For
designers
Your client is the learner
When working as a visual designer you may work for a variety of clients – small or big business, other creative individuals or people that work in completely different sectors. In education you will be mainly working for two types of clients, educators (sometimes known as subject matter experts or SMEs) and learners or students.
In this section you will learn about what learners or students need from you, and how you can help them.
Online learning is a different experience
When most people think about learners, they probably think about a group of people in a room. Children in a classroom or students in a lecture hall. Online students have a different experience.
They may be learning alone, after work and in a hectic house and tired beyond belief. They may be in a different country or using a second or third language. They might be a complete beginner at the subject and have no one else to speak to. You need to create an experience that gives these learners the best chance at succeeding at what they want to learn.
Advocate for learners
Make yourself the best friend they never knew they had. Fight their corner in rooms and conversations they may never be able to be in. Work through confusing topics so they don’t have to. Fight for them to have a voice and be able to give feedback. Make compassionate personas that remind others that what we create is for people, not faceless usernames. Ask the stupid questions so they don’t have to feel stupid. Always be the voice of empathy on their side and you will create content they think is fantastic.
Think about it
Think about how could you advoate for learners:
- Could you give students an opportunity to give feedback during content development?
- What personas could you create to help create compassion and empathy for your learners?
- How could you make the learning experience you're creating clearer and easier to understand?
Why do they want to learn this?
When you’re teaching a teenager or adult, you need to get them invested. They’ve got too much important stuff going on to just sit there because you asked them nicely. You need to tell them why they want to know what they’re about to learn. Giving a learner a reason why they want to learn something can help motivate them to keep going and make them more willing to hear what you’ve got to say.
Think about it
Think about how what they’re learning could be useful:
- Is it the foundation they will use to build the skills they will learn in the course?
- Will it give them the understanding of the subject that will make everything make sense later?
- Will it help them in the workplace?
Guiding learners through the learning journey
Doing a course online often means doing it by yourself. There can be group sessions and webinars held virtually, but often learners are physically seperated from the educator and other learners on the course. This means you need to make it as easy as possible for the learner to understand where they are in the course, what they're going to learn and what they need to do to succeed.
If you're a designer you might be comfortable guiding someone’s eye by using visual elements in a poster or illustration. Think about how you could do this for a learning experience. If you needed to guide someone through this experience when you aren't there, how would you do it? This is your design problem: you need to design the learning experience to help the learner get from not knowing what you’re about to teach them, to understanding it.
You also need to be able to give them feedback when they've got something right (or wrong) so they know they're on the right path.
Think about it
Think about how you can guide a learner through your learning experience when you're not there:
- How could you direct a learner through lesson using visual elements?
- What does the learner need to know to succeed? How can you tell them what they need to know?
- How can you give a learner feedback when you're not there? What do you need to tell them?
Make it easy for them
One of your most important jobs when working in learning design is to give the learner the tools they need to succeed. This means getting all the information they could need from the educator for them, so they don’t become confused or discouraged if there is something they don’t understand. This means making a learning experience as accessible as possible, so they can access the information they want to learn. This means making it as easy as possible to get through the content, so their mental energy is spent on learning instead of trying to figure out a horrible user interface or writing that is needlessly hard to understand. When creating your online learning think about how you can make it easier for your learners to learn.
Other resources
If you would like to learn more about guiding learners through the learning journey, look at our other resources: