Emotion Design Probe - Learning experience in the LT

A Summary

If memory serves me right, we were one of the few groups that defined the exact area of concern, that is:
1. Students’ level of concentration in lectures - deals mainly with the physical and emotional state of students
2. Students’ ability to comprehend lectures, or both – deals mainly with the cognitive aspects of learning

We also defined what a good learning experience would be.

In terms of methodology, every group had different sets of frameworks and data collection methods. Our group used field observations, interviews, questionaires and laddering while some other groups also included surveys, some form of cultural probes as well as environmental inference (Feng Shui).

In terms of frameworks, we oriented our questions towards fundamental questions of "What the students thought", "What they want", "How they reacted and Hidden reasons for their responses". As for analysing the data, we looked mainly at the factors that influence an experience: Environment, Time, Place, Other peoples’ interpretation and Previous experience. Some other groups brought in a modified version of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs to be applied to the situation which was quite interesting. Some groups also tried to adapt the "Four pleasures" framework for this case. However, we felt that this was a case of force-fitting since the framework's purpose is to analyse one's sources of pleasure and the LT learning experience in itself cannot be assuming to be inherently pleasurable to begin with, at least for most people.

Our observations and results were structured to look at both the humanistic and technological factors that influence students' level of concentration as well as the effect of different lecturer styles on students' ability to comprehend lessons. Our findings pointed towards comfort levels as a major determinant to level of concentration. From poorly designed furniture, over-enthusiastic air-conditioning, overly early/late lectures to the LT location, a myriad of different complaints were suggested. Many distrations also occured due to the misbehaviour of other students. As for presentation style, students generally disliked lecturers that read off slides and many cited unintelligible lecturers as a major concern. Other problems identified included the lack of equipment and organisational proficiency.

Most groups bought up many of the same problems highlighted, including the lack of legroom in some lecture theaters, the poorly designed tables, lecturers with poor communication skills and so on. These common issues are probably the most obvious to all of us as students and thus become the most salient.

While most groups were able to come up with numerous recommendations to overcome hardware flaws such as increasing legrooms, or installing padded seats and rubber padded doors, most would agree that disturbances from other students were difficult to stop. Through our observations, disturbances from students were extremely common, ranging from chitchats to food consumption. Although rules are made regarding student behaviours in lecture theatres, they are conveniently ignored. The most potentially viable recommendations, however, was to have teachers make better lesson deliveries. Some of the groups have brought up the same issue of conducting more interesting lessons (such as having a lecturer with a good sense of humour) to make the learning experience a pleasurable one. Our interviews and surveys reveal that students prefer lessons with value added extras such as multimedia presentations of videos, audios, interactive software and images, rather than just powerpoints and transparencies. Other elements such as animations can also help students understand difficult concepts better than just verbal explanations. Students have reflected that ‘if the lecturer is good, even if the LT is bad, at least the lecture can be made interesting.’ Our recommendation is thus to have enrichment classes for lecturers, so as to work towards that target of giving students an interesting and pleasurable learning experience for every lecture.