actually got a very important takeaway that designing learning experiences for adults is different from designing for students who are still in school / universities. The adults want immediate effects, and they want to see how they can make the knowledge they learnt into real practice to get the motivation. To be specific, an important takeaway from the user test I conducted was that the participant said she could figure out any relationship between our first few sections of contents with “how can I make money”. I was inspired by this feedback and got to know that we should include more structured content to explain the relationship between the courses and the real use, so that the adult learners can be more motivated and engaged, also, a more clear course flow can be shown to them at the very beginning.
Zora
Overall I think that our team made amazing progress this semester. As great as it would've been to come up with a fully fleshed out prototype, just given the amount of time it just wasn't feasible for our team. I think that we made great strides in aligning functional design of our prototype to align with the needs of our learners and the research that we had done in prior phases. I think that our use of Articulate Rise was a good way to try to emulate the imagined functionality of our ideal prototype which would be embedded within our sponsor's existing app.
If we were to proceed with this project, there are a couple of different ways in which we could improve, especially as it relates to updating the content to fit the needs of our learners length-wise and then also in coming up with our own in-house videos to further align providing learners with short-form, easy to digest content. The functionality of personalized learning tracks for learners depending on level of prior knowledge that they're bringing to the module was my favorite part, though we were unable to actually build that functionality into our prototype this time around. I think it is extremely valuable to be able to provide modified learning tracks for learners in order to meet them where they are and provide them with as much or as little learning as needed given their personal goals and financial journey. All in all, I think the project went well and I learned a lot from my teammates.
Deja
Going through the Development and Evaluation phase helped me realize how difficult it actually is to predict, at the onset of the project, how the final process is going to turn out. I suppose experience with projects like this would help one make more accurate estimates of things like how much time things would take or cost, but even experienced designers can't control for any number of project gremlins that might pop up, especially in the later stages such as Development and Evaluation.
A lot of it hinged upon the nature of the solution being developed. A mobile app would understandably take much longer to design than an eLearning module, for example, which itself would take longer than lesson plans that are written as documents. This could mean the difference between a development phase that would last only 1 week to one that could take 6 months. If the design team approaches the project without any prejudgments about the solution they are going to develop, then the Development stage, in particular, can really be anyone's guess regarding how long it could take.
The Evaluation stage was extremely useful in helping us identify areas that we think could be improved upon a future iteration or replication of this project. It made me realize that perhaps the best artifact we could have produced from all of this - moreso than the learning solution - is the design document itself. Its value lies in the fact that future teams have several months' worth of work that they can build off of instead of starting from scratch themselves.
Iron
Min
Heading towards the final phrase of prototyping and evaluation, I am very excited to see our first version of the design are being produced and tested. From doing affinity map, discussing on the feedback we received, and reflecting on the whole process, I have gained more knowledge about the field of instructional design. Meanwhile, I am also very content and confident about my group’s design because of strong theories/methods support, which I should keep doing and practicing in my future designs.
When designers experience failure, only reflection could allow them to process that failure, learn from it, and essentially become aware of future modes of failure that might come their way.
Lachheb & Boling, 2021