Prototyping in higher education course design

Universities can learn a lot about how to develop courses from product design. In England, a student will spend over £27k on course fees and give up three years of work to take an undergraduate degree, and they put their trust in the course team to make this worthwhile. The combined student tuition fees and education contracts in the 2017-18 academic year were £18.7 billion. At this size, the development of new courses should be a finely tuned process; many institutions have begun to invest heavily in making sure courses this is the case by hiring teams of Learning Designers. Learning Designers adapt many good practices from software and product design to develop offerings that meet the students’ expectations and long-term needs. Prototyping is one such tool helping universities develop great courses.

Prototype: a first or preliminary version of a device or vehicle from which other forms are developed.
Oxford Languages

Prototypes are used to test a solution before the institution invests heavily in the full development of a finished product or service. In higher education, prototyping allows Learning Designers and course teams to test the learning outcomes, course narrative and student journey with prospective students before committing resources to develop it. It enables these teams to create increasingly complete versions of a course over time as an iterative process, reacting to regular feedback and changing trends. Prototyping a course should reduce development time and the need for changes once the course is live. It allows faster identification of the optimal model and avoids the trap of investing heavily in course offerings with significant flaws.

The idea for prototyping comes from evolutionary software development, where a first version is built from a rough specification and presented to users for feedback. Each prospective user experiments with the prototype and makes suggestions for improvements or refinements to the design. The development team then makes improvements based on this feedback and gives it back to users for further testing. The prototype and improvement process is iterative, repeated until the product is where it needs to be for launch.

Iterative prototyping process:

Paper prototype
Proof of concept
Functional prototype
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A paper prototype such as a solution presentation or module map is used as a conversation with students and demonstrate the offering to test whether your offering fits their problem or need. Once the idea is proven to be worth investment, a proof of concept can be created; this is an internal technical test to see if the product can be built with available technology and tools. Once the product or service is approved in principle and proved to be practical to deliver, a working prototype that approximates the final product without being fully finished is created, and further user testing is carried out.

Once the product passes the working model stage, a minimum viable product, the simplest possible customer-ready version, can be built and delivered and sold as a functional product. The product continues to go through developments based on feedback throughout its lifecycle, making sure it remains fit for purpose.

The prototyping process means users get to try the product early. It helps narrow down specifications, and users are more likely to accept the system if they have been involved in developing it. There are some downsides; the first versions a user sees might be of poor quality due to the speed of development, it is not always clear how many iterations the development team should carry out. Prototypes are often built without maintenance in mind making it harder to support long term.

There are two main ways to use prototyping. The first is evolutionary prototyping, where the prototype will become the final system once users satisfied. Significant maintenance work (refactoring) may be needed to keep these products running efficiently, so some people chose to start again once the final design is agreed upon. This second method is called throwaway prototyping, where the initial iterative development is used to determine requirements and then discarded. The product is then built from scratch with quality and maintenance in mind. Throw away prototyping can have a higher upfront cost and slow down the final product launch but should deliver higher quality and a cheaper to maintain end results.

Using prototyping in course design

In the course or module design process, the paper prototype as a module map can be created as the output of a design process such as the UCL’s ABC workshop. A proof of concept represents any technical testing needed to deliver the course vision, and a working prototype could be one hour or so of the course built in the VLE. A working prototype should be tested with at least five potential students in one to one interviews to pick up significant trends in how prospective students feel about the course’s viability.

The Minimum Viable Product is the first run of the course with live students. It is generally accepted that a course needs at least three cohorts to reach maturity, with refinements after each run; Quality Matters (QM) even suggests that a course goes through three complete cycles before a QM review is carried out. Your Course design process should have reviews built-in after each of the iterations to make sure identified changes can be made.

Get in touch with me on Twitter if you want to chat about course development ideas.

The Grail Diary

In the film Indiana Jones and the last crusade, Indiana’s father, Henry Jones, played by Sean Connery, has a Grail diary. This notebook is the complete collection of his notes and sketches made in search of the Holy Grail. The Grail is the cup that Jesus drank from at the last support and is fabled to have magical healing powers for anyone who drinks from it.

According to the film, Dr Jones begins the notebook with his thoughts about the Holy Grail at the start of his search for it and gradually added to it whenever he found a new clue or piece of information that might help him find the cup. The notebook was carried with him at all times and acted as a personal reference guide for all things related to the legend of the cup and its hiding place.

