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While these issues only represent a subset of the details surrounding the challenges to creating delightful academic software, I think they highlight some of the opportunity as well. I am optimistic that through the technical, UI, and advocacy work of the Fluid Project and participating community and open source projects, we will be able to impact change both institutionally and within the open source organizations. I expect and hope that through forums such as Terra Incognita there will be more occasions for those of us in IT management, those engaged in supporting the teaching and learning endeavor, UI design, and programming across our campuses to find ways to bridge the divides both organizationally and culturally, and to collaborate in creating user-delightful open source software. You can find links to a number of related articles on UI design and open source usability on my del.icio.us site, tagged as “OSUI” (Open Source UI). Happy reading!
8 Responses to “Open Source Software and the User Experience in Higher Education”
Great piece, Mara. To my mind, this point is particularly critical:
“Another challenge in creating applications for academia is that many of the user goals are embedded in pedagogical methods that may be discipline specific or not expressed in a generalizable way. Instructional designers and faculty are rarely part of a development team. In the higher education community source environment we have an opportunity to remedy this. It may require reaching across local organizational divides to ensure that the user and instructional goals are adequately being met: Often, instructors don’t speak the language of technology, so the instructional designer can help translate, generalize, and communicate their needs. In turn, the instructional designer often doesn’t speak the language of the application programmer, and the UI designer can help translate and represent their needs within the design and work flow of the application for the developers.”
Programmers are from Mars; teachers are from Venus.
Given the distributed nature of Open Source communities, what realistic, low-barrier-to-entry methods can we employ to narrow the communication gap?
Hi Michael. You definitely picked up on what I consider to be an interesting challenge and perhaps the greatest opportunity for improving user experience. I am not sure I have hit on the perfect formula for this, but I do think the low barrier-to-entry solutions have to begin at home in our local environments. And that means that those of us in leadership positions have to start with evaluating the skills we have on board currently and do a gap analysis on the ecosystem. At UC Berkeley we have been lucky enough to start with some instructional development staff, and we have been able to grow that and build stronger partnerships with other campus units in this domain as well (Library, OED, Grad Instruction). However, as a campus we were completely deficient in the UI side of the house (also Project Mgmt., but that is another article and frankly since engaging in community source projects I am beginning to think we all need a new breed of agile PMs…).
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