I designed with my sister, Andrianna, a process that motivates her to use office hours and interact with her professors in a meaningful and comfortable way while also enhancing her own learning. The process is designed to help her in classes that are not as interesting or are challenging for her. The idea is that she connects the content to areas of interest and then takes that curiosity to office hours. Then she goes to her professor and discusses the connections. This makes office hours more comfortable for her because she can engage in conversations that are interesting to her and she brings some expertise by connecting it to an area of interest.
Learning is feeling uncomfortable. Talking to instructors can be uncomfortable for some. How might we make that easier?
Initially, my idea for this class’s design was to create a resource for people to understand their learning preferences and how to study according to them. I witnessed a lot of people in undergrad and high school struggling to learn, and I assumed that they just did not understand how they learned. At the same time, my younger sister was beginning college. She expressed to me throughout her first semester, that she was struggling to learn and stay motivated in her courses. She really wanted to change, but didn’t know where to begin. I thought, “Yes! She would definitely benefit from this resource.” So I began designing a website.
Turns out, a website with a bunch of information was not what she needed (perhaps no surprise). So I started all over again, except this time, we sat down, and I asked her all sorts of questions about her experiences learning, failures and successes, etc. This is where we discovered that she really likes to learn through asking questions and talking to people who are experts in whatever she is curious about.
I followed up with a question about office hours, and she admitted that she didn’t use them because they made her nervous.
New problem: How might we ease Andrianna’s nerves around office hours? If Andrianna becomes comfortable around office hours, then she will be more willing to ask questions and engage in her authentic learning, so that she enhances her learning and succeeds in her class.
We created the below template (which was not helpful). However, at this point, she was using office hours and was comfortable and excited! So we succeeded! But none of the prototypes did the job so now we had to figure out where in the design process did we solved our problem. That was how we realized that during the design process she was using her own process to learn and use office hours (featured image).