Wade Watts borrows this idea in the book Ready Player One to keep a physical copy of all his research related to the challenge to find Halliday’s Easter Egg. Wade uses the Grail Diary throughout the challenges as an aid to his memory.

While studying for my Information Systems and Management degree, I created my version of a Grail Diary titled The CIO Handbook. I used a Google Drive document to store all my notes for each module and added anything else I picked up in my job or more extensive reading that might help me in the future. I still have this document and have created a couple of other Grail Diaries related to significant, long-term goals that I have set myself.

Many note-taking apps provide a better platform for a digital Grail Diary than a Google Doc. OneNote, Notion, and Evernote are great tools that make it easy to take and store notes that you can organise and quickly access when you need to remind yourself of something you have previously read or an idea you have had. The ultimate software for a Grail Diary is Roam Research; it is not the easiest tool to master, but it works like your own personal Wikipedia.

In knowledge representation and reasoning, a knowledge graph is a knowledge base that uses a graph-structured data model or topology to integrate data. Knowledge graphs are often used to store interlinked descriptions of entities – objects, events, situations or abstract concepts – with free-form semantics.
Wikipedia

If you have a big challenge or goal, start your own Grail Diary. Add all your notes and ideas to the diary and use them as a reference whenever needed. You could start with a dead tree notebook or a simple Google or Word doc, but to make the most of the digital format, sign up to roam and begin to build a personal knowledge graph.

Get in touch with me on Twitter if you have your own Grail Diary or start one and want to talk about your ideas on using one.

Existential Risks

An existential risk represents a catastrophe that leads to an extinction event, society’s collapse to a pre-agricultural state, or a totalitarian regime that maintains total and lasting subjugation of the global population.

An existential risk is a risk that threatens the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential.
Toby Ord

We must be aware of the probability of such events taking steps to reduce the risk of their occurrence and avoid them. In the book ‘The Precipice‘, Toby Ord suggests that we entered a period of high risk in 1945 with the first use of the atomic bomb on humans and calculated that we have a 20% risk of total extinction 2100. Toby argues that humans need to start to take a longterm view of their decisions or risk the end of civilisation.

There are two main categories of existential risk; the first and less likely are natural disasters, including supervolcanos or asteroids. The second, more likely set of threats we have created ourselves (anthropomorphic) such as war, environmental damage, and unaligned artificial intelligence. We are currently told that climate change is the most significant risk facing civilisation, and it does have real consequences. Still, other existential threats are more likely to have catastrophic effects, and each needs attention based on its probability and impact.

Risk	Estimated probability for human extinction before 2100
Overall probability	19%
Molecular nanotechnology weapons	5%
Superintelligent AI	5%
All wars (including civil wars)	4%
Engineered pandemic	2%
Nuclear war	1%
Nanotechnology accident	0.5%
Natural pandemic	0.05%
Nuclear terrorism	0.03%

Future of Humanity Institute, 2008, taken from Wikipidia

There is a common argument about the need to look after the current population before making decisions that might reduce current growth and prosperity to provide a better future for the people that are yet to be born. There is also a strong argument that many of these risks have been inherited from previous generations. Both of these arguments are strong, particularly when you see the suffering and deprivation that many people across the world live in. However, they do not change the fact that the existential risks are real, and we have a responsibility to leave the world in a better situation than we found it.

How to reduce existential risks

Responsible and mature activism can be an important secondary activity, but there are many more impactful and pressing actions for those serious about reducing the risk of an end to humanity, such as living as sustainably as possible ourselves first. Toby Orb provides two actions people can take to lessen the probability and impact of global catastrophic risks.

Your choice of career
Charitable donations

There is a global mismatch of skills; this is particularly an issue in the various engineering fields. For a sustainable future, people must be working on practical solutions to existential risks. 80,000 hours provides ideas for how you can use your career to solve the human races most important problems and offers a list of jobs by problem area to apply the skill you have to the issues you feel most strongly about helping to solve. The most significant impact an individual can have on the future of human civilisation is to choose a career that reduces the risk of an existential event.

The second most significant impact you can have on reducing existential risks is to use your disposable income to support charities or companies that are working towards reducing global catastrophic risks. Toby Ord suggests donating to charities through the Giving what you can community. I would go a step further than this and suggest that investing your savings in private companies solving these problems is the best way to support sustainable solutions. Charities are dependent on donors for their survival; however, successful enterprises, once up and running, can fund themselves through the answers they provided, making a far more sustainable future.

