An Approach for Incorporating Community-Engaged Learning in Intensive Online Classes: Sustainability and Lean User Experience

ABSTRACT

Based on two user experience (UX) classes, this article describes an approach for incorporating community-engaged learning into intensive online classes. This approach relies on (1) sustainability for creating a flexible and meaningful thematic context with potential for an existing community engagement infrastructure and (2) the lean UX framework for serving as a foundation of the course structure. This approach showed promising results for students, community stakeholders, and faculty and is transferrable to various institutional contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-engaged
• service learning
• intensive classes
• online classes
• sustainability
• EPIC network
• lean user experience
• lean UX

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although the term “service learning” is often used interchangeably with “community-engaged learning,” I will rely on the latter because it emphasizes joint inquiry (Dubinsky, 2002) and avoids the negative connotation of “merely service” for institutional evaluations of such projects (“CCCC statement on community-engaged projects in rhetoric and composition,” 2016).

2. The structured goals for the nine classes that participated in the project during the same semester as my UX classes included improving the perceptions of the community and its sustainability, finding and promoting better ways of solid waste disposal, understanding homelessness, and planning and designing a space for an off-leash dog park.

3. Students from my classes were able to attend virtually; one local student offered to present.

4. Combination of hand-sketching with templates imitating the original website and PowerPoint.

5. Due to the evolving nature of the pandemic, this project was not as purely community-engaged and did not rely on existing infrastructure as much as the sustainability project I describe did. However, it showed the promise for future semesters to engage students in burning topics other than sustainability with support of existing programs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tatiana Batova

Tatiana Batova is an Associate Professor and a Senior Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University, where she teaches technical communication and user experience. Her research interests include global technical, business, and healthcare communication, user experience, content strategy, and sustainability. She has worked as an information developer, translator, localization project management, and multilingual consultant in healthcare and pharmaceutical fields. Contact information: [email protected].