Since I’ve been back at CMU, I’ve helped make two courses: Interaction Design Fundamentals (IxDF) and now, currently, Advanced Interaction Design (AIxD). I wanted to tell you a little about what that’s like at the HCII.
First of all, it’s generally a long process. To revamp these two core courses took years, well before I got here. It’s like addiction: admitting there’s a problem is the first step to resolving it, and sometimes that takes a while.
The first thing that has to be agreed upon is what the learning objectives are for the course. That is, what are the big lessons and themes and takeaways that we want students to walk away with. This might be something like “Understand the history of Interaction Design.” The set of learning objectives is usually pretty small, around 5-10, because in a single semester, you have only so much time to teach. Learning objectives tend to open up a lot of Big Questions like “Who are we teaching?” “What do the students need to know?” “What is the future of this industry?” “What will this field be like in five/10/20 years?” Determining the objectives can take many meetings of the Design Curriculum Committee. (There is an overall HCII Curriculum Committee too that looks out over the entire HCI course offerings.)
Once you have the objectives, the next thing is to match them with outcomes—what should the students be able to demonstrate, represent, or produce after this course? An example here might be wireframes or prototypes or be able to describe what Fitts’ Law is. (It’s not usually as granular as that last example.) This is where, in the core classes I teach, having an ear for industry helps, because teaching the students a method that professionals don’t much use anymore (cough personas cough) does them a disservice.
At this point, the class mostly passes out of the purview of the Committee and to the faculty who are going to be teaching it. If you have multiple faculty teaching multiple sections, it can be a lot of coordination. For example, for IxDF, we had five sections of the class with seven faculty working off the same set of course materials.
Once you’ve got the objectives and outcomes comes the part that really sucks: looking at the calendar. A semester at CMU is roughly 14 weeks, divided up into two seven-week chunks with a break in the middle. You then take the calendar and try to figure out what combination of lectures, assignments, readings, and activities will fit into that schedule reasonably, and in what order. There’s nuance to this. For instance, CMU has a multi-week add/drop period and you don’t really want to schedule any assignments due then because a student may drop the class (and a new one joins).
The fun part is figuring out what the lectures and readings and activities are. The hard part is putting together all those lectures and readings and activities. In an ideal world, those would be done before the semester starts. In the real world, for a new course, you’re often putting the slides together right before the class starts. We tried for IxDF to stay two weeks ahead of the students, but because, especially at the beginning of the course when there tended to be more lectures, it mostly didn’t happen. If we were several days ahead of the students, that was a win. I expect this to basically be the same for AIxD.
There’s a real joy in teaching an established class because all of this is mostly done for you and you can tweak it if you want or simply teach it as is. In some fields, one imagines, in theory, you could teach the same course for years, if not decades with some minor variations. Alas, that’s not my field. And what fun is that?