Existential risks are real, and we live through a period of human history where the stakes are more significant than ever. We have a responsibility to leave the world a better place than when we enter it, first through living sustainably, second through choosing a career that reduces either the likelihood or consequence of existential risks, and thirdly by investing and donating to organisations doing the same.

We are responsible for learning about the dangers and starting an open, honest, and respectful conversation with those around us. Just don’t be an art graduate who riots at protests about climate change and then returns to your single glazed converted barn in their camper van to sit in front of a log burning fire talking about how other people are ruining the planet. We have the creativity and skills; we need each person to take real action.

Posture and a flat stomach

We all want to look healthy and make a good impression, but with a year of staying at home hunched over laptops and slumped down on sofas with only a little walking, our bodies have lost some of their stature. In England, lockdown is beginning to be lifted as the days become warmer and the successful vaccine programme takes its effects on infections. Now is the time to start undoing some of the negative impacts of remote working and returning our natural posture.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has two suggested daily activities that will significantly impact how we look, and probably how we feel as a result; stomach vacumes to build the muscles that hold in our stomachs and wall stands to straighten out our bodies and stand tall.

Posture

Arnold suggests we spend five minutes daily standing with our back to a wall. Your feet should be a couple of inches away from the wall, you should stand tall imagining a cord being pulled up from the crown of your head, and you should have three points of contact with the wall; bum, shoulders, and head. I like to put my B&W PX7’s on and enjoy a 5-minute track while my muscles stretch back into position.

Flat stomach

Most of us have weak stomach muscles from lots of sitting around and from under-exercising them. Try three sets of 15 seconds stomach vacumes. To perform a stomach vacuum, pull in your belly button as far back towards your spin as possible and hold it there for 15 seconds. You may find bending over slightly and resting your hands on a table helps you get into the position and hold the vacuum for longer.

Arnold also recommends 200 crunches first thing in the morning.

Dead hang

I find that dead hanging from a bar for 30 seconds works great to undo my poor sitting posture too. I do my first 30 seconds after exercise in the morning, the second when I break for lunch, and the third as I finish up working at the end of the day. You can learn more about the benefits of the dead-hang from my post on shoulder health.

These three exercises performed daily will have a noticeable difference in the way you look and feel in just a couple of weeks. You will stand straighter, have a flatter belly, and healthier shoulders.

Free will vs determinism

I was thinking about the idea of free will vs determinism today. Much of western culture is based on the premise that we have free will and that good and evil exist. This idea is summarised in ‘moral liberty’ – that we can discern what is good and choose to pursue it over our immediate wants and desires.

Free Will: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.
Oxford Languages

Determinism: the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.
Oxford Languages

Many studies discount the idea of free will and replace it with cause and effect – that our decisions are products of the environment and our genes. Others argue that there is a space between what happens in our lives and our reactions to it; this is where free will exists. There are two ways you can exercise your free will:

For the small things; make a lot of choices
For the big stuff; Decide what you want and then build habits that make those choices easier to follow

In a world that increasingly believes that your environment predetermines every choice you make, exercise your free will and make choices.

Easter Sunday in England

Happy Easter!

Easter is a Christian holiday that celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the United Kingdom, we have a four day weekend with Good Friday and Monday as bank holidays. Over the four days, Church services are held on Good Friday to remember the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, on Saturday evening for the Easter Vigil, and on Easter Sunday morning to celebrate Jesus rising again.

In the run-up to the Easter weekend, Christian’s will fast for six weeks, excluding Sundays, traditionally giving up wine, meat, and dairy. On Easter Sunday, to mark the end of the fast, there is a big feast. In the morning, Easter Egg hunts are carried out, where chocolate eggs are hidden for children to find. Hot crossed buns are then eaten; these are raisin filled buns, lightly toasted, heavily buttered, and enjoyed with a cup of English tea. At lunch, a Sunday roast is eaten with the family; lamb is usually served, and people dress up and get together with the family for a feast.

Enjoy your day.

Think first, then write

Cal Newport recently published a post titled ‘In Defense of Thinking‘ where he writes about the importance of spending time thinking about what to say before writing. He argues it is the deep contemplation, not the writing, that is important. This idea is in direct opposition to writers’ advice to just sit down each day and get in a predefined word count done.

