Cultural Probe
To perform cultural probe, one of our members, Weiye, took a convenient sampling of 3 NUS friends and asked them to give a probe on a notebook. The duration of the experiment is 1 week.
Our findings are summarized into 2 main categories: non-lecture related and lecture related experience.
The non-lecture related experiences indirectly affect the overall experience of learning in lecture theatres. They include 1) tiredness due to the long journey to and from campus, 2) the lack of seats on public transports, 3) insufficient sleep in the previous night, and 4) the lack of time to have breakfast in the morning. As a result, students are not able to concentrate on the lectures, hence affecting their learning experiences. Another non-lecture related experience is the day of the week when the lecture is held. We gained feedback from our participants that the 'Monday blues', 'mid-week crisis' and 'TGIF-syndrome' also affect the experience of learning. In additions, students are unmotivated to attend the class right after public holidays. On the other hand, peers/friends also play a role in influencing you to skip lectures.
The lecture related experiences are broken down into 5 sub-categories.
- The lecturer - a good-looking lecturer may attract more students to attend the lecture regularly. Like-wise, the reverse is true.
- The lecture content - affects the overall user experience of learning in lecture theatres.
- Lecturing style - Participants generally feel a decline in learning experience if the lecturing style is monotonous, lecturers reading off the slides, and lecturers having incomprehensible accents.
- Lecture timing - Participants do not like to attend lectures that are too early or too late.
- Peer influence - reportedly reduces other students talking during lectures, skipping lectures or sleeping during lectures.
Laddering
In this approach, we interviewed a third year Arts student a series of 'why' question to sieve out the roots of the problem.
Big size -> Students sitting scattered -> Talk very loud -> Distractions -> Can't make full use of tuition
From the interview, we realized that the root factor contributing to the overall user experience of learning in lecture theatres is related to the amount of tuition paid (cost) and the perceived amount of learning (benefits).
Ethnography Study
For this approach, one of our group members, Wei Wei, crashed a lecture to observe and take notes of the whole process of learning in the theatres.
The behaviors observed are as follow:
1) Students brought own notebook, surfing the net or chatting on instant messenger during lecture.
2) Most students sit at the back seats, talking amongst themselves. The front rows are empty.
3) Some students eat and drink in the lecture.
4) Some students are sleeping during lecture.
5) Sometimes, the lecture notes and writing materials fell or were almost falling off the writing tablets.
6) The lecturer's voice was drowned in a hissing noise produced by the loudspeakers.
7) The projector screen was out of focus, with the lecture theatre's lighting casting a glare on it.
8) The flipping and jostling lecture notes and paper were observed.
9) Lecturers give too short a pause for students to copy notes, as evident from some turning their head to their fellow course mates to copy what they missed out, or too long a pause, as evident when students start talking amongst themselves.
10) Questions asked by students from front rows cannot be heard from the back.
Findings
From the three approach, we've concluded 3 common problems of learning in lecture theatres.
1) The lecture theatre's design - the theatres are generally too big for most classes, resulting in empty/half-filled lectures. This leads to students sitting at the last few rows and starting to talk amongst themselves.
2) Lecturer factor - the lecturing style, accents of lecturers affect the user experience of learning. The lack of 'crowd control' by the lecturers may negatively impact the learning experience of students who genuinely want to attend the lectures.
3) Student factor - Many students are affected by their fellow students' improper and insensitive behaviors/attitude during/towards lectures.
Solutions
Based on the findings, we proposed that
1) the lecture timing should not coincide with peak hours (office hours) as this may indirectly affect the traveling to and from campus for lectures. Back-to-back lecture timing should also be avoided so that students can have time to have breakfast or lunch.
2) On the student part, they should be nurtured to have good time management skill and positive attitude towards learning.
3) Students need to be aware of and considerate to other students who are attending the lectures, by not talking, eating, or doing anything disruptive to the lecture.
4) Big-sized lectures should be replaced with seminar style teaching with maximum capacity of 30 students per class. The smaller class will allow lecturers to perform better crowd control.
5) Lecturers should also improve their lecturing style by making the lecture more interactive. Accented English is acceptable as long as it is comprehensible.
My reflection on the assignment
User experience varies greatly among individuals. I think it is not possible to ask users what can create positive experience for them because they will just ask for the best thing, which is idealistic.
Now looking back at our proposal, I realized that most of the points that we proposed are idealistic. If they could be achieved, the problems would not exist in the first place. Therefore, I have to re-analyze whatever we have done for this assignment. If subjective interviews/collections of feedback such as laddering and culture probe are not very helpful feedback because the users will tend to ask for the perfect solution, which could hardly be achieved, would the 'objective' observation method, such as ethnography study, helps us in improving the user experience while we would only know 'what' is happening but not 'why' the students are behaving this particular way?
My answer is that each of them, standing alone, might not yield very helpful information towards improving the user experience. But a combination of them might be very useful. I think what went missing in our 3 approaches is the link among the three. We did the 3 approaches independently. And it could be that the sample size is too small. Therefore, I find that the findings from each approach does not concretely support one another.
Another thing that we have to be careful about is that we need to draw a clear line (as a professional) between what is improvable and what is idealistic.
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