This past week, I got to present our work with the Teaching and Learning Lab at HGSE, where we worked on Re-Imagining the HPL Field Studies. Looking back at the process that led up to that presentation, here are a few reflections.
The practicum experience
My hope for T127 was to work on an ongoing project at the Teaching and Learning Lab and see the entire design process up close. The project timeline didn't match the course, so instead we got to choose what to work on, based on our own interests and goals. It didn't seem ideal at first, but it was a blessing in disguise. That flexibility let me contribute to every single step of the design process.
The team
One of the most important aspects of an effective team is a shared goal. From the start we were aligned on the output we hoped to create: an interactive prototype built on Articulate 360. We were equally committed to learning about and working on each part of the process, meeting weekly to share ideas and decide the best path forward based on feedback from our team lead.
UX research
Most of our time went into interviewing the many stakeholders involved in creating and running the HPL Field Studies. That was crucial in informing our design decisions, and the impact showed during the presentation. As HPL learners and learning designers engaged with our work, they kept drawing connections to their own experiences of the Field Studies, which helped them understand the choices we'd made.
We had a list of ideas. The short timeline forced us to choose what mattered most.
Prioritising
Early on we generated a number of ideas from learner feedback. Given the short timeline, we narrowed them down to what felt most crucial to the HPL experience, and chose to redesign three aspects of it: learning onboarding, interactivity, and scaffolding. That balance of depth and breadth let us properly showcase a design for each.
Constraints
Because this wasn't a live project, we had a lot of freedom. Even so, we wanted to honour the real constraints the TLL learning designers work with, like the limited availability of additional content for the existing field studies. So rather than add new perspectives, we made the existing content more relevant by weaving in reflective questions that let learners connect it to their own experiences.
The feedback
Our team lead's input was instrumental. It surfaced pieces we'd overlooked. One note in particular stuck with me: our designs showed what we were trying to achieve, but not how. That pushed us to make the designs explain how we hoped the end user would actually interact with the product.
What it means for future work
Having gone through this, I now see the ADDIE model differently. We're still prototyping, but getting questions, feedback, and insight at this stage was exactly what helped us rethink the designs, and it would matter even more with further development and testing.
ADDIE is less a one-time framework and more an iterative loop.