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
Ernest Hemingway

When I started studying at the LSE, I had not written an essay in several years. In the first few weeks, I read the university’s ‘Strategies for success’ study skills handbook guidance. The guidance given was that a large portion of the marks came from the quality of the answer to the essay question rather than just writing everything you could remember about the topic. The argument should be laid out in a single sentence in the introduction, with the rest of the writing build around this. The handbook said to think of an essay as a game where you show you can think and have read widely and then evidence your knowledge, analysis, critical skills and understanding.

The typical format of the exam essays was to spend 45-60 minutes on a single question. From this time, we were taught to use 5-10 minutes to plan out the answer and structure of the argument. Within the 45 minutes, the aim was for around 1000 words that included a structured introduction, conclusion, and at least four paragraphs, each covering a specific justification of the answer. This structure was critical in making you think about the reasoning of your argument and structure theories, examples, rules, and texts to support it.

Writing guides like Writing that works by Keith Roman and Ninja Writing by Shani Raja suggest you start by structuring the narrative as bullet points before you write it out in continuous pros. Andres Erricson in Peak suggests that good writers start with what they want the reader to do before building an argument. The 5-10 minute essay plan, the bulleted narrative, and beginning with the call to action are tools to help you think about what to write before you start to put it into extended writing.

Experts do it differently. Consider how my coauthor and I put this book together. First, we had to figure out what we wanted the book to do. What did we want readers to learn about expertise? What concepts and ideas were important to introduce? How should a reader’s ideas about training and potential be changed by reading this book? Answering questions like these gave us our first rough mental representation of the book – our goals for it, what we wanted it to accomplish. Of course, as we worked more and more on the book, that initial image evolved, but it was a start.
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

When you pick up books on writing that talk about the practice of writing as a method to beating writers blog, question if the approach being given will lead to quality writing. That last 45 minutes of actual writing might be the end product of hours of reading and thinking before sitting down to work. Separate your thinking from your writing and only write once you have something meaningful to say. This practice is about quality over quantity in your writing and about making you more intelligent in the process.

Peter Coe’s Diagnostic Tests

Peter Coe was the father of Seb Coe, and an engineer turned middle distance coach. He approached his son’s training scientifically and helped Seb achieve 13 World Records and countless trophies and medals. Coe wrote a book detailing his training methods, strength and conditioning approach, and running workouts to help other middle-distance runners win.

There are runners who seem to be performing quite well but are often, quite unknown to themselves, not reaching their full potential because of a lack of specific or all-round strength.
Peter Coe

In his book, Winning Running; Successful 800m & 1500m Racing and Training, Coe lists a set of tests and standards to help runners identify gaps in their overall conditioning. Once the gaps are identified, the runner can create a programme to address them.

Test	Standard	Details
Balke Test		Run as far as possible in 15 minutes. Divide the distance in meters by 15 to give the speed in meters per minute. Subtract 133 from this number, then multiply by 0.172, then add 34.4 to get oxygen intake in ml/kg/min.
Standard Broad Jump	Athletes height plus 25%	A standing long jump
Hopping Test	10 hops	Mark out a 25m track, one-legged hop the distance. Repeat on the other leg to identify imbalances
50m Dash	6.5 seconds	As the name suggests
Free Weights
– Curl	50% body weight
– Press	70% body weight
– Squat	100% body weight
Sarjent Jump	65 cm	Measure the maximum verticle jump
Harvard Step Test	Score of 180	Using a 20 inch (50cm) step and a metronome set to 120 bpm and perform 30 steps per minute (4 beats per step) for 5 minutes. Rest for 1 minute and count the beats for the next 30 seconds. Multiply the time in seconds by 100, divide it by the 30 second pulse count, and then multiply it by 5.5 to get your score.
Height-weight Ratio	10% less that the Dr Stillman formula result for your height	Using Dr. Stillman’s formular – give 50kg for the first 1.5 meters of height then add 2.5kg for each additional 2.5cm
Percentage Body Fat	8%
Muscular Endurance Test		The maximum number in a minute
– Press-ups	50
– Squat thrusts	50
– Sit-ups	60
– Pull-ups	20

Diagnostic tests for middle distance runners

April Fools

This morning I started my ride on Zwift to find everyone riding tricycles. There has been a history of Silicon Valley companies doing something special for the day since Google posted its MentalPlex hoax on the 1st of April in 2000. but to me, no one does an April Fools quite like the English.

