Designs Supporting Students

Why You Should Care about Usability
Douglas Allen Peterson, Associate Professor of Psychology, The University of South Dakota
Usability should inform the design, adoption, and assessment of educational technology. After a brief overview of usability as a concept, this talk will address the implications of poor usability in education and explain why usability is ignored or undervalued. The conclusion of the talk will summarize common principles of usability that are particularly important for consideration in educational technology. Each principle is illustrated by examples of good and poor design or implementation. An increased awareness and understanding of usability principles can improve the evaluation of educational technology products, enhance educational outcomes, and diminish frustrations for educators and learners alike.

OUTCOMES: Understand the importance of usability in educational applications * Consider usability from the student's point of view * Complete an informal usability assessment * Understand usability issues and apply that understanding to training programs to minimize the impact of poor usability

SCALE-UP Classrooms Revisited: Strategies and Techniques for Teaching in the Age of Connected Learning
Jerzy Jura, Director - Academic Technology, School of Nursing, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Over the past two decades, since the introduction of SCALE-UP or active learning classrooms (ALCs), similar teaching environments that have become increasingly popular on campuses are the embodiments of constructivist pedagogies, radically different from those used in lecture-based curricula. But even those teaching strategies that had been developed specifically for ALCs such as team-based learning or just-in-time teaching were all devised long before social, mobile, and BYOD had become significant forces in campus-technology landscapes. This presentation will focus on exploring teaching methods suitable for ALCs that incorporate many of these recent technologies.

OUTCOMES: Understand three major modes of learning and which teaching and assessment methods best match each mode * Identify the main points of alignment of SCALE-UP/ALC environments with constructivist, learner-focused approaches to teaching that emphasize construction of knowledge * Identify and understand the sources of limitations of traditional SCALE-UP/ALC implementations * List at least four broad categories of SCALE-UP/ALC-suitable classroom strategies that are enabled by new and emerging technologies * Adapt several shared examples of classroom strategies to developing expertise and teaching practice in your discipline