User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice

Description

Situating itself in the Technical and Professional Communication discipline, this edited collection provides case studies from various points of instruction and curricular design to illustrate how a user experience (UX) methodology provides invaluable insight into understanding and including student-users. Drawing on research on student-users as they developed student-user profiles, journey maps, diary entries, course reflections, and affinity diagramming, among other sources, the authors of the chapters in this book argue that UX design is not only a worthy practice, but also a necessary one. Collectively, they argue that the UX design approach allows student-users to become co-creators of class material and academic products rather than the byproducts of such work. Together, the work in this collection offers an impetus of a new way of thinking about instruction and programs: designing courses and programs not only for students but with them. Kate Crane is associate professor of English specializing in technical communication, rhetoric, and writing studies at Eastern Washington University (EWU). She currently serves as director of the M.A. in English with emphasis in rhetoric and technical communication and as director of the B.A. in English studies. Her research focuses on user experience, user-centered design, usability, information design, pedagogy, and program design. She co-authored Fundamentals of User-Centered Design: A Practical Approach (2016) with Brian Still and has published articles on information design and pedagogy in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2018) and Communication Design Quarterly (2019).
Kelli Cargile Cook is professor and founding chair of the Professional Communication Department at Texas Tech University. Her scholarship focuses on online education, online training, program development and assessment, and user-experience design. She has co-edited two collections on online education: Online Education 2.0: Evolving, Adapting, and Reinventing Online Technical Communication (2013) and Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers (2005). She co-authored The Agile Communicator with Craig Baehr (2017). She is currently a member of the IABC Academy Committee. She is a past president of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication. She has received three lifetime awards in technical and professional communication. She won the Distinguished Service Award from the Council for Programs in Technical and Professional Communication in 2013, and she was recognized as a Fellow by the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing in 2014. Most recently, in 2020, she received the Ronald S. Blicq Award for Distinction in Technical Communication Education from the IEEE Professional Communication Society.

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