Sarcasm is the use of words usually used to either mock or annoy someone, or for humorous purposes.
Wikipedia

To understand April Fools Day in the English speaking world, you need to understand something of the playful English humour. It is common for kids growing up to trick each other, as a battle of wits, with ever-increasingly elaborate statements delivered with complete sincerity at random times. The game is to try and say the most unbelievable thing you can think of at the most arbitrary time and to deliver it as earnestly as possible to catch your friend off guard and get a response that shows they believe it for that first split second.

Quote: “If you say the word ‘Gullible’ slowly it sounds like oranges”
Anon

A similar test of wit is to ask a question so obvious as not to need a response but delivered completely deadpan so that the victim is caught off guard and responds. The best one I have ever seen was a childhood friend who joked with my sister-in-law, who had generously taken a long lunch break to take us to the London Aquarium. My friend asked, ‘Where is the London Eye’ while standing directly in front of, and facing, the 135-meter Ferris wheel, to which my sister-in-law being the caring human she is, responded by pointing it out… we cried with laughter.

These harmless attempts to catch out your friends into believing something ridiculous and beyond reason are often followed by fits of laughter from the protagonist and red-faced embarrassment by the victim. They are funny because they are a never-ending two-way test between friends – it only works if it is in good faith, playful, and immediately obvious that it is a joke.

Gullibility is a failure of social intelligence in which a person is easily tricked or manipulated into an ill-advised course of action. It is closely related to credulity, which is the tendency to believe unlikely propositions that are unsupported by evidence.
Wikipedia

Each year on the 1st of April, these jokes are taken to new levels of preparation and creativity. As long as the prank is done before midday and immediately apparent that it is a prank, anything is fair game. Commonly, as soon as someone has fallen for the hoax, the perpetrator shouts ‘April fools!’ to let them in on the joke.

The BBC and April Fools

Traditionally April fools jokes were about playing a prank on your friends and neighbours, but corporations have recently got involved. The best April 1st hoaxes have been by the British national broadcaster, the BBC.

In 1957 the BBC’s prestigious Panorama investigative journalism show played a segment called ‘The Swiss spaghetti harvest‘ that showed farmers picking spaghetti from plants that tricked many watchers who contacted the BBC asking where to get the plant.

In 1965 and then again in 2007, the BBC told viewer they were testing Smell-o-vision and to call in if the experiment was successful; many did.

In 1976, on BBC Radio 2, the famous astronomer Sir Patrick Moore told listeners that there was a unique alignment of two planets increasing the upward gravitational pull that would result in everyone being lighter at precisely 9:47 am. Sir Patrick suggested listeners should jump at this time to feel a strange floating sensation; many called in to share their experiences.

In 1989, the BBC sports show Grandstand had a segment where the presenter shared his praise for the broadcast team’s professionalism while a fight broke out between staff in the background.

In 2008, the BBC ran a high-quality nature video segment sharing a newly discovered flying penguin colony. The presenter shared that the penguins use their unique skill to summer in the amazon rainforest. People were amazed.

Keep it fun. Keep it classy.

The digital marketing funnel

Smart Insights is a digital marketing publisher and online learning platform run by Dr Dave Chaffey. Chaffey is the author of the excellent book Digital business and e-commerce management, which I studied during my Information systems and management degree. I have been reading up on digital marketing this week, and I came across one of Chaffey’s frameworks that organise and simplify modern marketing.

Smart Insights RACE framework lays out the marketing funnel to help people plan and manage a digital marketing strategy. The framework includes; plan, reach, act, convert and engage and shows the critical measures for target setting and evaluating each stage of the marketing funnel.

The Smart Insights RACE Framework

Plan: Define your goals and strategy
Reach: Grow your audience using paid, owned, and earned media
1. Buyer stage: exploration
2. Key measure: audience volume, audience quality, audience value and cost
Act: Prompt interactions, subscribers, and leads
1. Buyer stage: decision making
2. Key measure: leads/lead conversion rate, time on site, subscribers/likes/shares
Convert: Achieve sales online or offline
1. Buyer stage: purchase
2. Key measure: sales, revenue/profit, conversion and order value
Engage: Encourage repeat business
1. Buyer stage: advocacy
2. Key measures: repeat purchase (lifetime value), brand satisfaction and loyalty, advocacy

Find out more about the marketing RACE planning framework on the Smart Insights website.