HUMAN SYSTEMS EXPLORER

(DOCUMENTARY)

Student Usability Testing of Modules

A vital part of any module's design process is testing its functionality with the students for whom it is intended. Professors report that students are generally thrilled to use the interactive diagrams, particularly because it makes concepts in physiology come alive in new ways. Students are also eager to provide feedback, which is done formally and informally at various points during a module's creation.

To begin, Dr. Parker says it is essential to check that medical concepts earmarked for a diagram are, in fact, concepts that students are anxious for help on. Faculty at the Medical School help choose these topics, but sometimes they miss they mark as to where students are confused, and Dr. Parker talks to the students in his own classes to feel out certain preliminary module ideas. The finished diagrams, he says, really have two distinct sets of customers – the professors who will use them as teaching guides in the classroom and the students who will use them to better understand medicine. Dr. Parker works hard to balance the needs of those two groups and ensure that both agree on which concepts should be incorporated into modules.

When the Human Systems Explorer project started out, only input from faculty advisors was solicited to refine modules, but Dr. Parker felt strongly that students needed to be included in that part of the process. Working with educator Nurit Bloom, he and his team put together a usability and testing program to account for student feedback. Each year, they pair between 40 and 60 students with an evaluator for one-on-one observation sessions. During a session, the evaluator watches how a student interacts with a prototype module: what seems to make sense and where apparent confusion lies. The session also includes a series of targeted questions about the content and design of the module.

The evaluator then sifts through the stacks of student feedback and formulates a distinct set of design recommendations, which are passed along to Dr. Parker. He calls this "formative feedback" and uses it to guide his revisions to the prototype. Next, an updated version of the module is sent back to the students for a second round of usability testing, a chance to see if earlier problems have been fixed. Finally, the module is ready for integration into the classroom. Even at this final stage, though, Dr. Parker tries to collect what he calls "summative feedback" by issuing survey questions and talking directly to students again. The question is: Now that the modules are in use, how effective are they?