XplanaZine

I’m in meetings with a group of developers this week and there has been much discussion about user testing and building in good quality assurance into products.
I reminds me of a time last year, when I was still in my former life as an IT Director for a large university. I was working with our development team on a learning portal for our faculty. As with all internal projects, we had suffered through our share of scope creep and were rapidly approaching hard deadlines for taking the system “live.” One day, shortly before launch, we had a sign-off meeting where we were going to give, hopefully, a team approval for the product. One of the team members spoke up midway through the meeting and suggested we add one last feature. It would make the whole thing absolutely complete, he argued. There were mostly nods of “Yeah, that would be perfect,” but there was one lone dissenter. “How could we do that to our poor customers?” she asked. ” We’ll just end up doing something ‘to’ them instead of doing something ‘for’ them.”
Of course, we were sure she was just trying to slow us down by throwing a wrench in the spokes. We decided to go ahead and make the suggested changes without any provision for testing. And our “contrarian” friend turned out to be sadly prophetic. We did end up doing terrible things “to” our customers when all we had really wanted was to do something nice “for” them.
User testing. Or, for that matter, testing in general. Those who work in software or hardware development know how important it is. It’s the difference between making a big splash and launching a catastrophic disaster. And yet, even those who work in such circles often let their better judgment be overridden by the desire for change and the need for haste.
I guess that’s understandable. Sometimes businesses have to take risks, they have to cross their fingers and hope they get lucky and don’t go down in flames.
But what about teachers? What’s our excuse? I will confess, right here and now, to being guilty of not testing my courses and of inflicting unneeded confusion and pain on students. I have been teaching for twenty-two years and my general approach to user testing has been to do it wrong for about three semesters and then to make gradual adjustments until it is at least bearable for the students. As I figure it, testing has been something like a five-year program for courses over my career.
Some of you reading this are snickering, remembering some of your own trial-by-error-and-student-suffering campaigns. And you’re also asking yourselves, is it really all that serious?
Of course it is. I become even more mindful of it as I prepare to teach a new online course for the <a href=”http://www.ou.edu”>University of Oklahoma</a> in the fall. Their CAS IT group demands that course modules and components undergo full user testing. In addition, they set up peer support for online teachers (most of whom, like me, have been doing this for a long time) and encourage effective collaboration.
And they are right to do so. My mantra about technology has always been — “Change is evil. Change involving technology is twice as evil.” Online learning is the pudding proof. Retention is difficult in these courses. Students often resist the changes presented by the new learning environment. To make matters worse, poorly-tested content or technology often fails to work properly and only exacerbates the problem.
User testing for courses? Absolutely! As much as possible. But maybe we could do it for all courses. I promise to spend a week of practice before I step into the classroom to teach a new course again.